Further Reading

Linear liner notes 

This episode contains absolutely no politics at all as its not allowed because everyone is mourning endlessly about Prince Philip being more dead than he has been for the last ten years. So only mourn Prince Philip when listening to this, unless you’re hearing it after Sunday 9th in which case go nuts and politics up the place. Plus a chat with Dayana Shalai from The Curve podcast (@CurvePodcast) about the Race Report and more.

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

• • The Curve Podcast on Twitter – https://twitter.com/CurvePodcast 
• • The Curve Soundcloud – https://soundcloud.com/user-349730367/episode-2-race-2/s-ZjljW 
• • The Curve Podcast on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/thecurvepodcast/ 
• • Dee on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/dee.ess.aye/ 
• • #BlackInFinance Twitter hashtag – https://twitter.com/search?q=%23BlackInFinance 
• • Take Flight podcast webpage – https://fl1ght.co.uk/ 
• • ET the Hip Hop Preacher webpage – https://etinspires.com/home 
• • ET the Hip Hop Preacher on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/etthehiphoppreacher/ 
• • 14 Black British Podcasts You Need To Listen To (BuzzFeed) – https://www.buzzfeed.com/adaenechi/black-british-podcasts 

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:

• • Get 10% off at British Boxers with the code in the episode – https://british-boxers.com/ 
• • 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

Ep227

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that doesn’t do plain speaking as reading flight numbers off the departure boards gets dull pretty quickly. I’m Tiernan Douieb and as the Queen’s main ride, Captain Racism, Demolition derby expert and pioneer of eye bags for eye bags Prince Philip has finally died, I think we should all hold a candlelit vigil for him on Clapham Common and see what happens.

Prince Philip officially died last Friday even though, yes, I assumed he had done years ago too and was just being carted around for show like a British museum touring exhibit. But apparently, he managed to hold on till just before he was due a letter from the Queen, which he obviously thought wasn’t worth sticking around for and then kicked the bucket or at least had one of his many staff do it for him, at the age of 99. Gah, so young and so much potential left to give right? And of course when a royal dies the country enters a period of national mourning where for 8 solid days we all honour Philip’s death by complaining that the Masterchef final wasn’t on, all the radio has gone shit and that we’re bored of watching haggard wisp Nicholas Witchell try to eke out a third day of news that a man is still indeed dead and hasn’t returned to life like a new COVID variant has hit Romero levels or a season of Kingdom where absolutely no one notices that anything about the awful behaviour the royal is displaying is any different to normal. Prince Philip said he didn’t want the fuss of a state funeral, planning instead for one with just 800 guests which sounds positively casual. Thanks to COVID, you know the disease that has led to the deaths of many, drained public resources and widened inequalities and so in many ways, is just like the royal family, Philip’s funeral will now only have 30 attendees, with Prime Minister and St Bernard hide filled with old feta cheese Boris Johnson stepping aside to give more space for friends and family to attend, because with his two faces, ego and hair that’s at least four places he’d otherwise take up.

So instead as part of 8 days of national mourning for Philip, there has just been the fuss of every electronic billboard featuring his looming face, MPs making speeches about him where some chose to talk about his achievements, the Prime Minister chose to say that every time Philip made a racist comment it was just an attempt to lighten the atmosphere even though in reality that wasn’t quite what he wanted to lighten. One article last week said the Duke of Edinburgh had the air of a man who knew what to do in a bear attack, which is presumably tell his staff to allow themselves to be eaten by it while he drove off straight into a tree. Or maybe it’s just play dead. I’m not sure. There is also to be no political news for 8 whole days, with no press conferences, interviews, or campaigning because in the great British attempt to cover up the Duke of Edinburgh’s racist views, they’ve pretended his want for a blackout wasn’t just Philip’s views about his granddaughter in law joining the family. So obviously I have to comply and the podcast this week will have absolutely no political news whatsoever and instead I just want you to spend every second of this show mourning Prince Philip, eating your Prince Philip commemorative cereal shapes resembling a car wreckage, watching the special Prince Philip versions of television shows where celebrity chefs wearing a plastic mask of the recently deceased royal, hack away at a pig carcass till it resembles his face, or wannabe pop stars sing his name over and over again in a variety of styles while Tom Jones gyrates accordingly and we all great our friends with something horrendously bigoted about their ethnicity before whispering our favourite thing about Phil to each other. Mine is the way he started wooing the Queen when she was just 13 and he was an adult, and how he’s clearly kindly passed that trait directly onto his son. Ah what a lovely bunch. Rest in Power Philip, because as a royal that’s pretty much what he did his whole life anyway.

So luckily for the government you won’t be hearing about how when former Prime Minister and constant infected football bladder David Cameron said back in 2014 that lobbying would be the next big political scandal waiting to happen, it was because like all good sociopaths, he was merely laying the clues for his own capture. I wonder what other hints at his future disappointments we might find if we harken back to his days as PM. Perhaps that tune he hummed as he walked away after resigning, will actually turn out to be a series of notes that are a code to his offshore accounts? Or maybe that weird legs apart stance was actually a marker for the direction you should travel in to find where he buried his morals. And spine. And that pig. For the past year no one’s mate Dave has been lobbying various ministers and civil servants, including the Chancellor and grinning binder clip Rishi Sunak who he texted directly to plea for government funding for a company he worked for that has since gone bust. Classic Cameron, a man whose notion of the big hole in public finances, was always that it is never as deep or needing as the one in his pockets. Three weeks after the reports were leaked, Cameron squeaked out a non-apology saying that even though everything he did was above board, there were lessons to be learned about how he communicated with the government but from someone who has never given a shit about supporting education that isn’t saying much. It seems his main takeaway is to do it again but more quietly next time.

The government are going to investigate Cameron’s efforts to lobby ministers, so we can all pretend that’s a relief knowing full well they’ll decide the former Prime Minister’s only mistake was not offering to have a go at selling unsafe PPE as well or he’d have qualified for twice the amount. They’ll no doubt say we live in the least corrupt country in the world and we should be regarded as a model for other money based countries. It will be an independent inquiry, much like the recently released Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was, which now turns out that large portions of it were rewritten by the government after it was submitted because there’s nothing says ‘no structural racism here’ like actively erasing words of people of colour to pop your own version of history in there instead. I’m surprised they didn’t change an entire section to Scarlet Johansson. The report has been heavily criticised by pretty much anyone who’s ever read or seen anything ever, but No.10 have, as always, responded by rejecting all criticism and saying it’s just a distraction from the contents of the report which say it’s not race but socio-economic backgrounds that impact life changes. So, I’m excited to see how in a few years they won’t have done anything about that either and will no doubt rewrite a report saying that was never a thing and it’s all to do with people’s favourite crisp flavours or something. The government say what people should be focussed on is their 24 recommendations for making people’s lives better, one of which is a ‘Making of Modern Britain’ resource that tells how actually slavery was great for the cultural transformation of African people. Yeah god of course, now you say it, it’s obvious, isn’t it? And really if you think about it, the bombing of Pearl Harbour was actually so positive in how it gave the Hawaiians a real chance to finally revamp the dock scene. If you really think about it, the Spanish Inquisition were actually just helping everyone get a head-start on their job interview technique and ability to deal with stress.

It’s all about how you look at it right? I mean if you pop that positive mental attitude right on like a pair of VR goggles then you’ll see that eight nights of rioting and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland isn’t at all the fault of Boris Johnson because how was he to even know where Northern Ireland was or that he was responsible for it when it was a whole sea away? I mean it can’t be a real country otherwise he wouldn’t have given the ministerial position of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to Brandon Lewis, a man who looks like a rejected Wind in The Willows character on account of all his traits being so mind numbingly boring he did nothing for the story. Lewis understands the situation in Northern Ireland so much that he waited until there had been violence for over a week before he urgently flew over to do absolutely nothing about it. He said that he was the first to acknowledge that there were issues with the Northern Ireland protocol, which he wasn’t as he insisted on January the 1st that actually there wasn’t an Irish Sea border at all. So the only explanation is that he has not paid attention to anything anyone else has ever said about it and Lewis’s now feeling smug that having discovered there is one, he’s can finally fix things by letting everyone else now which should calm it all down. There’s been lots of idiots, like for example Kate Hoey, who is made entirely of teeth, blaming the EU for inflicting the protocol on Northern Ireland and stopping them from having a Brexit, something they did by obviously whispering into Boris Johnson’s ear as he slept so that he and his team alone would come up with it and then thank the EU for their flexibility in agreeing to it so that Northern Ireland could have a Brexit. Lewis told political parties in Belfast that the protocol would not be scrapped, probably on account of them having absolutely nothing to replace it with after getting rid of the backstop. Johnson’s only response so far was a tweet after 6 days of violence saying that the only way to resolve differences is through dialogue, not violence or criminality, which must be why he hasn’t bothered saying anything since and doesn’t want to hold an emergency summit to talk about it.

In fact, Johnson hasn’t really said anything at all for days, with the media blackout meaning that instead of his big announcement to herald the lifting of yet more lockdown restrictions in England, we have just had a warning to behave responsibly, which coming from Johnson is like Animal from the Muppets doing a public service broadcast to ask for people to drum quietly. It was only two weeks ago that definitely doesn’t look like she’s his relation Jennifer Arcuri made it public that her and Johnson did have an affair for four years, the most shocking part of that is the evidence that he was actually able to commit to something. When it comes to all the public funds that Arcuri had access to during that time, Johnson believes he has no case to answer to and I guess if he believes it, why should we question? I’m starting to think the best way forward for all of us is to just to review ourselves. I wish I could have taken my own driving tests and passed myself first time round after insisting that nearly careering into the side of a lorry was just me trying to culturally develop British driving. So really if we weren’t all relentlessly mourning, we could be celebrating as institutional racism has definitely gone so says the institution, the Prime Minister has only ever acted appropriately so says the Prime Minister, Brandon Lewis has sussed out what the problem in Northern Ireland is and we won’t hear about it on the news till Sunday anyway so hopefully if they ignore it it’ll just go away and now pub gardens, zoos, hairdressers and shops are open again meaning we can now all see the things we can’t afford to do after a year of no work. More than 32 million people in Britain have now had their first dose of a vaccine and 7.4m of those have had their second too but due to incredibly minimal blood clot risks that are less than the contraceptive pill, under 30’s are being offered an alternative. Vaccine that is, although it’ll probably end up just being to stay at home while all older people with 12 houses go to all the festivals and tell them they’re being ungrateful. According to Education Secretary and runny nose personified Gavin Williamson has said that children have lacked discipline and order during lockdown, but I reckon that’s just because having been at home with his kids, he’s witnessed them laughing at how pathetic he is on a daily basis. Williamson wants mobile phones banned in schools. I guess maybe he’s worried students will use them to leak details of national security council meetings and then end up taking his job?

Things are getting back to the normal we were unhappy with before COVID and the transport secretary and missing link between humans and mole rats Grant Shapps has even said people can start thinking about foreign travel again, which is worrying because I’ve been thinking about it for ages. I can’t afford to go anywhere but it’s been my happy daydream whenever the government have fucked something up and I want to escape the country. Both Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson have been urging people to return to their offices, with the PM saying that people have had too many days off, not realising that the country doesn’t have the same work ethic as him. While Sunak says that bosses need to get staff back to work before they resign, which isn’t how it works. Ooh if you continue to let me have more time for exercise, eating well and seeing my kids then I’m walking. Imagine the strikes as people form protest lines outside work demanding more hours and longer commutes, cheering as scabs push past because that’s the real revolution. Sunak would have been a factory owner in Victorian times demanding everyone let the orphans lose their limbs in machines otherwise they might willingly starve themselves to death.

There are talks of traffic light systems being used to allow mass events to go ahead, and I hope the system will be red, no you are pestilence the horseman of the apocalypse. Green, go for it, Amber honestly arts, sports and culture have been so fucked over that we need your ticket sales and I’ll just look over here and you can run in and we’ll pretend you never coughed. There are concerns over the use of vaccine passports being used to allow people to gain access to go abroad, festivals, theatres and similar events. I’m quite pro-vaccine passports as I got through a lot of my teenage years with a fake ID and what with youth employment being at an all-time low, this could give a lot of much needed work to a savvy 14 year old with access to a printer and a laminator. A number of MPs have said that vaccine passports would be dangerous, divisive and discriminatory so I guess that is a problem as with those qualities they may end up running as a Conservative MP. Labour leader and practical ASR33 teleprinter telex terminal Keir Starmer said vaccine passports are not British, and he’s right as a truly patriotic passport would give us less access to places.

Speaking of Labour, which we’re not as they too have halted all political interviews, conferences and whatever it is they actually do until after Big Phil’s Anti-Wake party, Keir Starmer was criticised after visiting a vaccination centre at Jesus House in Brent, which is known for is homophobic beliefs. No Starmer, that is not what anyone meant when they said Labour was a broad church. Starmer said he wasn’t aware of their views before his visit which isn’t a good look for someone as forensic as him if he isn’t even able to use google. Is it perhaps that he was aware but was hoping conversion therapy actually meant he could get tips on how to make swing voters like him? Labour’s new tactic is to push for a Victims Law, presumably so they can claim for the absolute battering they are getting in the polls. Returning to the days of New Labour, it’s to give victims of antisocial behaviour the same rights as victims of crime, as anti-social behaviour has risen in the past year. Yes of course it has. We all had to be anti-social, or we’d have passed on the virus you fucking idiots.

In Scotland, slowly compressing outie Alex Salmond announced his new political party Alba, who stand for making electronic products in the 90s. Oh no sorry. Wrong one. They are standing for independence and obviously care about it so much they wouldn’t let the SNP do that all by themselves. And Baroness Shirley Williams has died aged 90. A founding member of the Liberal Democrats but apart from that she seemed to be mostly liked. Hey we all make mistakes.

But of course, I can’t mention any of that on this week’s show. Unless you’re listening to this on Sunday 9^th April, in which case its totally allowed. But if its before that, please remove all references I’ve made to anything political and instead just replace it with mourning for Prince Philip a man who enriched many people’s lives through the Duke of Edinburgh award which gets kids to use skills to orienteer their way safely out of a forest and thus give them a head-start at survival if being chased by Prince Andrew.

ADMIN

Did you miss me? No? What do you mean you’ve been too busy watching the same documentary about Prince Philip on twelve different channels at once? Look I don’t mean to appear callous, but I honestly couldn’t give a shit. I mean a lot of people have died over the tragic past year we’ve had so the idea we might ignore them to go all out for someone who regularly sounded like an arsehole is all the wrong priorities. I saw on the news just yesterday it said ‘live: Prince Philip dead’ which is a confusing headline as it is but also, he died on Friday. Has he died again? Is it like how the Queen gets two birthdays? It is just bonkers. Still though, we can now all sit outside and drink booze or something though ironically thanks to the past year all I can afford to do is stay at home. I’m not remotely religious as you might have realised by now, but as it was snowing this morning on this, the day everyone can drink but only outside, I did wonder if it was some deity trying to give us one last chance to reconsider. But I’m trying to be hopeful about it all. The vaccination program seems to be working and that’s great, even if I don’t think Johnson deserves the praise, he’s getting from it. I mean all he ever does is fuck things up so much that when something actually goes right like it’s meant to, it’s deemed a huge success. It’s like the kid at my school who tried to burn down the music block and then after that we had to give him a round of applause at assembly for just turning up to lessons for a whole week. Anyway, I hope you had a good few weeks without this podcast. I tried very hard to not watch the news but annoyingly things kept happening and I couldn’t fit them all in this show or well, it would have gone on for ages and there’d be no time left for royal mourning. But of course this is back now and will continue to be until we all figure out something better to do with our lives or you know, it stops being too cold to go outside. We went to sit in our friends, sort of not really a garden but some concrete outside their flat yesterday and it was so lovely seeing them till our hands went blue and I did wonder if the way we’ll all suppress COVID is by making it number two on the biggest cause of hospital admissions after pneumonia.

Thank you thank you to L Jones for donating to the acast supporter, Pablo, Helen, Martin, Christine, Somebody, James and Kim for donating to the Ko-fi and Ande for upping his patreon donations. And a very big thanks to Jackie and Peekay who donated to the ko-fi after I tweeted about a book I really wanted to read but couldn’t afford to get because this month is rubbish. More about that book in a min. But look if you can donate to this podcast it is still, until gigs are allowed to return in July time, sort of my only regular work and so if you can even fling a regular £1 to the Patreon or ko-fi sites as a recurring payment, you will be making my life and the making of this podcast tons easier for me. Obvs if you can’t that is also fine but I probably won’t send you a Christmas card. I mean I probably won’t send the people who donate a Christmas card either but the probably bit gives hope and we need hope right now. Also its nowhere near Christmas. This is a really useless sell isn’t it? Anyway ko-fi.com/parpolbro or Patreon.com/parpolbro or if you really need to the Acast supporter button. Or now we’re allowed outside, just lob your credit card at me from a distance and I promise to only use it for contactless payments up to £45.

Thanks also to Daveyboy for the nice review on Apple Podcasts, which is another thing you can do should you fancy.

So that book right, I read two books over that break which is a lot for me as I have no time to read during the day and then at night I tend to immediately fall asleep if I start reading. But thanks to getting food poisoning from a cake, yeah really, I’ve never felt so betrayed in my life, I had several hours being sad lying in bed and managed to read the entirely of Musa Okwonga’s brilliant One of Them which I interviewed him about on this show in Feb. Its so very, very worth your while. A fascinating, insightful and moving read. Bloody loved it. Then the other book was Emma Dabiri’s book ‘What White People Can Do Next’. Emma Dabiri did the now very famous book on African history called Don’t Touch My Hair, and this new book, despite the intentionally provocative title, is the most beautifully positive read about the stupidly divisive world we’re currently in. Honestly, couldn’t recommend it enough. It’s a really humanitarian view about our need to see other people as people and not categories, return to a life of empathy for others and generally stop going on Twitter. I’ve been calling it a sort of memo to humanity. Its only 148 pages long and you can currently get it on hive.co.uk for about £6.45 and it’s had my brain racing since I finished it in one sitting. Emma Dabiri was on The Blind Boy podcast talking about it the other week which is what made me really want to pick it up.

Oh and maker of all the music on this show, or in other words all the music I nick from him and my brother Corin aka The Last Skeptik, has a new track out if you like his musics. Its called ‘today I’m gonna change my life’, so grab that from whichever music hole you seize noise from.

Ok on this week’s show I am talking to Dayana Shalei from the Curve podcast all about the race report and if the business sector is in anyway better than the government when it comes to equality and in the middle there’s a bit all about how David Cameron is still a shit.

INTERVIEW WITH DAYUNA

If the government were to release a truly honest report on racism in the UK, it would likely just have one A4 piece of paper signed by Priti Patel and quoting Dr Evazan in Star Wars at the Mos Eisley Cantina when he says ‘He doesn’t like you. I don’t like you either. You just watch yourself.’ Followed by links to where you can find flight details to the places furthest from here. As it is the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was released at the end of March and announced that actually institutional racism doesn’t exist in Britain. Yes, it turns out Windrush scandal victims still not receiving compensation for illegal deportations, disproportionate COVID deaths of black and Asian people and various members of the establishment from royals to politicians regularly trying to out racist each other like it’s a Radio 4 panel show, is actually something that should be regarded as a model for other white majority countries. Which also sounds like asking a contestant on Just A Minute to promote racism for 60 seconds without hesitation or repetition. Though actually the report did contain repetition as Chairman of the committee and man who regularly looked like his shirt is trying to eat him Tony Sewell has said many times that he doesn’t believe institutional racism in Britain exists, as have several other members involved in writing the report. So, of-course they wouldn’t find it. It was like hiring X-Files Season 1 Dana Scully to write a report on the existence of aliens. Since the report came out, the Prime Minister’s senior advisor on ethnic minorities resigned, academics quoted in the report have said they were tricked into contributing to it, commissioners of the supposedly independent report have said that Downing Street rewrote big bits it in order to keep up the totally not institutional racism of rebooting something so that its inherently more whitewashed. Oh, and a Met police officer was sentenced for being a member of a Nazi group but hey maybe that’s something that should be regarded as a model for other white majority countries right? Ah no wait, we’ve tried that one and it turns out, not so great. That the race report was wrong isn’t news, particularly to people of colour in the UK who are very aware that this is a place where the BBC’s obituary of Prince Philip said his regular racist outburst were ‘nothing more than an attempt to lighten the atmosphere and put people at their ease’. I mean there’s only a handful of events where comments like that relax people and they generally end with cross burning or Nigel Farage passing round a hat to fund him shouting at dinghies. So how dangerous is it for the government to say institutional racism isn’t a thing? Or can positive progress towards a more equal society be made without state involvement because I mean, it is increasingly looking like with all issues in the country right now the only way to do the job properly is by yourself, especially when most of the government have never had a job before and don’t really understand what it is.

This week I spoke to a guest, who, I’ll be honest, I booked in to talk to before the release of the race report and I was really hoping to talk to about all the other work that she does. But as is exhaustingly the case, because Dayana Shalai brilliantly talks about navigating institutional spaces such as finance, education and healthcare as a black person on her podcast The Curve, it meant we had to start there. Dayana aka Dee is a young professional in the banking sector, and with her friends, set up The Curve to create a space where people could talk candidly and openly about the issues they face in them in terms of prejudice and bigotry from blatant to structural. The podcast is on a hiatus while they rebrand, so Dee kindly agreed to a chat about the ways in which we discuss race as a society and if the business sector is better or worse than any others when it comes to inequality. I should quickly say there are a couple of zoom glitches. Hopefully I’ve edited it so you won’t notice it too much and also weirdly, despite there not being an issue at any other point, there’s one bit where Dee makes me laugh so much it echoes through her headphones and sounds all weird. It is funny though. Also, a first for this show, I’ve left the bit on at the end. I always ask guests if there’s anything I should have asked them that I didn’t and then I usually edit it into the chat so you don’t notice. But this time Dee asked me a question instead so I thought best to just let the chat continue and leave it as it is. Hope you enjoy. Here is Dee:

INTERVIEW WITH DAYANA PART 1

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

MIDDLE BIT –

British politics is the only long running drama where the return of a classic villain isn’t exciting. Case in point, David Cameron, the arse imprint on a leather sofa of a man, has reared his unfathomably red face back into the news these past few weeks. Or more correctly has had his faced reared by the press catching foul wind of his attempts to lobby various Downing Street mugs to get funding for a now collapsed company. Yes it seems his career of trying to cut public funding where-ever possible, has now evolved into a more subtle plan of sucking the last bits of public funding away for his own financial benefit. If you haven’t heard the story, because either you’re incredibly lucky and have actual fun things to do with your life or because every news story this week is just telling you that a man is indeed still dead, then let me start you at the very beginning. Greensill Capital was a financial services company, or to translate, they made money by pissing about with other companies money. I would love to explain to you exactly what they did with reverse factoring, and future accounts receivables finance, but this is still meant to be vaguely an entertaining podcast and not a sleep aid so just trust me when I say they helped companies hide their debts, make late as fuck payments to suppliers and borrow money for things they hadn’t even done yet. It all that money juggling that is risky, careless and unsurprisingly led to insolvency when in March the company securing the loans Greensill were taking out to pay off other companies debts said fuck that for a laugh and so they found themselves unable to pay a $140 million loan back to its lenders and ultimately a whole load of people have lost an absolute shit load of cash because no one learns anything in that sector proving that an expensive education is yet another pointless waste of money.

Lex Greensill, who sounds like an animated frog villain but looks like Steve Carrell’s worst role, was an unpaid adviser to David Cameron’s government and I suppose looking down the line he definitely wasn’t worth paying for to be fair. Something Cameron did get right. Greensill’s appointment was supposedly part of the Civil Service drive to improve efficiency, so maybe he just advised passing the buck onto others at a discount and then hoping you’ll get bailed out when it comes back round. Something Cameron did get right. Then in 2018 David Cameron was hired as an unpaid advisor to Greensill in 2018, which again, sounds like it makes sense after his main achievements revolved around leaving everyone else to mop up his mess but as that is largely what Greensill did as a company too you can see why they gave him stock options that could have been worth £70m. Now it seems that in-between hiding in an obscenely large shed and writing memoirs that likely read as a dark, dark version of a Dick King Smith novel, Cameron was lobbying the British government to chuck some of the emergency government back COVID loans to his new work home. Yes, no better, more secure risk free use for emergency funds, than to fund a place that gives emergency funds to places. It’s like a campaign to support jobs for unnecessary middlemen, which they’d probably pay someone else to do for them at an exploitative lower rate.

Cameron’s lobbying involved texting and ringing the Chancellor Rishi Sunak, which is a silly idea as he’d have been better off getting hold of him on Instagram DMs. Sunak voluntarily published his texts to Dave-o, where he said he’d pushed the treasury team to help Greensill. I don’t think that’s literal pushing by the way, as that’s what the Home Secretary does. Cameron also lobbied a senior Downing Street aide, which I think is senior in terms of authority not aptitude. None of that was successful I should say, as the Treasury rejected the proposals, but Greensill did have access to tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer cash under a different COVID scheme called the Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme which they will now never pay back because they went all insolvent. So the question is, did the fact that puff facey Cameron used to be PM and have Rishi’s digits on his speed dial give him special access that say another company wouldn’t have had if they could only contact the Treasury by applying the usual way via the gov.uk website that seems to be based on the user experience of someone who is highly skilled at choose your own adventure stories set in the administrative department of Escher’s estate. Well I mean clearly but the way in which our oh so democratic governance system works means that it was more than two years since Cameron has been in office, so he didn’t have to clear the role with the vetting committee for this sort of thing and because he was a Greensill employee, albeit an unpaid one, he didn’t need to declare himself on the registrar of lobbyists. A group that was set up by David Cameron’s own government in 2014. The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union administration Act of the same year makes it an offence for someone who isn’t a registered lobbyist to directly lobby ministers or civil servants but if you lobby on behalf of an organisation it’s all dandy for you to not let anyone know that you, former Prime Minister who is all too aware of how public money works as you wouldn’t let any schools, libraries or councils have it, would now like a big wodge of it so you can get millions to add to your offshore shed fund.

That means it was also legal and proper for Cameron to take Lex Greensill to meet Health Secretary Matt Hancock for a private drink in 2019 where they discussed a payment scheme converting salaries for doctors and nurses into bonds and selling them for profit. That scheme was used in some areas of the NHS, which means based on my limited knowledge and please write in if I’ve got this wrong, staff were paid weekly or daily, via Greensill who would earn profit on it with the interest and then pay the original sum to the staff member. Yes, making money off risking money that someone else is earning by saving lives. I don’t think that could sound more massively fucked up and sinister if you asked Kevin Spacey to read it direct to camera as a weird Christmas video tweet that absolutely no one wanted.

Cameron has non-apologised, as is his remit, saying merely that he should have contacted the government through only the most formal of channels, so he’ll probably do it all over again but in a tuxedo or something. Cameron did warn when he was prime minister that lobbying would become the next big scandal so we should’ve known he was just setting things up so that he would actually be right about something at one point in his life. This is nothing new, and the past year has shown more than ever the ways in which private companies procure money from the state is no level playing field. Or if it is, the playing field is owned by a friend of Matt Hancock and he rents it out to do lunges in to try and impress some teenagers and now the playing field owner has a billion pound contract to use the field as a test site. Labour are pushing for changes to lobbying laws, we only know about this one because its David Cameron and reports were leaked to the Times. But there’s almost certainly tons more cases like it, that are legal only because the rules are shit. The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments normally meets four times a year but has only met once in the last year and a half and didn’t even publish any minutes for that one, unless they’re pretending to be so transparent all the words are done in invisible ink. Government accountability is so low even Greensill wouldn’t have wanted to turn it into bonds and sell it for profit. Labour are campaigning for the lobbying register to include in-house lobbyists like Cameron, so that means the opposition will probably mention it once then assume that’ll be it done and not understand why it doesn’t happen.

It’d be lovely to think there’ll be repercussions from this but as it’s all coming out during an 8 day media blackout on political press conferences, interviews, ministerial visits and announcements from the Conservatives or Labour, because it’s a week to bury all sorts of bad news for the country apparently. Sunak and Hancock won’t have to answer anything and Cameron will probably go back to enjoying his millions plus the £115,000 he still gets from state funding to run his own private office that he takes nearly a month to write a response about the lobbying story from. But then it makes sense that any interest the press might have in Cameron is immediately skimmed off and returned at a much later date as something with less than the original value.

Further still, Greensill’s administrators have found they can’t verify invoices underpinning loads to its top client, Sanjeev Gupta, who’s known for his business in the steel industry, as in the metal not the other kind despite it looking like that is where his expertise might lie. Several companies said they had never done business with Gupta despite being named on the invoices via Greensill and the two have been accused by MPs of running a potential Ponzi scheme. Still if getting people to part with a lot of money in the false promise of future golden times isn’t the theme song for the last decade of Conservative governments, I’m not sure what is.

And now back to Dayana…

INTERVIEW WITH DAYANA PART 2

Thanks to Dee for having time to chat. Her podcast The Curve has been on a break since last year and is returning soon under a new name, to be announced soon. But till then, do go back and listen to old episodes which you can find on all podcast servers, and on Instagram at thecurvepodcast. Dee is amazingly and inspiringly absent from social media, I’m so jealous, but you can find her on Instagram at dee.ess.aye.

So, if all goes to plan, I’m hoping to speak to guests about Northern Ireland, Scotland, local elections and some of that political jazz over the next few weeks but I’m aware as ever, we’re in a constant political shitstorm, so if there’s anything you think I should be talking to people about, give us a shout. And you do can said shout via @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast page on Facebook, the contact page at partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you could…ah no what am I talking about? They’ve halted everything until Prince Philip is buried in-case the very idea that anyone could be doing anything except mourning endlessly like say, sending a letter or wafting smoke signals, would be nothing but traitorous. So if you have any time left after wailing at your Philip shrine, with your Philip pillow and eating your commemorative Philip moulded cheese string, then it’s probably just best to email isn’t it?

END

And that is all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast. Thank you for returning to this here show despite the other option of just in-casing your head in a cement mound usually reserved for controlled explosions, and patiently sitting in a dark corner hearing the endless sound of nothingness until all of this has passed at which point a trusted friend, relative or Amazon delivery driver that you’ve got to know so well, will sledgehammer the casing off and tell you that there is finally something else on the television other than Prince Philip memorial programs. But personally, I think you’ve made the right choice. Should you also feel the same and haven’t yet reached for your nearest concrete moulding tool kit then please do recommend this shit to someone else who’s existance you’re at least vaguely aware of. Parp about it on social media or wherever you do your online shouting, donate to the ko-fi, patreon or Acast supporter site and maybe even give it a nice review on a podcast platform, train carriage interior or virtual meeting space.

Warm thanks but heated only by renewable energy to Acast, my bro the Last Skeptik, Kat Day and Katie Coxall.

This will be back next week when political activity resumes and we suddenly all realise we were actually much happier without it and campaign for the BBC to show wall to wall Prince Philip documentaries again.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by mourning Prince Philip obviously. How dare you even think about anything else. Stop it. Stop it right now.

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