The Chaser Report - RIP Silvio Berlusconi & Boris Johnson

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Dom and Charles farewell Silvio Berlusconi by reminiscing their favourite scandals of his. Meanwhile Boris Johnson pulls out of something far too late. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Dom, a momentous day. Yes, sad news. And we're not going to talk about that sad news. Other sad news, some giants of European politics have left the stage. Boris Johnson has resigned from the House of Commons in the UK.

And Sylvia Bela Skoning has resigned from living. is no longer around having died, I think, at the age of 86, or in, you know, in terms of normal lifespans, about 140, both of them, massive controversies, massive amounts of sex with massive amounts of women. Yes, I think that there will be a noticeable drop in the amount of sex being had in the halls of power in Europe as a result of these two events. So let's just take a moment.

To commemorate them both, we'll talk about their records shortly, but I think the most appropriate thing we can do is just a moment of, well, utter advertising. That was respectful. I don't know what that was. I'm sure it was the way that certainly Sylvia Belisconi would have wanted to be remembered with commerce, people making money. But let's start with Boris Johnson, who's had the most extraordinary career from being

quite well-liked spectator editor and columnist to kind of, you know, went on every panel show. I think he went on mock the week. Mock the Week. Yes. Kind of a jolly eccentric of UK life. He wasn't really meant to become Prime Minister, and yet he just seemed completely unstoppable to the point where he became Prime Minister

at the time of the greatest crisis since World War II, and which he absolutely monumentally fucked up. Yes. And it seems beautiful that his departure came as a result of not once, not twice, but on many occasions, having parties in violation of his own COVID lockdown laws. Yes, and I think the actual specific thing

that he's decided to just, resign from is because he's now sort of been caught lying about some of the lies that he told before. Like, sort of getting to the end point of accountability where his lies are just piling up so high that it's just easier to get out of the way. Is that right? I'm sure that in his head, if they were true at the moment when he said them. I just love, they've got a photo here. It's got the timeline of the events. And look, the first party that they've looked at, 15th of May 2020. It's a cheese and wine night at Downing Street. You've got a bunch

of staffers out in the garden, sitting around tables. It looks like a party. It looks like a party. Yeah. Because part of Johnson's whole thing was, I didn't know they were parties. Like I just thought of them as gatherings of colleagues at work.

Yes, that's right. So his defence of his first one was these people were at work, talking about work, just having wine while they did it. Now, at the time, the law said you could meet one person outside of your household in an outdoor setting while exercising, which I suppose they're exercising their hours. They're exercising their culinary capacities.

Yeah. And this just kept happening. And then a week later, drinks in the garden. And it was an email saying, welcome to socially distant drinks in the number 10 garden this evening. And the PM and his wife turned up. And the police found that this did bridge rules at the time. I mean, at the point where you're inviting people to socially distant drink, they're not

You're supposed to meet more than one person. Who passed those laws again? Charles, who was it? Boris Johnson passed. That's right. There was another one. There was a farewell gathering. Then there was Boris's birthday.

And he only went to it for 10 minutes to his own birthday, apparently. Yeah. Because it's like he had lots of work to do because he liked working so much. And this is 30 people in indoors in the cabinet room, giving him a birthday cake and singing happy birthday. Like the most COVID-y thing you can do is singing. Well, the thing that surprises me about all these revelations. right is presumably Boris Johnson went to Eaton, right, where you learn that rules are not

for you. That's right. That you make up rules and then suckers beneath you follow those rules and you exist on this plane of existence above those rules because you are the ruling class. Yes, and you're so charming and so, I'm terribly sorry. I didn't realize. You go to court and the court just goes, oh, look, I went to the same school as you. You know the judge, yeah, exactly.

You probably did a nutty run through the quad back in the day. And so what surprises me about all this is that Boris Johnson actually learnt something at school. Well, you learned how to bumble through. Now, Rishi Sunak got fined for attending the event. As did Boris Johnson, as did Carrie Simon's Mrs Johnson, the latest Mrs Johnson. There was a party to farewell. How's Rishi Sunak going to afford the fine? It's just a very, very long list.

I'm not going to read them all out. But there's another one during a different lockdown in December, their Christmas drinks, where they're all basically 20 of them in a room with platters. Does this look like a work meeting or a party? So what Dom is currently showing me is a photo of a party. Yes. And you're saying, does that look like work? I mean, the difficulty with it is they do look like shit parties.

They're pasty British people. So, yes, I mean, it's not a party I would want to attend. But I think the greatest, the greatest event of them all. And there are, I don't know, more than a dozen of these parties in Partygate. It's the 16th of April 2021, where it was the night before Prince Philip's funeral. The nation is in mourning. Oh, yes, yes. The Prince consort has just died.

There's going to be the big funeral the next day. And you might remember that the Queen was so keen to abide by the rules that because no one else from her household was at the funeral. She sat by herself in her 90s morning her husband. And the nation went, oh, what a wonderful stoic grandma. Yes, she was. Whatever you think of the Queen, she did follow the rules on that occasion, the rules set by the government. The night before the funeral, guess how many parties were held at No. 10 Downing Street? Well, more than one.

There were two parties. What? Yes, amazingly enough, there were actually two parties at number 10. And the apology said to the Queen, it should not have happened at the time that it did. But it's just extraordinary. And so Boris has resigned in a fit of peak, basically. having felt victimised simply because he denied that these parties were parties

he went into Parliament and said that they weren't parties I mean were they believe his standards were they not debauched enough I know that didn't it didn't it the Bullington Club didn't they all fuck pigs and stuff or was that David Cameron oh that was David Cameron so easy to get them confused I mean I assume given the number of illegitimate children

Boris Johnson has a party's only a party if it involves having sex with a staffer yes I mean there's got to be knocking up for it to be a party Yeah, so maybe it's just, like, didn't meet his high standards. But how would you know? I mean, we don't know how many children he has. This is the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde loves this factory.

He never acknowledges how many children he actually is fathered. And I noticed today, actually, he's in trouble again because apparently he's recommended for a life, like a sort of inheritable peerage, like the sort of top type of peerage. This party worker who looks remarkably like him. and there is a suggestion that she may, in fact, be one of his daughters. Oh, but no one knows. But how would you know? Yes.

I mean, this is the latest scandal. Statistically. No, very likely. I mean, it is the one achievement of his life, I think. The greatest, and he's very good at writing. Like Genghis Khan. Yes. He writes op-ed pieces quickly and he spreads his seed very, very rapidly.

Oh, well, this is the thing. So the latest scandal, and completely separate scandal, is his, apparently when you're prime minister and you leave the job, you get the right to appoint a whole bunch of, yes, members of the House of Lords. Yes. It's just a weird, we don't have this tradition in Australia. But as you leave office, you just go, oh yeah, put these 10 or 20 people into the House of Lords with a job for life, able to vote on where the laws get passed.

You just get to somehow point your mates to that. And one of the people on the list, if I'm not mistaken, was his hairdresser. And admittedly, that's a very difficult job. Yes. I mean, that's probably, if you can handle that, he probably do deserve to be in the House of Lords. Yes. So Boris, you know longer. But he did say when he was leaving.

One part of his statement was, for now, he's going to leave the parliament. Yeah, because I must say, he strikes me as somebody who always believes he's got one more comeback. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He probably thinks of himself as Churchill. He does. I'm sure he does. Yeah, he would view himself as, he's already erecting statues to himself in his mind.

One more comeback, one more child is his principle. But look, it's possible, although I gather that the rest of the Tories are so cross with him that they may ban him from actually being, you know, getting content. conservative endorsement. Because what he did with this list of his peers that he wanted was that he said, there's a whole process where you send them and they then get evaluated by an independent body, just to try and make it not completely cronism, even though it is cronism. And he just said to Rishi Sunak, mate, can you just ignore that step?

Just put them straight through. Can you just put them straight through? Wow. Amazingly enough, Rishi Sunak went, nah. No, I actually have to keep my job. I'm not going to do that for you, Boris. I'm sorry. But look, as he departs, okay. politics for now, before presumably running for Mayor of London again, we should showcase his

achievements because his was a momentous prime ministership, Charles. He got Brexit done. He was the one. He was the one who, you know, he won on the no side. Yeah. He had the bus with saying how all the millions of dollars that was being put to the EU every single day and how it would go into the NHS. Did that happen, remind me? No, no, no. No, it didn't, it didn't happen. But it was a good bus. Yes. It was a great bus. And then what else did he do? Oh, yes, he managed COVID, didn't he? Somehow the UK managed to have both the most lockdowns, I think, are just about anywhere. And the most deaths.

Yes. You know why? Why is that? What they did, this is genius. It was when they realised that it was incredibly infectious, they decided, well, we shouldn't have old people in hospitals because the hospitals will become an incredible sort of hotbeds of spreading this disease. So they very sensibly discharged all the old people who had it back into the old aged care homes. In the homes, naturally.

And so that was at least an extra 100,000 right there dead because essentially every aged care home then had... It was a hotbed. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. It spread almost as quickly as Boris Johnson's DNA. Yeah. And no, I remember, I mean, that they did manage to protect the hospitals for a time.

And what they did was, the nice thing, they clapped. They clapped. Remember they all clapped, the NHS workers? Yes. They didn't really help them in any meaningful way. They didn't pay them properly. They didn't get indignant working conditions. It was almost, I think it was a sort of, at least from Boris Johnson, a sarcastic clack.

Yes, it was. It was an ironic clap. Yes. And then he gave them the clap. Yeah. So Boris is no longer, I mean, I always remember Boris, the image for me, and I don't know if I said this on the podcast before, but the image to me that typifies Boris. And I love the footage more than any other footage from the UK in the past. 30 years or so, is where he tried to celebrate the London Olympics, which he helped to organise,

presumably he just sort of took credit for. And he comes in on a zip line. And he's got a helmet on, he's got a UK flag, a Union Jack in each hand, dangling. And he just gets caught, suspended in mid-air. Somehow he's too heavy to get to the end of the zip line. And he just sort of dangles in media, doing absolutely nothing, waving the flag and looking like a tit. Very symbolic. But presumably during the course of the zip line, he managed to knock up a few women. Yes, that's right.

There you go. The Chaser report, more news, less often. So farewell to him. And look, speaking of sex, Sylvia Bellisconi, it's tempting to remember him just for the Bunga Bunga parties, the sort of outrageous sex parties, where he had sex with an underage sex worker and so on, and then lied and paid her off and all this sort of stuff.

But he did so many other fuck things as well. And I think it's important to remember what they all were. What I loved about the tribute on ABC Radio this morning to Silvio Belisconi was the amount of surprise that they had over just how little time he spent in jail, given how many terrible things he did over the, like he got into trouble quite a lot. He did. Because he was quite corrupt as well as, yeah. Well, technically not, Charles, because what he did was, and this is his master's stroke,

was that he would change the law. He abolished corruption. So that the thing that he did that was illegal wasn't illegal anymore. That's a perfect example. He's being buried in this absolutely ridiculous giant underground mausoleum at his villa. Where apparently there's a giant kind of plaster models

of mobile phones and money and stuff he wants to take with him into the afterlife. They've got no space there for 30 or 40 lovers as well as himself. But that was illegal. Building that morselaum was illegal until his party changed the law, so it wasn't. Yes. And that's just a great way to run a country.

Yes, yes. He was very innovative in many ways. Probably his biggest achievement, I think, was finding out a loophole that led him basically own commercial television in Italy while also then running for office. So he controlled the media and the country, which is always just a great thing in a democracy. And the football team.

Of course, A.C. Milan, he owned as well. So he owned the most popular football team and the commercial TV. And the name of his party was Forts Italia, which is the cheer that A.C. Milan fans cheer. Well, it's for the national team. At the World Cup, Forza Azuri means go blues. So for its Italia, you know, go Italy, basically.

That was probably the extent of his kind of political vision. Yes. Just, yay, and I'm going to own everything and get lots of money. Yes. There's this amazing story about him giving Colonel Gaddafi billions of euros at one point for stopping people arriving on boats. And he was Vladimir Putin's only friend, apparently the only person who actually liked Vladimir Putin. And apparently sent him a bottle of wine to quite read.

recently for his birthday, even this year. Yeah. Even this year. I think he was still a senator. He could never get anything. No, he was always on the cusp of a comeback. He was always going to, you know, like, and I think actually his party, I don't think it's called Footser Italia anymore, but he's starting to thrive again.

Oh, it's in power. Yeah. I mean, he's not part of it anymore, I don't think, but he's certainly still there. Yeah. Well, he's not there. He did now, but he was in the Senate, but he had waned somewhat. Yes. And he was kind of hobbling around and stuff, but still having sex, I'm sure, we're sex workers.

Yeah. Do you think in the same way that in England, as you leave office, you can appoint House of Lords, is there any sort of thing in Italy where, when you leave this world, you can appoint people to, I don't know, come with you to the House of Lords or at the House of the Lord in the Sky? Somehow it'd be some sort of celestial sex party. Right. There's a great story about him when he owned Asi Milan he owned another club called Monza

and I think it's only last year he gave this talk or so on he said every time you beat the top teams I'll get a bus full of whores to come to your locker room and he's just always creating jobs he was really pro-employment it's very strange how we had

we had Scott Morrison the UK had Boris Johnson Italy had Sylvia Berlusconi They're all of a type, aren't they? But Charles, no. I mean, the thing is, Scott Morrison was so humourless and never did anything outrageous. Well, no, I shouldn't say that. He never did anything outrageous in his personal life.

I mean, politically, sure, all the jobs and so on. But he never did anything ridiculous in public life. So what's the Australian analogue, Bob Hawke? I mean, yes, I guess Bob Hawke in a sense in terms of being fringball and all the sex. Berlusconi, this is one of the best things that Berlusconi did. He didn't do much in terms of international. National Relations. At one point, there was a big summit in Trieste, in Italy, and he jumped out from behind a monument, behind Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and shouted cuckoo.

That was a thing that he did at one point. He played a hilarious practical joke on Angela Merkel, who I think probably wasn't subjected to many practical jokes during her life. No, I suspect she wasn't. And I suspect she would have just sort of nodded sagely and seriously. Yes, he also pissed off the Queen, which is quite fun, because he was shouting at a summit, shouting Mr Obama and Mr Obama, and she turned around and said, what is it? Why does he have to shout? And, I mean, he just did.

That was just the way he lived, he lived loud, he loved loud, and he absolutely fucked Italy up for a long time with massive levels of corruption. So what a life. Yeah, but to be fair, Italy was corrupt before Silvio Belisconi. It wasn't an unusual example. Yeah, I mean, he just did it better. Yeah. I think he was Prime Minister longer than anybody post-war. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Since Mussolini, he liked, by the way. He really liked Mussolini. He said, Mussolini never killed anyone. So, you know, with all the deaths this year, 2023 is not turning out too badly. There's been a lot of deaths. You've had George Pell. You've had Rolf Harris.

It's Sylvia Belisconi. Yeah, it feels like there have been a lot of major deaths. Yeah, I feel like there was a couple more petos. There have been a few. Yeah. I mean, like, well, we had Galane Maxwell got convicted this year, didn't you? Well, I presume that the death is imminent. I presume whoever did.

Every Epstein will get to her too. Yeah. No, it's not a bad year. It's been interesting, yeah. I mean, Boris Johnson, I presume we'll just carry on for decades. He's got many more children to father. Oh, yeah. Well, isn't there, I'm pretty sure one of those sexually transmitted diseases,

I think it's syphilis, is the one that actually, wards against other diseases. Oh, that's great. They use, I think they now use syphilis in the treatment of MS, what's called? Multiple sclerosis. Yes. Oh, there's no chance of Boris getting that. I'm pretty sure they've now come up with these sort of counterviral treatments.

What a petri dish he must be. And every child, he parents, fathers would just have an amazing inheritance of resistance to everything. That's right, exactly. Yeah, so there you go Two absolute fuckers One dead, one resign That's the latest from Europe Our gear is from road

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