The Bugle - Politics: An Audition For Reality TV

Episode Date: November 11, 2023

Echoes of History including some half-apologies, some 'legacy' issues in the Middle East, and expensive food. And, is Suella Braverman stupid? Just ask her colleagues.PLUS: Become the owner of an exclusive episode of The Bugle, on 12 inch vinyl! Become a premium member NOW! https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateThis episode was presented and written by:Andy ZaltzmanAlice FraserJames NokiseAnd produced by Chris Skinner and Laura Turner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world. Hello, Bugleers, and welcome to issue 4,280 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world, I am Andy Zoltzman and you join us. Just in time to hear a very exciting, and it must be said somewhat amusingly, surprising discovery about how to create world peace and end all human suffering. No, you've missed it. You were too slow.

You should have tuned in earlier. Seriously, whatever you were doing in the last two minutes, Buege was really so important that it was worth missing that. That's what is wrong with this planet. You people, no offense, and don't try to play the show back, but starting earlier, you've had your chance. But welcome, nonetheless, to the bugle we're recording as we so often do yesterday, all the day before that or a while ago, depending on when you're listening. That got time, is very confusing for me now. It's the 10th of November, 2020 and 23, and joining me today, we have an absolute smorgasbord of hemispheres for you.

Firstly, from the Southern Hemisphere and now I think a good 70% pregnant so pretty much packing a bonus hemisphere herself. It's Alice Fraser. Welcome Alice. I am the hemisphere myself Andy. How are you? I'm alright, thanks. I've had a week off from news, which has been a bomb. I'm not sure sanity is the right word, but an absence of pure insanity. So yeah, I've been a little refreshed. I've been house hunting in this small Queensland town that is going to be my home for the next six months as I spawn. And today I went to a place that was like a little outside the price bracket, maybe slightly too fancy.

And I walked in and I was like, oh no, this is way too fancy. It was like chandeliers and you really ugly glass coffee tables and like a home cinema and it was so disgusting and tasteless and just such a waste of wealth and I was like this is what you spent the earth on it was just boomer, classless trash and I was like oh man good to know that that's what our children are going to be breathing smoke for for the next couple of generations. So you chose not to live in a metaphor for human, human idiocy. Joining us from the Southern Hemisphere, but now residing in the Northern Hemisphere, very, very complicated. Welcome back to James Nakhisa.

James, great to have you back on the bugle. Have you been? Good, Andy. Thank you for having me for Happy Black Friday weekend, all of you. Yeah, it's always nice to be on the discount show. You've had a busy couple of months doing some stuff at the rugby world cup. How has we've already talked about that much on the bugle. I don't know why, maybe it's because as an English rugby fan, it would have just been, you know, we talk about the bleakness of humanity quite enough on the bugle without going into how England plays rugby.

So how was the whole experience for you? Well, I feel like with the state of the world, I wouldn't be surprised if English rugby itself was diagnosed with ADHD after the past few months. I had a really fun time, because I went over to be a comedy reporter at the rubber workout, and there was only five Pacific Island reporters. So I had to be a real reporter.

And then by the final press conference of Fiji in England, Fiji lost and the other Fiji, the other Pacific reporters went, oh, it's going to go have Carva with the team. So suddenly I was the only reporter in the press conference, which if you go to my Twitter profile, my banner is now me and in the moment with the cameras recording that I realize that I am alone with the British press back. I've got, and also I mean during that, during the, the world, we were not related to the World Cup, you also became the, the voice and conscience of British train travel, which was, well, that was an exciting new career direction for you.

Thank you, Andy. Like most Englishmen dealing with people from different cultures, you have brought back to light a trauma I had repressed. That's what we do. Yeah, I caught a train on my way back from the World Cup to Edinburgh in London. Rookie mistake. I hear the British listeners cry. What's catching a train to anywhere? Yeah, anywhere. Any interaction with British Rail just heard the national tutting going on. I think it was 14 hours in transit at the end of it, featuring

a four and a half hour cab ride where the cab driver got lost in the hills of Scotland in the middle of the night. So yeah, look man, I'm having adventures. I'm meeting people. I went to France. I don't even speak French. My French would arguably get us all killed. Well, I had someone with a toddler I've been teaching her that British trains go, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, whoops. I mean, 14 hours of tutting. That must have been pretty, I don't know if the touch kind of code's got a whole carriage of people touching simultaneously, do they sort of harmonise with each other

so you get the sort of just f***ing sake in Morse code, tutted by 80 people at the same time? It's what I imagine sitting in Parliament would be like in the UK. You're not really sure what's going on, you feel out of control and it's just non-stop-tutting for 14 hours. You have to make sure the tattling is asynchronous because otherwise when you're going over a bridge it can create a resonance and that's how the tape bridge disaster happens. I think that might be the first tape bridge disaster reference. I don't know, Beagle. I mean, there aren't not many. High five to my William McGonigal stance.

That's right. I need a niche of history that we've not touched on. But remember, go and ask. We were almost cool, Alice. We were talking about sport and then you're just pivoted. Pivoted? Pivoted. Right, to the docking us.

Pivoted us. To the docking us. We are recording on Friday, the 10th of November 2023. It's amazing to think that in just a hundred years time, it'll be 134 years in a day since the Berlin Wall came down. The controversial city and an opinion splitting barrier had been basically sacked as a wall at the age of just 28 on the 9th of November 1989, a year better known of course for England losing the ashes 4-0 to a previously unfancyed Australia. And it might have been a reverberatingly bad summer for English cricket, but arguably it was an even rougher few months for diehard East European communists, as

their dream of an eternally miserable future of disappointing cars, non-luxury food items and supersonic female athletes crumbled before their very eyes, culminating in Romania boss Nikki Chowchesco's impressive bid for worst Christmas ever award. It was also a very bad summer for the comedy character act Iron Curtin, who's highly amusing musical satter on the failures of state communism and the hilarious daily prep for of Soviet oppression. And the pure unadulterated joy of watching the women's 4x400 meter relay found himself in decreasing demand. On the 11th of November 1918, well that famously was armistice day that brought the First World War to an end, presaging a solid, well what was it now, about 8-12 minutes of sweet glorious

global peace. It was signed at 545 AM on the 11th of November, but only came into force at 11am, leaving just enough time for another 2,700 soldiers to die even more futile, even the millions that had gone before them. And it is that kind of determination to kill each other when there is literally no point whatsoever that separates us from the other species who clog up our planet. That was 105 years ago tomorrow. As always a section of this podcast is going straight in the bin. This week we have a Christmas section in the bin might seem a bit early, but it's nearly mid-November now. The Christmas adverts have started coming out. The

John Lewis advert, which Britain gets bizarrely obsessed by on an annual basis, is out this week. And John Lewis's competitors, the retail behamoth, nodgers and claystrop of, once again, courted controversy with another controversial, controversial Christmas advert. You might remember last year's nodgers and claystrop feature a trouserless Santa Claus working in front of the family Christmas tree to the sound of a grime cover version of John Denver's country roads while swinging the family's pet cat around his head and swigging from a bottle of absent. The situation of

course was resolved when Santa presented a weeping child with a nodges and clay-strop luxury velvet covered toy cats replaced the family's now deceased pet and some NNC own brand wallpaper to cover over the blood splatter on the living room wall plus a couple of bottles of own brand moonshine to make it up to mum and dad and it finished with nodgers and clay strokes for an ounce Logan, something for everyone, everywhere and everywhere. Well, this is Advert Features, an unusually graphic 17th century Christmas witch trial which two terrified young children, longingly out of the window of their home to see their

mother undergoing some extremely 17th century justice seemingly dunked in the town pond and not emerging. Their growing panic swaged only when mum emerges from a secret trap door in the house, dripping wet, to be greeted by Dad with a bundle of Christmas gifts, an odd isn't close to a plush towel in dressing-gam, some soothing, rejuvenating hand cream, that trial-by-fire could really sting. A new NNC artisan Eucalyptus and palm leaf broomstick and a multi-use home cauldron containing a ready-roasted turkey from the Noges and Claystrop food hall critics have claimed that the advert and specifically the slogan Noges and Claystrop for life's guilty pleasures are misogynistic. Well, let you be the judge of that.

Anyway, that section is in the bin. I mean, Andy, you've just expressed the dream of every corporation had they a soul or a REM sleep cycle, just comes synonymous with a holiday. I don't think people are really aware of their history, but it's marked by such failed holidays as Trojan condoms attempt at a... you'll log f*** fest. LAUGHTER Well... That's a combination of words I don't think anyone was really prepared for. LAUGHTER Top story this week. Echoes of history. It turns out that Maximus Desimus Mirrilius

was right, the fictional Roman warrior pugilist, vengeance specialist, and public entertainer famously said what we do in this life, echoes in eternity. Now he wasn't merely trying to convince his soldiers that being hacked to death in a forest in Germany in a early 20th century film was a fun way to spend an afternoon. He was actually telling the truth, as proved by the world in November 2023. And we start our echoes of history section with old empire powers nearly apologizing for the horrors of empire news. And I mean, this is something that's, you know, as a British person is, you know, something that crops up in the news every now and again, the intermittent near apologies that Britain just about

forces out into into the world. We had another one over the last week, King Charles, Casey III himself, into a second year of Kinging now, the King, and he almost apologized for colonial abuses in Kenya. Now, I don't know quite what it's gonna take to tip Britain over the edge into an actual apology. We also had the German president asking for forgiveness in Tanzania over the last week as well. I mean, what point is an actual full sorry going to be given ever, do you think?

Generally, it's around the time that they opened the checkbook. It's when the apology is accepted. It was very sorry for how many did we take? I guess there's extra zero for that. I do I do think the Germany do trying to sneak an apology to any other culture in the middle of an Israeli war. It feels like it's trying to sneak it in. Just, hey, don't look, but by the way, we also have f***ed up Tanzania. Well, I mean, King Charles said he wanted to deepen his understanding of colonial wrongs perpetrated by the British Empire on a state visit, this week he was in Kenya. And that raises for me the question of what actually they teach you in King's school, if it's not what British colonies got up to. The stuff you did when

you were owning the world. And I thought it was actually quite, when I was reading it, I thought it was quite a good sort of apology because he said lots of things, you know, the wrongdoings of the past, the cause of grace, sorrow and deep regret. And I was really like rating it as an apology if somebody said that to me as an apology I would take it and then I heard the apology that the Germans gave to the Tanzanians and I was like ah yes the experts in apologizing but also like Germans apologizing for anything has just got to be a step down from the biggest apology they had to do like I feel like they've got more practice. What's interesting to me was that in both the British and German neuropolygies contained the term shared history. And I mean that is stretching the meaning of the word share

really way past its point of maximum elasticity. I think I mean sharing sharing is generally am I am I mistaken this is sort of a two-way process I'm not sure we got shared history did we? I mean you can I mean remember that lovely shared punch we had. Sure we invaded you but you had to be there to be invaded. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it was unusually direct by British standards. I really think back to when David Cameron was prime minister and not only didn't apologize for the various glitches. I think it was, I can't remember if it was in India

or Pakistan, he was talking about the Koei Nor diamond and said it wouldn't give it back because he didn't believe in returnism. So not only will we not apologize, but we will also invent completely new terms to justify our lack of apology. That is how far we're prepared to go. But I would return it, but the store policy said two weeks,

and it's been centuries. I think the thing with Charles is that he's, it's like what Ella said. We act like, oh, he's just got here though. He's just, he's a new king. It's like, yeah, but he's also 74 years old. He's not like the young King Charles just finding his feet as he goes around the colonies. Like, you know what happened.

He's not finding his feet. We all know where their feet are. They're in their mouths. Yeah, he's a bit killed your ex-wife for this mate. You're ready. He's in a second year of Kinging now, Prince Charles. Doesn't seem to have been sent anything particularly victorious. Seldom looks happy and it's quite hard to be glorious at the best of times when you're in your mid 70s and essentially you're a constitutional Ron Burgundy obliged to read out whatever's plonged in front of you. So I don't know if our national anthem is working on him quite as well as it works on his mummy, but he's can you get up to the best of his abilities. This was something interesting. He said wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest

deepest regret. And well as you sort of hinted at, not quite enough sorrow and regret to ever include them on our national history curriculum, certainly not one I was a child, but anyway, we're making progress. We're almost getting to the B of bang, you've got to withdraw your apology on the S of sorry. The German president Frank Walter Steinmeier in Tanzania asked for forgiveness, particularly with relating to a brutal suppression of an early 20th century rebellion that resulted in more than 300,000 deaths. And he said, what happened here is our shared history.

That's not sharing his caring. Let's not forget that. That's not particularly caring by the sounds of it. He also talks about colonial amnesia. And I guess it's like childbirth, isn't it? You just have to forget the atrocities you perpetrated in previous generations, otherwise there's no way you try to exploit the world again. It's just an for imposter syndrome if you read a bit of colonial history and you just think like some idiot got sent somewhere and killed half a million people because they were

incompetent at their job. It makes me feel much more confident about submitting a spec script. My favorite part of the German Chancellor's book, I want to assure you, we Germans will search with you for answers to the unanswered questions that give you no peace, which is him colonizing the healing process of a country-dead-e-colonized. They've got the answers made. All you need to do is ask them what the answers are. As well as state near apologies, Lloyds of London, the insurance house founded in 1688, has been accused of reparations washing after responding to a review into its links with the

slave trade. Again, I mean, history, I mean, this is something we talk about quite a lot in the view, and it's something that is constantly keeps coming back to us with stories like this. Lloyd's commissioned academics to do research into its shady past, you know, due credit to Lloyd's for doing that assume under extreme pressure. 18 months of research found out that Lloyd's had insured the largest slave ship owners in the early 1800s, used their personal experience in slave-men to work within the slave trade, facilitated relationships between slave-shape captains, ship owners, insurance underwriters, and actively protested against abolition. The research did not aim to quantify the financial wealth that Lloyd's

made through the slave trade. Though I imagine that would have been quite easy to find out, I can also see the incentives for them not to find out. Lloyd says formally apologized and said it's committing £52 million towards a programme of initiatives, including those that will help people from black and ethnically diverse backgrounds to participate and progress from the classroom to the boardroom, which is a lovely promise to people of diverse backgrounds. Now you too can perpetuate the wrongs that are facilitated by corporate greed. Like if you're inside the system, you can help make sure that the next demographic group we absolutely profit from the oppression of is not yours.

It's a beautiful thing. It's a system of a corporation that lets people diffuse responsibility for atrocities through the abstraction of a profit margin that promotes monsters into power and leaves them there because they're good for the bottom line. I think it's a really nice promise that people of ethnicly diverse backgrounds can share in those atrocities. You know, just the way that you can like share responsibility across a corporation so that

you can sleep at night because you've only perpetrated 1 1,000th of a war crime alert. I feel like they're missing the point here by focusing on ethnic diversity in corporate greed because I feel like human-f**kness is melanin and agnostic and the only real diversity I'm interested in seeing at Lloyd's is a diversity of opinion about whether actually money should be the primary metric for human success or maybe it should be something like not profiting from the enslavement of others. The £52 million programme of initiatives, I mean I can just want to say £52 million at a lot of money to you or me, maybe not to James after all the money is creeping off the

railway industry now to buy his silence for future wrongs. But, Lloyd, Lloyd? No, no, Andy, I've got a promise for they're going to set up a committee to investigate what happens and see if there's anything that can be done to educate future generations about British travel. But the Lloyds, I mean, it made a big loss in 2022, around about 800 million, but it made a profit of 2.3 billion the year before.

So that's still one and a half billion up over those two years. So 52 million, I mean, that's not a huge amount. That basically still leaves them with one and a half billion of the one and a half billion that they made in 2021 and 22. So it's maybe they could find a little bit more to put towards these things. Yes, but Andy, these are the, these are just the British slaves. Oh, they got slaves all around the world they've helped with. They've got to, they've got to dish it out too now. We've already got like educational get-to-getters from different diversities that help us figure out

each other's trauma. It's called Fringe Festival. And there's so many around the world that they got a throw 52 million here, 52 million there. I'm just amazed that they are shocked by this. You were an insurance company in the 1600. What did you think was going to come out of this report? Why did you not have more money prepared for the eventual shit storm of people checking the records that you kept? That's how they find out

that you had dealings with slave owners. Sure, Slavingship, you're an insurance company. They checked your fucking records. Also, I mean, a bit of beyond that. James, just sort of reading the article now, a ledger from 1807 showed that one underwriter in short, about a third of all known slave ship voyages at left England, and his name was Horatio Clagget. And when you find a name like Horatio Clagget in the past, it's best leave that well alone.

Nothing good can possibly come out of investigating someone called Horatio Clagget. But again, if you check your list of former employees and a Charles Dickens villain shows up, surely you can, we better add another zero to the million. your list of former employees. Anna Chow's Dickens villain shows up. Surely you can, we better add another zero to the millions we're preparing to get. In other echoes from history news, well, the Middle East is, well, pretty much nothing but echoes from history. It seems, but it's going futuristic at the moment. Israel used its arrow missile defense system to shoot down a ballistic missile blasted

off by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. And it hit it outside the Earth's atmosphere in what is being claimed to be the first combat ever to take place in space. That, of course, is ignoring the Neil Armstrong buzz-older in Little Me first, no Me first, no Me first, no Me, I've written a special speech. Look at me, I'm a Buzzy Buzzy B, sorry Buzzy, we're going with my version. Hey, Buzzy, look over there, got you one small step squabble. Also, it's ignoring MoonRaker, Star Wars and countless other documentaries about combat in space. But even so, this is a very exciting new development.

Alice, I know you're a huge fan of technological progress in war zones. At last, Andy, one step closer to space atrocities. One small aeromycel defense system deployment for man. One giant stepped towards full- on space war for mankind. Now last children can look at the night sky and after asking, Daddy, is that a star of or one of Elon Musk's 12,000 orbiting Starlink satellites? They can dream of a future where they can set foot on the moon and shoot someone they've never met right in the face for King Country and Corporation.

I think it's a beautiful thing, Andy. It's a beautiful thing, Andy. It's a beautiful thing. Well, you always see technological progress in any war. And eventually, I mean, this is one of the brilliant things about war as a human hobby. Is these things trickle down into civilian life and make everything worthwhile?

So I mean, could this lead to, you know, the same technology being used for ballistic, space-based global delivery systems. So if I want a new set of Patagonian pencils, they could be blasted to me direct from South America in under an hour using the technology that only war has fostered. Well, I mean, and these things feed back into each other. I have a very attractive friend and she can shoot a man down in a bar from space. Well, it's amazing to think just five or six hundred years ago, we were still having each other to pieces with swords and axes and now we're playing high-optained space snooker. I mean, I think that

tells us, tells you a lot about our species. James, what would be the next technological advance you'd like to see in humanities, in humanity to each other. I just like something to stop the junk mail getting through. Right. Because I've tried the tape on the letterbox that says no junk mail. I've tried putting up a sign. I've tried standing in the doorway and putting my best Scottish accent on to say, do you speak English? Can you read? No, junk mail. And it's still getting through. So maybe missiles

is the next step. I do want to just give a quick shout out to Mike Ruff's child, the Jewish writer in America, who has a book called Jewish Space Lasers and other conspiracy theories about my family, Forts and Priors, Mike, this is not going to help. This is definitely going to make you have a very bad month. It's a very funny book. I'm sorry that they've come up and cut you off at the knees, so to speak. In other news related to the Middle East crisis, the United Nations has hired an AI company to fix absolutely everything to do with the Middle East, if I may overstate things massively. A company called Culture Pulse, which I think we should be suspicious of just from its name, has been hired to simulate scenarios. Now, a chap called F. Laurent Schultz from Culture Pulse has stressed he is not claiming

that his AI can fix the Middle East and that's good. I mean, there is not a computer big in clever enough to untangle that particular nuclear geroberm of worms. He says that the key is that the model is not designed to resolve the situation, is to understand, analyze and get insights into implementing policies and communication strategies. Now this in itself is a bit of a concern and surely a huge misunderstanding of the situation because I mean the dangers of understanding analysis and insight politically, I mean, that little triumph of expertise is an absolute no-go area. Is it not? That's fundamental to this crisis.

Well, also the idea that you can solve the problems in the Middle East right now by understanding the history of the Middle East, I feel has been well and truly disproven by the history of the Middle East. I feel like the more history there is in the Middle East, the more likely things are to go, Keblui. Also, feeding in all of the data about what people have done to each other in that particular region of the world into an AI sounds like a plan that is exactly how you would train a real artificial intelligence to write humanity off as a species. Well I mean, well humans have been struggling with the region since 6,000 years ago give or take

when God at the end of a no doubt stressful hectic week, probably on about three or four hours sleep a night and let's be honest he was no Margaret Thatcher, frankly left the place in a mess from which is never fully recovered. So if AI can step into the gaps that God left, maybe it's worth a go. In a weird part it's going to be when the AI starts spinning the rainbow carousel around while processing. But moving on to a country that lives in the constant echoes of history, the UK now and well more another exciting chapter in the decline in full of this country with Suwela Braferman,

the home secretary and I need to check this as we record that she's not yet been sacked, still not sacked for whatever reason, has been once again, rubbing her patented brand of Chilean fused vinegar into the social wounds of this country. Let's start with her claim over the weekend that homelessness is essentially a lifestyle choice. She was apparently has plans to crack down on people sleeping on the streets, Apparently, it has plans to crack down on people sleeping on the streets, but intense, these luxury demanding snowflakes wanting not just to use our cold icy British pavements, but to have a flimsy sheet of fabric between them and the damply bone-chilling darkness of winter people want it all these days.

But she wanted to clamp down on this. She said on X, formerly, X, formerly, Twitter, formerly before that, just Twitter. She Xed. The British people are compassionate without the hashtag hashtag not all brits, which I think was very much needed there She said we will always support those who are genuinely homeless the stats don't entirely back that up And she said but we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people many of them from abroad living on the streets as a lifestyle

choice. Now, we all make lifestyle choices. Maybe we go to yoga classes, we drink smoothies, rather than coffee, we cut down on overtime to boost our work-life balance if that options open to us. We cut down on sugary foods, we take up knitting or martial arts or a combination of the two, or we choose to sleep in a tent through the British winter. I mean, these are all peas in a lifestyle pot, are they not? Yeah, the the basic Boomer interior decor luxe place that I inspected earlier today with it's like horrendous reflective glass surfaces. That's a lifestyle choice, Andy. I don't think desperately looking for a place to sleep and something to eat counts, except insofar as it's not dying lifestyle choice.

It's quite hard to understand what, if anything, I mean, the mental processes of a Suwala Bravaman, because she was criticized not just by homeless charities, or by not just by opposition politicians, but also by conservative politicians, and also by anyone with an even partially conscious brain, as well as by dog squirrels, snails, and meabers, turnips, and even inanimate objects, such as benches,

and even tents of criticized Bravamanaman for this despite the extra media attention that tents have been getting as a result. It's, I mean, all countries have politicians that make them squirm with embarrassment, but I think Bravaman is, I mean, right up there at the moment in terms of the most idiotically provocative in the world. Well, I think it's a testament to the politics of what country are in, Andy, because in Britain, of course, you go, this politician is deranged, and in the United States, you go, well, they're probably running for the Republican candidacy. My favorite part is the quote, just after the part you read, where she references the

states and goes, unless we stop this, British cities will go the way of places in the US like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Like, oh no, not the two coolest ones. Ladies and gentlemen, people are having sex and some of them are having orgasms. Yeah, not the centre of technological advancement and the centre of cultural advancement in them, modern Western world, no, no. That's not British, we don't want that. You know, I slept on the streets of London about 14 years ago, which was a particularly rough couple of weeks,

and I'd love to blame the Tories. I mean, partially I do because we were using the same Coke dealer. And in some ways you could say it was a choice, although addiction, it's a different discussion. But I would say, my Brits have a very strange understanding I think of homelessness and sleeping on the streets. My mom, when she found out,

bought me as a Christmas gift, down and out in Paris, but George all well, I would say that, I think if Suella, brother, I know, she's the funny one in the family. So well, if she really wants to understand homelessness, I think she should just sleep in a tent outside number 10 and just haunt where she's soon at. And if she wants to really get into the whole method of it,

maybe put a little cauldron outside, get a couple of cats to walk past, sacrifice a couple of junior Tory bench members. I think that's already happened to be honest. There's a number that you don't see anymore, whether it's to do with impending court cases or ritual sacrifice, we just don't know. Will that history be the judge of that? Do you think she's trying to get fired?

Well, so following on from these comments about homelessness, she wrote an article in the times, and sometimes when you tweet something, you might do it in the heat of the moment, or when you say something in an interview, you might not use the exact words that you want, but in a written article, you have chosen the exact wording, And she wrote an article in the Times in which as home secretary, she basically completely undermined the Metropolitan Police. I think this is further proof that Bravenman is unhinged. She's fueling hatred and division.

She is wholly offensive and ignorant. She's igniting community tensions. And fundamentally, she is stupid. Now, those are not my words. Those were all words of figures from within the conservative party, so that that is the extent to which Bravaman is finding more barrels to blast through the bottom of. She is now too much for the Tories. As a complete tangent, James, I was in, I was walking past a crystal shop in the small coastal Queensland town, but I'm currently inhabiting and I heard a lady very seriously say to another lady, which craft is an art and not a science and it took all of the strength in my extremely tired body not to say it's a craft lady, it's

in the name. But it's been very suggestions that Brevenin is now being so deliberately provocative that she's trying to get sacked and make herself the hero of the Tory right and us put her in her position to be the next Tory leader, because as we've discussed on this show, and we saw with Liz Press last year, the leader of the Conservatives is not chosen by real democracy, it's chosen by asking around about 80,000 mad people who the mad is candidates. But it's about Rishi Shunak in a tricky position. Either he doesn't sack her and looks weak, or he does sack her and looks weak.

And he's going for the middle ground of potentially maybe sacking her. And it all raises the question, why the f*** was she there in the first place? Well, he definitely looks like he's the sub in any relationship. I mean, that's, that's where Britain's prime minister is right now.

You mean, you elected like the dude who looks like he was the biggest Harry Potter fan in the world, right up until they told him to put his toys down because he's the British Prime Minister. I mean, Labour is saying that Brevon Men should be sacked because of this growing backlash about her attack on metropolitan police. You expect that from Labour, but I do think it's like a bright light of a rear bipartisanship at this moment of politics that Labour and the Tories can agree that she's a dangerous maniac. On the subject of dangerous maniacs, former Number 10 incumbent Boris Johnson has, well, we've been having the public inquiry

into how the government dealt with the COVID crisis. And it's emerged that he had offered to be injected with COVID, live on national television, when he was... And he knows what the people want. I mean, I guess there's nothing about Boris Johnson that can surprise us if we've followed his career as we have. He's a man with a track record of hiding in fridges when the going got not so much tough but involving some moderate journalistic questioning. I mean, nothing that he did as Prime Minister really should should surprise us, but I mean, being injected with with an illness on on television, I mean, I guess, you know, we knew that we were all getting a bit bored and locked

down and just wanted stuff to watch. But is I mean, was that was that the right thing to do? Well, I mean, look, again, first of all, man of the people knows what the people want. Second of all, he's not, you know, being injected with a dangerous disease. He's not being injected with a dangerous disease. He's not asking anything of the mothers of his 18 children, that he wouldn't ask of himself. I'm suggesting that he's the dangerous illness that's being injected into those ladies. You can put the joke together for yourself and try it at the top. At least you didn't make them do it live on television.

I don't know. That may be coming. He's got a new show. Is he got a show coming up on GB news? He does. I was, he got a show. I would say he got a show. Isn't he meant to go to court?

And you're putting it on trial for stuff. How does he get a fucking show? Well, if the world has learned anything recently, it's that politicians being on trial need not interrupt their careers. Maybe that's what Sulea is doing. She's just pivoting to some reality TV show where she goes around being a to the homeless. FOOD NEWS, now and James, you are our Michelin Stard restaurants correspondent and you've brought to our attention a story about a Michelin Stard restaurant in Belfast in Northern Ireland that has had to announce its closure because everything has become

too expensive. It's thank you Andy, like many comedians I've stolen food from the bins of many restaurants after a gig over the years. And one in Belfast, that's in Northern Ireland, not Connecticut. It's closing due to the very expected result of becoming too expensive, not just for customers, but also for themselves. It's a combination of COVID and a cost of living crisis, and all the other thing is that the toys are completely ignoring, which has meant that they're going to have to shut down their restaurant as it is because the costs have just spiraled out of control and it's now about 100 pounds just to get a tasting menu going, which isn't

that much to the proper rich restaurant connoisseurs who are listening to the bugle, the champagne socialist group. But it's quite a lot, apparently, to the people of Belfast. And I don't know if you know anything about the history of class warfare and Belfast Andy, but it can get a bit prickly if your restaurant gets too expensive. I mean, it's obviously a big concern though, the restaurant industry has been struggling over the last few years, and well, the celebrity, American celebrity chef, Skluton Malvein, has, well, he's also struggling with these issues of costs, and he's announced the opening of the Percept, which is a new high-end, non-physical, fine-dining, imporium, where customers are told the idea of the dish, but not given any actual food,

thus saving money on ingredients, kitchen equipment and any staff to cook the food amongst the dishes on the menu at Percept Include, hint of halibut, cuddled in a memoir of zucchini, served with an ambiance of cockled chimeras, and for dessert, a hallucinator of pipe-drempt, phantasmagorgonzola with a mind-pickled mirage of the quay rates and figgy figments. So I mean that gets that's one way round I just not have any actual food in the restaurant.

Well that brings us to the end of this week's bugle. Next week we will look back on the American elections and have an update on the latest from the well court cases that are currently spiting up American politics as we are now, what less than a year away from the presidential election next year. I have something to plug. We have a bugle live tour in March next year around the United Kingdom, not all parts of the United Kingdom, but quite a lot of parts of the United Kingdom. We are in Glasgow, Norwich, Cambridge, Birmingham, Coventry, or the Warwick Art Centre, which I think is technically Lemmington's spot. It's sort of in the middle of nowhere, but anyway, find out where it is. Leeds, Edinburgh, and

Sulfur, they're also dating London on the 8th of June next year. Details are available via the Beagle website. Chris, anything to add to that? That was actually pretty smooth Andy. Yes, thank you. Oh, thank you. For once, nothing to add. All right, there we go. So do buy your ticket.

I mean, the ideal Christmas present for anyone is a ticket to see one of those Beagle live shows do come along. James, what do you have to plug? I have a rugby podcast. If you're curious how I ended up at the international tournament, it's called Fair Game Pacific Rugby Against the World and it's all about the interactions of politics between worlds rugby and the Pacific. Alice. Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. I do a weekly writers meeting among other things which is now twice a week because it's so popular and I have still not brought myself to charge any money for it so you can get that for a dollar a month. You can

get two weekly writers meetings. I'm not good at business. Well, you've been hanging around the beautiful for too long, Alice. Well, yeah. Also, I have a podcast called The Gargle, which is the sister podcast to this podcast. It is the Sonic Glossy magazine to this and Pugals Audio and Newspaper for a visual world. So, if you like listening to this podcast, but don't like politics, I, I mean it's a,

it's a weird name. I mean I'm on, I'm on this week's episode. So if you like listening to this podcast but yeah, hey, Andy, that is a key demographic in our listeners. If you want to support both the Gargle and the Bugle and join our voluntary subscription scheme go to the BuglePockast.com and click the donate button and our premium level voluntary subscribers now get access to an exclusive monthly Ask Andy show we are recording the second of these next week so that will be available shortly. Yes that's it, we'll be back next week, until then goodbye.