Further Reading

Linear liner notes

It’s ok you can go shopping now which will totally save you from any germs. Got a store loyalty card? Ah great, now you won’t get COVID twice. I’m sure that’s what the scientists say but who knows as we haven’t seen any of them for days. Far right protests, Robert Jenrick doing dodgies and Boris Johnson continues to seem hating being PM. But its ok because now you can queue for 10 hours to buy new pants. Plus a chat with Dan Rebellato (@DanRebellato) about coronavirus’s effect on the theatre industry.

Key links and sources of info from Dan’s interview:

• • Dan Rebellato on Twitter – https://twitter.com/DanRebellato

• • Dan’s website – http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/
• • Find your MP here (and write to/email them to urge them to publish a plan to support the arts) – https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/
• • National Campaign for the Arts on Twitter – https://twitter.com/weareforthearts
• • National Campaign for the Arts website – https://forthearts.org.uk/
• • Scottish Arts Funding Enquiry webpage – https://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/CurrentCommittees/111397.aspx
• • Musician’s Union on Twitter – https://twitter.com/WeAreTheMU
• • Equity UK on Twitter – https://twitter.com/EquityUK
• • The Writers’ Guild on Twitter – https://twitter.com/TheWritersGuild
• • The Royal Court on Twitter – https://twitter.com/royalcourt
• • James Graham on Twitter – https://twitter.com/mrjamesgraham
• • Elizabeth Newman on Twitter – https://twitter.com/NewmanEJ
• • Daniel York Loh on Twitter – https://twitter.com/danielfyork
• • Vicky Featherstone on Twitter – https://twitter.com/vicfeatherstone
• • Samuel West on Twitter – https://twitter.com/exitthelemming
  

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:

• • Twitter – twitter.com/ParPolBro and twitter.com/TiernanDouieb   
• • Facebook – www.facebook.com/groups/ParPolBro 
• • Website – www.tiernandouieb.co.uk/podcast
• • Donate to the Patreon – www.patreon.com/parpolbro
• • Buy me a coffee – ko-fi.com/parpolbro
• • Review the show on iTunes – itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/partly-political-broadcast/id1075342863?mt=2 
• • Review the show on Stitcher – www.stitcher.com/podcast/partly-political-broadcast
• • The Last Skeptik – www.thelastskeptik.com
• • Kat on Twitter – https://twitter.com/chronicleflask
• • Buy Kat a coffee (go on, spread the love) – https://ko-fi.com/katday

Transcript

Ep192

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that says that there is unreasonable behaviour on both sides. I am of course, talking about my neighbours. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as the Prime Minister and palm husk refilled with bullshit Boris Johnson urges the British public to shop with confidence, did he intend to sound like an advert for Tena pads or is it just the natural result of taking the piss for so long?

That’s right, the new government message is just to shop till you drop ill with coronavirus. Quickly while stocks are 50% cough. Non-essential shops have now reopened across England. Is it safe? Who cares! Because according to the Prime Minister retail therapy is all you need to fight germs, as though the coronavirus only attacks anyone wearing last season’s colours. Queues have been around the block for many high street retailers, who the Chancellor and man with all the depth of personality that you’d find in a broken Tupperware set Rishi Sunak, says are excited for customers to return. Proving that he’s been so privileged in life that he’s never ever had to work in retail, or he’d know that wasn’t true at all. Some bookshops are promising to take books off shelves for 72 hours if customers touch them without buying them, so collectively we could work together to make sure criminal tortoise Jeffrey Archer doesn’t sell a single copy of his new book. Zoos have also reopened because its only fair to give the animals a chance to see what it’s like when humans make themselves extinct, and theme parks too, which is good news for me, as my daughter is too small to go on the rides, so I can leave her at the lost children tent and get a few hours free childcare. Single parents or people who live alone can now choose one household to become a social bubble with, which is great news for those widowed grandparents who’ve always wanted their children to know which their favourite is. Sadly no news yet for people who after three months of lockdown with their families, wish they lived by themselves. ‘Time to spend for the country’ said Johnson, because it’s unlikely that him or the chancellor will allow the country to spend for you for much longer. Clap for the NHS, Take control, stay alert and now go out and splurge all the cash you don’t have on clothes you don’t need because you still can’t go anywhere so that pair of stained pyjamas is still all you’ll need till October, but you know, for Britain. The country has met the 5 tests by just saying that it has so it must be true, and on Saturday only 36 people died from COVID19 which according to Health Secretary and the world’s saddest quaver crisp Matt Hancock means that we are winning the battle against this horrible disease, so why not quit while we’re ahead? I mean you can’t lose if you’re not even taking part, right? I mean who knows as scientists haven’t been at any of the daily briefings for days, because in the same way you can’t follow the science if you don’t know where it is. Or you do know where it is but no one else realises there’s a dungeon under Number 10 and you ain’t saying nothing.

Reports say the Prime Minister hasn’t turned up to a COVID19 Cobra meeting for over a month, though maybe the rest of the cabinet requested he didn’t after every previous appearance just involved him asking why we can’t just pay for someone to beat it up over and over again. Considering last week, Johnson said he was taking direct control, does that mean they’ve just given him his own TV remote and told him to stay in his room and watch what he wants? Or has Johnson had enough of the coronavirus already? Is it much like his previous relationships, something he thought was a fun challenge, but then got too close and now just wants to run away and let someone else deal with it? Or is he already just tired of being Prime Minister? I mean take the past few weeks as case in point. Whereas before his response to the past week of protests would’ve been that racism would be defeated if we were just optimistic enough or what about building a bridge, now it’s just to have a new commission for tackling racial inequality. Ah yes, nothing like the people responsible for greater inequality and racial prejudice shining a light on inequality and racial prejudice. Hopefully they’ll just sit still and pass a lamp round while pointing at each other. There are over 250 recommendations for how to tackle racial inequality, from BAME groups that have submitted policies to the government, but that would require doing something whereas a commission will mean that they’ll spend a lot of time finding something we all knew and then for the government to ignore that anyway because it’s all taken too long and Boris is now on holiday again. As the far right marched in London and many other cities over the weekend, it took Johnson several hours to cough up a carbon copy of the tweet he did the week before for the Black Lives Matter events. Sure, there was the racism has no part in the UK bit, something that if he was serious about, he’d leave the country, but alongside it was the same concerns that the marches & protests have been subverted by violence. That’s what he said about the BLM protests but with those, he also wrote an 8 tweet thread insisting that the Winston Churchill statue was important, and that while he may have expressed opinions that are unacceptable to us today, we cannot now try to edit and censor our past. Which is hypocritical at best from a man who still won’t even release the Russia report into interference in the last election. No one was saying to take the Churchill statue down, but Johnson’s concern led to it having a large box erected around it, looking as though on revelation in its place would be Debbie McGee doing Jazz Hands or David Blaine trying not to piss himself. I’m not saying that Johnson’s comments helped to incited the far right, but a whole bunch of red bald men, looking like sore potatoes took to the capital and various monuments around the country, insisting they were there to defend them after last week’s sea burial of Edward Colston and subsequent removal of statues of other historically shitty people like Robert Milligan. I’m not saying that racists are thick as pig shit, but many groups gathered around statues that unlike Colston, had nothing to do with slavery, and a few around statues of abolitionists. Which begs the question did they remotely understand why protestors removed Colston’s statue last week, or did they just think BLM was an anti-statue movement standing for Banish Large Monuments? Or maybe they looked at these pale, stony faced monuments who haven’t changed in years, despite the world moving on around them and felt some sort of kinship. Or maybe they just like lumps that stand around doing doing for years, which is probably why they voted for Boris Johnson. Many of the far-right protestors stood supposedly defending the cenotaph while also doing Nazi salutes which is like saving an endangered species by eating it with chips. One man in particular, Andrew Banks, was caught urinating on the memorial to PC Keith Palmer who died during the terrorist attack on Westminster in 2017. I suppose you could argue that he thought that by marking it with his scent, it was protecting it from other predators, but it was actually just another example of those who pretend they care about the country, pissing all over the best things about it.

Black Lives Matter cleverly decided to cancel their march on Saturday, choosing only to do local protests to avoid a clash with EDL activists and fascists. So instead the uncooked dough crew all scuffled with each other and police, and I have to say, I was quite shocked at how many lone wolves and one off bad apples were there together. I mean what are the chances? At one point a man in a ‘White Lives Matter’ t-shirt got called racist by an ‘All Lives Matter’ protestor, like if Thanos accused Ultron of not having any morals. It is the sort of fracturing of the far right that us lefties have been excellent at for years. It’s nice to see they’re finally catching up though I’m not sure how many fringe groups you can get when everyone looks exactly the same. Still if they find something to argue about other than appearance it might show they’re evolving. There were more than 100 arrests, which compared to the 29 protestors arrested at the BLM demos the week before, shows that yes white people are superior, at being criminal violent rioters. But then that is basically what colonisation was. Home Secretary and that weird unpleasant metal taste in your mouth but as a person Priti Patel said that a small minority behaved in extreme thuggary, but it wasn’t, it was hundreds and hundreds of white British racists. Maybe she only used the term ‘small minority; as a clever way for her to trick herself into disliking them. That is an unfair joke of course, as Patel clearly doesn’t like racists, as she herself said in the Commons, she has received racist abuse throughout her life, and not just as part of the warm up exercises she gives staff in the Home Office. No she was called a number of unacceptable terms which is why when asked by Labour MP Florence ‘definitely not Taiwo Owatemi, or Kate Osamor because it’s really not that hard’ Eshalomi, if Patel would look at resolving structural inequality, Patel told her that she wouldn’t be lectured by the other side of the house. Because I’m not sure if you know or understand but the racism Priti Patel has had, potentially just from her dad who was a UKIP councillor, is exactly the same as absolutely everyone else whose suffered racial abuse has had. Ok? Exactly the same. And that’s why, by asking her dad to stop it and everyone at the Home Office only to name call when no one else is around, racism has been completely dealt with. 30 Black and Minority Ethnic Labour MPs wrote to the Home Secretary, headed by MP and woman who looks like she’d talk to you on the bus even though you had your headphones in Naz Shah, asking Patel to reflect on her words. The Home Secretary responded on Twitter saying she was being silenced. But maybe being asked to think of other people’s experiences is silencing for her, I mean if she suddenly gained empathy, how would she be able to work in the Home office?

At least Patel and Johnson condemned the protests on Saturday, even if it wasn’t an outright acknowledgement that they were very different to the largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests the week before. It’s not the same to have one group of people demanding equality and justice for all, and a change from hundreds of years of oppression, and one group who thinks they are the superior race because they haven’t seen their penises in years and are the only species whose lineage is directly traceable to the fatberg. Whereas in comparison, Labour leader and metal loo roll holder with a cover Keir Starmer refused to even say far right or racists in his one tweet condemning protestors, because then how will he get them to vote Labour next time round or support the party by buying one of the reissued immigration mugs? Starmer took part in the online Grenfell memorial, along with the Prime Minister, remembering those who died 3 years ago in the horrific fire caused by unsafe cladding that still covers over 2000 buildings in the UK as the government missed their target to remove it all, just 4 days ago. Many of those who lost their homes and loved ones in that fire, still haven’t been given rehoused. As both party leaders pledged to make sure this wouldn’t happen again, it was hard not to feel like that means Starmer’s Labour will fight to make sure that rather than make residential buildings safer, they’ll campaign for more fire blankets in high rise buildings. Meanwhile Johnson will give contracts to many of his friends to do infrastructure work on the rest of the affected buildings and they’ll all be turned into luxury flats or bridges, with the original flammable cladding left on the side.

Labour MP and gopher David Lammy said Johnson’s plan for a racial inequality commission lacked detail and was written on the back of a fag packet, which is actually credit to the Prime Minister and I’d assumed he’d not written anything down at all. It’s very obvious he won’t do anything at all and will leave it for whoever comes next. Much like Brexit, where according to Johnson the talks with the EU just need a bit of oomph, without realising that yes that is the problem but it’s on his side rather than there’s. Apparently, the PM sees no reason why trade deals with the EU can’t be done in July, but that’s the problem, he sees no reason so why would he be bothered to try? It’s up to the EU to put a tiger in the tank he said, in one of those phrases that was created to sell petrol but doesn’t actually mean anything in reality. A fish tank? That’s too cruel. An army tank? A tiger wouldn’t know what to do. But it’s the sort of phrase that in a month’s time unless the EU negotiators physically take one of the world’s most endangered species and pop it into a liquid tight container of some sort, Johnson will say they’ve not kept to their word and will collapse us face first into a no deal, as he thinks that option has less prep work involved.

Footballer Marcus Rashford wrote an amazing open letter calling on the government to reverse their decision on not providing free school meal vouchers for children during the summer, because 2020 is the year where footballers appeal for societal change while politicians score own goals on the global stage. More than 1.3m children rely on free school meals & the Food foundation said that around 200,000 a day are skipping meals because their family couldn’t provide them with food during lockdown due to lack of funds or access. But Johnson has already rejected Rashford’s plea, instead confirming the system will end at the beginning of summer, meaning kids will go hungry. How can Johnson let children be neglected like that? I mean, write your own jokes here. He has yet to officially respond, but Downing Street have said that he understands the issues facing families across the UK, which he doesn’t, or he’d not be telling them just to go out and shop. I guess maybe the PM is just allowing thousands of children to starve in order to emulate his hero once again, Winston Churchill. Rashford is already working with a food distribution charity to deliver 3m meals a week to vulnerable people during lockdown and his letter has received over 200,000 retweets on Twitter and support from the National Education Union among others. So, by rejecting it, Johnson isn’t going for the popular choice which is an odd thing for a populist. It’s like he can’t even do that right. Same goes for the updated Gender Recognition Act which would have made it easier for people to legally change their gender, until the government scrapped it this week. It was a publicly popular idea, but I guess we know that Johnson has an aversion to making any transition period go smoothly. It’s alright though because what he will do is make sure no one can upset a statue, and make sure everyone protects statues and no one forgets about statues of people we already don’t get to forget about because the curriculum and television and media is all swayed so we only ever remember the bits of history that make us look like good guys and not the colonial murdering bastards that we were and in some cases, still very much are. And that’s what’s important right? Even if adversely by caring more about those statues than the welfare of actual living people, it means the entire country goes bust.

In other news but also the same news, Tory MP and sadistic lychee Iain Duncan Smith has said that the 2m social distancing rule should be changed, probably because despite no longer being in the DWP, he knows it stops them scrapping someone’s disability benefits if they can manage to crawl even half of that. And conglomerate of all the things that you have to clean from the rim around your fridge, Nigel Farage, has stepped down in the way that you do so you don’t fall from the push, from his radio presenting job at LBC, days after saying the protestors who took down Edward Colston’s statue were like the Taliban. I don’t think that works as the Taliban aren’t really known for fighting for equality but Nigel probably got confused as many of the people doing it weren’t white and were wearing facemasks so that’s all his racist brain can compute. Good riddance I say, though I don’t trust LBC at all, and I’m worried they’ll announce his replacement is a ‘3 hours with Goebbles ghost’ show, though fingers crossed they’ll do the right thing and make him extra sad by getting someone from abroad to take his job.

ADMIN

Greetings Parpolbrod types. Welcome to yet more of the same shit. The next time I have to try and find yet another joke about why Boris Johnson is a lazy arsehole who makes hollow overblown statements that mean nothing that I’ll just use something from an old episode. How can I be doing more work than him? Urgh. How are you all coping? I tell you what got my goat this week, no not trolls. No not the goat catcher. It was a BBC tweet describing racists as ‘anti-racism critics. That’s just weird. Just say racist. You wouldn’t call a serial killer an ‘anti-murder detractor’ or a terrorist an ‘anti-terrorist denigrator’. It’s so weird. The letter that went around to BBC employees telling them that while the BBC is not neutral on racism, staff have to be impartial about which causes they support so as to not upset viewers. I mean, I do understand as if they upset racists then they’ll have Nigel Farage booked in for those 100,000 further TV and radio appearances for no reason. It amazes me that the far right in particular like to call out people for being snowflakes who are offended by things but get very upset if you call them a racist. I did a tweet about the irony of fascists wanting to protect the Churchill statue and so many people responded with ‘who are you calling a fascist? I am just against vandalism’ and it’s like, well firstly, if you think this is about you, that’s very much your problem and secondly, I was calling the people doing Nazi salutes covered in swastika tattoos fascists. Or is that politically incorrect? Should I now be calling them ‘Anti-Nazi knocker’ or something?

Someone sent me a tweet I did in 2009 about needing scientists to make zips for pitta breads. That’s the fun stuff I used to make jokes about. Sigh. Remember that? 11 years ago when pitta bread zips were our worries? I mean there was also the financial crash but I was already poor so didn’t really notice.

But look here we are, another week and it is late in the old Douieb HQ so while I could complain and complain about the endless stupidity of people I won’t. It’s not my fault that two 80-year olds, one in a mobility scooter, physically pushed everyone out of the way in the queue into Kew Gardens the other day, to race to the front and I swore at them very loudly. I mean it’s up to them if they think they’re too privileged for viruses but I do hope they keep trying to find out. Sorry, I wasn’t going to do more complaining. What I was going to say was thanks for tuning in yet again, thank you tons also to James, Andrew, Clare, Richard and Joe for the ko-fi donations which as always, are very appreciated right now. And if you too feel like this show is worth the price of a coffee or if not this show, you know, me staying alive as the comedy industry completely disappears, then please do throw a quid or two to the ko-fi.com/parpolbro or join the patreon.com/parpolbro site. If you can’t do that, do a nice 5 star review for the show on Apple Podcasts or the like and obvs just shout about listening to this thing whenever you can. Speaking of listening to this thing, this is episode 192, which means its nearly the 200^th episode coming up. Should I do something special? I mean obvs it depends what the state of the world is by then, but any particular guests you’d like me to try and get, or get back? Or no guests and I do something different? I’m not sure how you’d celebrate the 200^th of something as I’m not old enough to have found out yet. What do vampires do? Or highlanders? Do they get two letters from the Queen? If you have any suggestions of how to do a celebrating, then let me know. Also, I haven’t tried it yet but I’m still aiming to do that call in live show on Thursday 25^th at 8pm. Put that in your diaries and I’ll be tweeting and facebooking more info soon.

Think that’s it for this week’s admin boreville. The kids comedy show I did with Tatton Spiller at Simple Politics is still online for another week and then I’ll take it down and set fire to it as its now so untopical, what with it being filmed last September. So if you and your kids want to watch it, do check it out and the link is in the podcast blurb. And this week’s show has brilliant playwright and general theatre clever person Dan Rebellato telling me all about why the arts are completely fucked. Which is fine with me as according to the Arts Council, comedy isn’t an art. I’m not sure what it is instead. Pretty sure quite a few people don’t find me entertaining either. Is there a category just for being? I’ll have to look it up.

INTERVIEW WITH DAN

While it’d be hard to argue with anyone who said that right now, there is far too much drama in the world, it’s not the sort that you’d watch for relaxation. Well, unless you’re a disaster capitalist. Thanks to ol’ corona, up to 70% of theatres currently face their final act, with 50% of all music venues seemingly playing their last tune, most comedy clubs not having the last laugh and a whole ton of museums being confined to history. Culture is very important not only for education, understanding, escapism and giving me something to do, but the theatre industry alone contributes over £32bn to the British economy, which is a lot considering how very little of that will come from tax as most actors earn nothing 10 months of the year. Over 50% of theatres in the country are charities or trusts that are currently receiving no support, the other 50% currently have no income either and working out how and when they’ll restart when every show will only be able to have the average audience of one of my Edinburgh Fringe shows is going to be tricky. Self-employed support ending in August means not only performers, but tech staff and many theatre staff will have no income at all and it’s all looking like the sort of bleak situation that Jim Cartwright would write something poetic about in 10 years-time but sadly there’d be no one around to put it on and nowhere to go watch it. So how to save the arts? And is this now an opportunity to turn things around, and make theatre more affordable and diverse again? Or will the loss of venues and income for those involved, social distancing and the need for funds mean the last two theatres left in the UK have tickets for £7m each so it’s only Richard Branson that will be able to sit and watch Benedict Cumberbatch be every role in Hamilton.

This week I spoke to Dan Rebellato. Dan is a playwright for theatre and radio, an author of many books about contemporary theatre, and he is currently a professor of theatre at the Royal Holloway university of London. I have known Dan from the world of Twitter for some time and even met him in the real world back when that was allowed, and so I dropped him a line to see if he’d mind explaining exactly why theatres are in so much trouble right now, what effects that has on the country and what could or should be done about it. I’m fully aware, as I briefly mentioned earlier, that theatres are a small sector in the whole arts industry that is struggling right now, as is the whole hospitality sector and I will try and get people on to talk about other areas that need help right now in future episodes. Dan is an expert on theatre so it seemed best to pick his brains on exactly that and how to stop the final curtain falling. Hope you enjoy. Here’s Dan:

INTERVIEW WITH DAN PART 1

We’ll be back with Dan in a minute but first…

MIDDLE BIT

ROBERT JENRICKS

You know Robert Jenricks yeah? The housing secretary that only seems to have got his job on account of having several houses, you know like how Matt Hancock is health secretary because all his policies are like horrible accidents that lead to emergencies. Well there are questions about whether or not he’s been up to shenanigans, after he overruled objections from a local council and planning officers to approve an application for a £1bn housing application in the Isle of Dogs from billionaire media mogul and Guess Who character Richard Desmond. Two months before it was approved, Desmond attended a political fundraiser where he happened to be sat next to Jenrick and said that he lobbied him to push through the construction plans, though Jenrick says that he told Desmond he couldn’t discuss it there and then, and then two weeks after it was approved, he also donated £12,000 to the Conservative Party which beats a thank you card doesn’t it?

Why should you give a shit? Well Desmond’s housing plans were for the Westferry Printworks redevelopment which was 1500 homes in East London but only 21% of them were going to be affordable housing, so at 80% of the already hugely unaffordable London rate. I mean 80% of money no one even on a reasonable wage will ever have, is still a lot of money. The target for large housing schemes in the capital is 35% so this was well under, hence criticism from the council and planning officials. Not only that, but it was pushed through one day before a new Community Infrastructure Law came in, meaning any developers would also have to pay £40m to support projects in Tower Hamlets, London’s poorest borough. So by pushing it through Jenrick was making sure that Desmond got to keep more of the money he has and doesn’t need rather than you know, help people with it, while also making sure no one could afford to live in the homes unless they were super rich.

Now so far Jenrick has said this is all above board, of course he has, that he didn’t discuss anything with Desmond pre-planning approval, but Desmond says he did and it’s hard to know which of the two immoral arseholes to believe but they can’t both be wrong. It’s like that riddle in Labyrinth but where both doors lead to a home you can’t afford. Jenrick did accept that it looked like apparent bias in the decision and that’s why he ended up quashing it and saying a different minister would have to decide on it, though Tower Hamlets council believe this is so he didn’t have to release the documentation. He also didn’t bother turning up to an urgent questions’ session in the Commons and instead sent a junior housing minister hilariously named for a Conservative Chris Pincher, to constantly say he had no clue about anything and try his best not to cry. Which doesn’t look great if there’s an urgent question about your conduct and you decide it’s better to send someone else. Jenrick did then turn up to a Commons questioning today, where he again said he’d done nothing wrong and that he was sat next to Richard Desmond totally by accident, you know, as you do.

So, this leads to the questions of whether or not he’s breached ministerial code, which says that if you discuss official business with a contact without there being another official present, you have to disclose all your chat otherwise naughties could be happening. That’s exactly what it says, just like that. Those words and everything. MPs also have to declare any personal interests and relationships, you know like the one Boris Johnson promises he didn’t have lots with Jennifer Arcuri, and their decisions must be made fairly without any bias. Thing is, as you might have noticed, there’s been a lot of contracts given by the government to companies where that last one is questionable lately, all under the guise of coronavirus legislation. G4S and Serco have got testing contracts, an AI firm that worked with the Vote Leave campaign has been awarded a £400,000 contract to potentially data gather on COVID stuff, Dido Harding, who’s in charge of the track and trace scheme is married to a Tory MP and is on the board of the Cheltenham races that they allowed to go ahead, and the government are currently being sued over handing £350m of PPE contracts to a pest control company without the contract ever being advertised for bidding by anyone else which is bonkers because coronavirus isn’t that sort of bug. This contract for the Westferry Printworks feels much the same, especially as the Prime Minister has been reported to have met with one of the lobbyists from Desmond’s firm too back when he was London Mayor and he approved an initial development scheme. And Richard Desmond is a proper piece of work, who took over owning the Daily Star and the Express back in 2000, firing so many journalists that one of the writers that stayed on, wrote a piece in the editorials with an acrostic that spelled out ‘fuck you Desmond’ which is the sort of smarts I’d expect was completely wasted on Express readers. He’s always flitted between political parties depending on who could do him favours, with a big donation to Labour when the government allowed him to take over the newspapers, then a massive donation to UKIP in 2015 which explains a lot of those front pages, and now after selling both of the papers for a massive fortune in 2018, he’s back to the Tories as it seems they can help him get developments built.

An inquiry is being urged by Labour and some members of the London Assembly are also calling for a police investigation. Hopefully some light will be shone on this and Jenrick will have to own up or step down. Unlike Desmond’s planned property, hopefully it won’t all be quashed before there’s significant developments.

And now back to Dan…

INTERVIEW WITH DAN PART 2

Thanks, so much to Dan for having the time to chat. You can find his website at DanRebellato.co.uk or he’s on Twitter @DanRebellato. And of course, all links that he mentions will be on the website soonish.

What other pandemic or non-pandemic content do you need to hear? What would soothe or excite your ears right now? Should I replace all interviews with just some whale noises or someone with a nice voice telling you it’ll all be ok over and over again for an hour? Let me know who I should interview and what I should interview people about and you can get it in touch by dropping me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast facebook group, the contact page on partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or why not scrawl your suggestion across a questionable historical statue while dodging 15 men that look like sore potatoes to do it, and I’ll see it as it’s plastered over every paper and news show in the land to prove that racists aren’t as bad as people who write things on inanimate objects that mostly no one cares about. As always, it’s probably just best to email isn’t it?

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast and yes, well done you, you’ve made it all the way to the end of the show which means, FANFARE PLEASE, you get to hear an exclusive ParPolBroHotPolGossFact. This week’s political fact is so known by very few, on account of it not being true. But that aside, with both Johnson and Starmer making such nothingy comments about the far right protesting in London that a dragonfly’s wings accidentally brushing against a granite wall would’ve made more impact. Which is something they probably would’ve quickly condemned and had that dragonfly sentenced to 10 years on vandalism charges. But which politician made the worst post protest comment? Well that’ll be Casimir Bartel, the Polish president from 1926-28 who was also a mathematician. It wasn’t during his presidency, but years after at the beginning of World War 2 where he publicly said that all sides were equal, but that’s because he hadn’t heard the question and was looking at a hexagon. PARPOLBROHOTPOLGOSSFACT for you right there. If you enjoyed that or hated it so much that you used the heat generated from your face to power your home for a week free of charge, then why not recommend this show to people who may feel the same about it, via your social media channels or just yelling when you go outside. Chuck a few quids at the ko-fi or patreon if you can and please do a nice review for the show on Apple Podcasts or one of the like.

Big thanks to Acast, The Last Skeptik, Kat Day and Mushybees.

This will be back next week when Boris Johnson will announce that they are scrapping the 2m social distancing rule but instead everyone should try to keep 2m apart but they don’t have to unless they want to but also its wise to do it. Stay 6.56ft apart will be the message, followed by government posters advising what the distance is in hungry schoolchildren.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEE

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