 Boris Johnson has overseen the deaths of 150,000 people during Britain's disastrous COVID crisis. Boris Johnson's hard Brexit deal risks breaking up the United Kingdom. And the habit of Johnson's ministers of doling out multi-million pound contracts to their mates has landed the government in trouble in the High Court. However, after all of this, could it be Boris Johnson and his partner, Carrie Simons, ponchant for fancy furniture that finally starts to unravel his premiership on the day the Electoral Commission launched a formal investigation into the funding of the Downing Street flat? That's the question we'll be asking this evening. And I'm joined to discuss that pretty big question by Dalia Gabriel. How are you doing, Dalia? I'm doing good, Michael. How are you doing? Very well. I kind of enjoyed PMQs for the first time in a long time today. It was a bit spicier than usual. So you're gonna be going through some of that. I know, I feel ashamed to say that, but it was juicy than normal. Normally I switch off after the first question. Now I feel obligated to watch some of these things. You're probably the target audience. Yeah, you're probably the target. Like if anyone's gonna enjoy it, it's gonna be you, Michael. That's the meanest thing you've ever said to me, Dalia, but we'll move on. Later in the show, I'm gonna speak to journalist Amanda Ferguson about the resignation of Arlene Foster. And we'll also discuss the latest controversy surrounding Prince Andrew. It's another pretty outrageous one, I have to say. And to close the show, we'll take a look at a new low on the Joe Rogan show. As ever, do please tweet your comments on the hashtag Tiskey Sour. What do you think about the discussions? We're having the topics we're covering. Do let us know. Now, what do we know about Boris Johnson's flat refurbishment and why is this particular topic causing so much controversy right now? Well, let's go through the first part of that question first. So what we know is that over the course of the pandemic, Boris Johnson and his partner, Carrie Simons, were spending tens of thousands of pounds doing up their Downing Street flat. We also know that at least 58,000 pounds of that was spent by the conservative party towards that refurbishment. And this is the most crucial bit probably. We know the conservative party themselves received 58,000 pounds earmarked for the flat from businessman Lord Brownlow. Now, those are the facts as we understand them. Next, the controversy. Why is this controversial? Well, on the most basic level, every prime minister is entitled to a 30 grand grant to do up Downing Street. And the fact that Boris Johnson and Carrie Simons felt that this wasn't enough and that they'd have to seek outside funding says something about their distance from ordinary people, especially at a time when people are really struggling due to the COVID pandemic. More seriously than that, because that wasn't really a surprise to anyone, was it? The fact a businessman appears to have fronted the cost of the refurbishment raises questions about what they might have expected in return. Indeed, this is precisely why renovations of the Downing Street flat are normally publicly funded. We don't like the idea there could be a conflict of interest between a prime minister receiving gifts who is also making policy. Finally, I mean, this is what's really got Boris Johnson into trouble is the issue of transparency. Now, political donations are allowed, but they're supposed to be declared to the Electoral Commission within a set time period and this donation wasn't. That's why this morning the Electoral Commission launched that investigation. Now, what has Boris Johnson said about all of this? Not very much. The statement he keeps falling back on is that he has now paid personally for the refurbishment. This, I suppose, would say these are now loans instead of donations. That would still need to be declared, so you still have issues there. The other issue which he hasn't answered is when he decided that he would pay these back. So from what I understand, he wasn't really planning to pay for this refurbishment until Sky started investigating. Then when the newspapers, when journalists, started investigating, that's when he fronted the money. Did he originally intend to pay it back? It's very, very unclear. As I said, all of this is very unclear, but, well, unclear in terms of Boris Johnson won't ask any questions about it. I think we're building up quite a concrete picture as to what happened. Keir Starmer today at PMQs tried to pin Johnson down on these facts, though. Could he get anything from him other than I have now paid for the refurbishment? Let's take a look. Who initially, and Prime Minister, initially is the key word here, who initially paid for the redecoration of his Downing Street flat? Prime Minister. And, Mr Speaker, when it comes to misleading Parliament, you may recollect that it was only a few weeks ago that he said that he didn't oppose this government, this country staying in the, leaving the European Medicines Agency. In fact, that he was then forced to retract and that he leaving the European Medicines Agency was absolutely invaluable for our vaccine run-on. Actually, it was just last week that he said that James Dyson, he said that James Dyson was a personal friend of mine, a fact that James Dyson was corrected in the newspaper this morning. As for the latest stuff that he's bringing up, he should know that I've paid for Downing Street refurbishment personally, Mr Speaker. And I contrast it, and I contrast it at any further declaration that I have to make, I will, if any, I will be advised upon by Lord Guide. But if he talks about housing costs, Mr Speaker, then the people in this country can make their own decision in just eight days' time. Because on average, Labour councils charge you 93 pounds more in Bande, the Conservative councils, and Liberal Democrat councils charge you 120 pounds more. That, I think, is the issue. That, I think, is the issue upon which the British people would like him to focus. So it was very clear what happened there. Keir Starmer knew that Boris Johnson was going to say, I've covered the cost of the flat renovation, and that's why he asked the question, who originally paid for the flat renovation? Who originally paid for it? He asked that in a very clear way, and Boris Johnson basically ignored the question and changed the subject. That will be a running theme because Starmer had another go. Let's take a look at what happened next at PMQs. Mr Speaker, normally when people don't want to incriminate themselves, they go, no comment. Let me ask this. Let me give, well, let's explore this bit further, Prime Minister. Let's ask it a different way. Either, this is the initial invoice, Prime Minister, either the taxpayer paid the initial invoice, or it was the Conservative Party, or it was a private donor, or it was the Prime Minister. So I'm making it easy for the Prime Minister. It's now multiple choice. There are only four options. It should be easier than finding the chatty rat, Mr Speaker. So I asked the Prime Minister again, who paid the initial invoice, initial invoice, Prime Minister, for the redecoration of the Prime Minister's flat, the initial invoice. Mr Speaker, I've given him the answer, and the answer is I have covered the costs, and I think most people will find it absolutely bizarre. And of course, there's an electoral commission investigating this, and I can tell him that I've conformed in full with the code of conduct, with ministerial code, and officials have been advising me throughout this whole thing, but I think people will think it absolutely bizarre. That he is focusing on this issue, when what people want to know is what plans the Labour government might have to improve the life of people in this country. And let me tell you, if he talks about housing again, we're helping people on the house. I'd rather not spend taxpayers' money, by the way, like the last Labour government would spend £500,000 of taxpayers' money on the Downing Street. In fact, I'd rather... I would... Yes, they did. Yes, they did, tarting it up. I would much rather, I would much rather help people get on the property ladder, and it's this conservative government that has built 244,000 homes in the last year, which is a record over 30 years. This is a government that gets on with delivering on the people's priorities while he continually raises, I think, issues that most people would find irrelevant to their concerns. So, again, a very, very specific question, a multiple-choice question, in fact. And again, Boris Johnson changes the subject. Just for some context there, Boris Johnson did mention the Blair and Brown government spent all of this money. They spent more money than me. They were in government for more time than him. I'm pretty sure what he's referencing there is the fact that the Labour prime ministers between 1997 and 2010 used up most of that grant that you get per year, the 30K grant that any prime minister gets to do up Downing Street. So, essentially, they did what they were allowed. Boris Johnson seems to have done what he wasn't allowed. That's the difference. Now, I'm going to skip a couple of questions because it does get a little bit repetitive. You can imagine Keir Starmer asking that very specific question, Boris Johnson changing the subject. I do want to show you the last exchange between Starmer and Johnson, because in this one, Boris Johnson kind of really loses it. Now, you can decide for yourself whether the angle works for the PM. Does it really get a point across? Or does it make him look a little bit rattled? Mr Speaker, don't the British people deserve a Prime Minister they can trust and a government that isn't mired in sleaze, cronyism and scandal? Mr Speaker, last week he came to this chamber and he attacked me for talking to James Dyson about ventilators, where we're now sending ventilators to help the people of India. And the following day, the following day, Mr Speaker, the Labour front bench said that any Prime Minister in my position would have done exactly the same thing. It wasn't only a few months ago that they were actually attacking Kate Bingham, saying she was a crony, when she helped to set up the vaccine task force that delivered millions of vaccines for the people of this country, Mr Speaker, helping us to get out of the pandemic. This is a government that is getting on with delivering on the people's priorities. We're rolling out many more nurses, 10,000 more nurses in the NHS, now than there were this time last year, 8,771 more police officers on our streets, now than there were when I was elected, including tougher sentences, Mr Speaker, for serious sexual and violent criminals, which he opposed, Mr Speaker. We're getting on, and by the way, I forgot to mention it, I forgot to mention it. Last night, our friends in the European Union voted to approve our Brexit deal, which he opposed, which enables us not just to take back control of our borders, Mr Speaker, but to deliver free, which it does, which he fervently opposed, enabling us amongst other things to deal with such threats as the European Super League, Mr Speaker, but it enables us to deliver free ports in places like Teeside, and above all, taking back control of our country has allowed us to deliver the fastest vaccine rollout in Europe, as he well knows, Mr Speaker, which would not have been possible, which would not have been possible if we'd stayed in the European Medicines Agency, which he voted for, Mr Speaker. Week after week, the people of this country can see the difference, but in a Labour Party, the twists and turns with the wind that thinks of nothing except playing political games, whereas this party gets on with delivering on the people's priorities, and I hope that people will vote conservative on May the 6th. So, very heated. I'm don't worry, that's the last clip I'm going to show you of Gears, Tamer and Boris Johnson, no more dud gags, and no more all that bullshit, really. Dahlia, I want your thoughts on this controversy, and first of all, I suppose, what did you make of that exchange at PMQs? Was that Boris Johnson coming out fighting and showing that he cares about the issues that the public cares about, or was that him looking rattled? He's normally quite relaxed in those situations. Was the fact he got so angry and pointy showing that there's a real issue he's worried about here? I mean, I think that it was probably the best kind of performance he could have done, given just how egregious and how much the press is sort of turning on him. And I think that question of, is this going to have an impact on the public? It's very difficult to say, because Boris Johnson is Teflon. And if the public does care, it won't be because this is necessarily worse than anything that he's already done, but it will be because the public are being encouraged or allowed to care by the press. So, we're seeing some kind of dissent amongst sections of the right-wing press who probably feel that a genuine threat, like Corbinism or something, is far away enough that they can go back to sort of this power play of picking their guy in the White House, in Turning Street. But I also think that that Teflon ability, to kind of persevere and retain his popularity throughout crisis after crisis is part of that cult of personality that Johnson has cultivated, where he was basically able to sort of caricature himself as old money, eat an educated figure, harking back to like the colonial era. And it allows him to be unaccountable because it allows him to be egregious in plain sight. And that was obviously partly cultivated by the media. So there's a kind of contradiction that's emerging between that and the media going after him now. But this is, I think, and to kind of like come back out of this, to look at this as such a kind of explicit toughiness. Like I think that the thing that is so, the thing that is grabbing the headlines is, Carrie Simmons referring to John Lewis as if it's like kind of low class tat or whatever. And the key, what is key to, what this is telling me is that, this is the effective face of right wing governance right now. In this book that I recently co-authored with a bunch of amazing scholars, Empire's Endgame, we talk about this uncanny rise of the buffoonish leader as the new face of sort of right wing governance. And we see it in Boris's like disheveled hair, his sort of so-called gaffes, his brazenness with which he conducts himself and his complete disinterest in respectability. We saw similarly in Donald Trump, we see similarly in Modi, in Duterte, this kind of very clownish model of right wing authoritarianism essentially, that's very different to the conservatism of Theresa May and David Cameron as destructive as those forms of conservatism were. And that buffoonish, that cultivation of buffoonishness, it's effective because it kind of captures or signals this dissatisfaction with politics as usual with slick politics where people feel like they're kind of being conned or lied to or disrespected, but it allows him to kind of present, which is almost what Kirstama represents. It allows him to kind of present himself as this outsider to the political and economic upper class, despite the fact that he's been like marinated in and reared by that very upper class, but by cultivating that buffoonishness, that disruptiveness, it creates this like strange affinity with the public where there is no actual affinity. And that when you read these kind of egregious examples of that caricature that he's cultivated for himself, I think that it doesn't stick as much because of this broader context of the grounds on which he was able to cultivate popularity. And it sort of not only does that recklessness, I think embody our desire to kind of just throw a brick into the wall of the establishment as we perceive it. But I think people accept that level of recklessness because it feels more authentic than the kind of politics that Kirstama represents. And also I'm kind of like psychic level, psychological level that speaks to our desire to sort of destroy or disrupt this incredibly dysfunctional system. But, you know, so what is interesting here and what we might ask is, you know, how come these moments where, as I said, you know, Carrie Simmons is talking about John Lewis as if it's like cheap tat, it both does and doesn't cut through. So it makes people flinch, but it doesn't make them revolt. It, you know, it doesn't make them regret voting for him. Do they feel that, you know, well, at least I'm getting what I voted for, at least it was explicit, at least it was authentic. But what I don't understand, and this is why I'm not sure if this is going to read with the public, if this is going to kind of have an effect on public opinion, is that if, you know, the recklessness and lack of discipline that on one level has its appeal, especially in the context of Brexit and, you know, that whole election where, you know, it felt like he was defending a brick being thrown into the establishment. But how that has managed to maintain its appeal at the time of a pandemic when in which a desire to go back to like a predictable and stable normal is at least temporarily heightened and preferred. And that's where I feel like this might not cut through. Because if it has withstood and survived that, then I think it can survive this, but not to kind of drag on too much. But I think that another reason why he's going to survive this is because that buffoonishness has this incredible power. It generates this expectation of neglect, of chaos, of unaccountability. You know, you can't expect accountability or rationality from a buffoon, from someone that is so, who has lowered those expectations so deeply. And in lowering those expectations, Johnson has been able to have this space to create an entirely avoidable situation where, you know, we have the highest number of deaths in Europe where so many people's lives have been touched negatively, by his recklessness. But for that situation to be perceived as unavoidable. So, you know, like it's almost like, how can we expect something better from someone who is not capable? How can we expect something other than pretentiousness, toughness from someone who mobilized that very pretentious toughness to get elected? And maybe those aren't good things, but at least we're not being fooled or taken for a ride. And it kind of reminded me a lot of, you know, when we were on the doorstep and when we would talk about, you know, the threat that the Tories represents the NHS and how Corbyn has this program, much of which was highly achievable. It wasn't that radical at all. It was a very standard social democratic manifesto. But what we were told was, we just don't believe that that's what's going to happen. And I always thought to myself, well, surely if someone gave me two options, one option is that someone is definitely going to punch me in the face. The other option is that they might give me a piece of cake or they might just not do anything. I'd pick the cake, the possibility of cake, rather than the certainty of being punched in the face. And yet so many people in the election from chatting on the doorstep where people seem very aware of the threat that the Tories represented to the NHS, two things that they hold dear, they picked the punch in the face. So should I, you know, this is why I think the standard that he set and the model of that buffoonish authority has, in a sense, made him resilient to these kinds of scandals. I don't know if that makes sense. I think there's a lot to that, Dahlia. I mean, you're talking about cake. I mean, Boris Johnson does promise people cake as well as punching them in the face. Let's go to a few comments. A big 50-pound super chat. Thank you very much from the Black Angel. I'm Shlendra Singh with a fiver. There is something profoundly elegant about this moment in British post-imperial history, a serving PM selling his soul for tawdry soft furnishings. I like that great comment. Folk music, I like tweets on the hashtag Tiskey Sour. Obviously, Johnson isn't answering reasonable questions, but what the hell is the speaker's role in this? Shouldn't he intervene to insist the questions be answered? It's a very good question. Sometimes he does do that. Sometimes he says it in the middle of those those exchanges. Look, this is Prime Minister's questions. You should be answering the question not going on a big long attack at the Labour Party. But maybe he was not feeling so proactive today. Mitt Sturford with a fiver. Johnson's comments about bodies piling up is far more egregious than this flat. Thanks, Navarra, for everything you do downstream this week was great, too. I think there's a lot to that comment. I think probably it's going to be more visceral for people, the comment about bodies piling up. I think the real damaging thing for Boris Johnson is his handling of the COVID pandemic. For me, that's the one thing that is most visceral that people in the public feel strongly about for very good reason, probably more so than this flat. For me, the flat seems more like an unforced error. It makes you question his judgment. Why would you need to do this when you could have just accepted the 30 grand, had slightly less plush furnishings, and not put the integrity of the Prime Minister's office in doubt? It just seems unforced to me. Anyway, we've been discussing whether or not this is going to cause serious damage to Boris Johnson. Too early to say. One thing we can be certain about is that it's causing a bit of a distraction that Boris's ministers are not particularly appreciating. Matt Hancock today at a Downing Street press conference wanted to lead with the news that Britain has ordered 60 million extra Pfizer jabs for this autumn, but he found himself very frustrated when all he was asked about was Boris Johnson's flat. If a serving government minister is found to have broken the rules on party funding or even law, should they resign? Well, thanks very much. I know that the Prime Minister answered lots of questions about this in the House of Commons earlier. And given that this is a coronavirus press conference, you won't be surprised that I'm not going to add to the answers the Prime Minister's already given to very extensive questioning. Thanks. Next question is Christian Gurramathie. Last year, Amanda Milling threatened to abolish the Electoral Commission if it didn't do the job that ministers wanted to do. As it now investigates the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party, is it doing so with that threat still hanging over it? So I'll answer the first question and then ask JV2 to answer the second question. And I think we'll give the third one a miss. As a former culture secretary, you championed the right of the free press and the fourth estate to ask difficult questions. Yet this evening you haven't engaged with those questions from Chris or from Laura around Tory sleaze. Now, what's the point of us being able to ask difficult questions if you're not going to engage with them? Thanks. Well, on the last one, the point of the press conference is the incredibly important progress that we're making about coronavirus, which is without doubt the most important thing facing the country. And if you've listened to the answers, I'm sure you have, from Dr. Kanani and Professor Van Tham, you'll have had one of the most illuminating descriptions of where we're up to scientifically and operationally and clinically that is available. And I'm very, very grateful to the incredible capability of the people who support me as a minister. And as I say, it is important that there are questions and there were endless questions in the House of Commons earlier on some of the issues that you raised and you'll have seen the appointment of Lord Geit earlier. But you've also got to concentrate on the big things that really matter. So Matt Hancock there, just like Boris Johnson at Prime Minister's Questions, refusing to engage directly with the question. To be honest, I can also see why because anyone who has attempted to directly justify Boris Johnson's behavior when it comes to this flat has come out looking, I mean, like an absolute mug. I mean, really bad. There's no way you could defend this about looking terrible. I've got three examples for you of people who tried. The first one is from a friend of Carrie Simons who was speaking to the Daily Mail. So this friend said, the makeover is appropriate for a building of such huge importance. Carrie has exquisite taste. It is classic, stunning, stylish and chic. She should be congratulated, not criticized. Now, no one gets to go in the flat other than the Prime Minister and his partner. So this idea that we're supposed to be really appreciative that they've spent a lot of money from a businessman and potentially, put the integrity of the Prime Minister's office in question, I mean, it kind of already was, wasn't it? That we're supposed to be appreciative of because the sofa looked great. I mean, I don't know what planet this person lives on. In terms of what planets people live on, the next one's even worse actually. The next is Sarah Vine. She is a Daily Mail columnist and wife of Michael Gove. Here she is speaking to Radio 4 this morning. The thing about the whole number 10 refurbishment thing is that the Prime Minister can't be expected to live in a skip. He has to live at a certain, you know, to a certain standard. And the problem with all of these political things like this is that no one is ever prepared to bite the bullet. No one is ever prepared to say, look, you know, this building does need to be maintained. There do need to be decent furnishings. We do need to have a fund that pays for it. Let's just do it. He can't live in a skip. He got 30 grand to do up a flat that was already pretty nice. It was already lived in by a Prime Minister. They spent 800 quid on each roll of wallpaper. So the idea that the alternative would be a skip is a bit much. That's also the kind of, it's the kind of comment from an outrider that you'd think, oh, they have nothing to do with the government. So, you know, this is just someone chatting share. You shouldn't really associate that with the people they're talking about, the actions they're justifying. She is married to Michael Gove. So I mean, this is someone with close connections to the story at hand here. I mean, also that comment about the skip has to be taken in conjunction with Carrie Simon's comment to Tatler of all magazines that the flat was a John Lewis nightmare, which many people have taken offense at. My final example of someone making a fool of themselves defending this sorry state of affairs is Nadine Doris, who's a health minister and she doesn't understand how corruption works. So quite tweeting question from Andrew Pierce who's a Daily Mail journalist about the money that went on the flat. Nadine Doris says, you can legitimately ask was taxpayers money used beyond that? It's absolutely none of your business. And the answer of course is no. So when it comes to how the prime minister paid for the flat, unless it was taxpayers money, it's nobody's business. Now, I don't know if she's playing stupid or if she just is, because the point of corruption where this is something that we're concerned about is not that it's necessarily gonna be taxpayers money on the line, although obviously, when it comes to cash for favors, it often seemed to be. But it's more that you can buy access to the government and then ultimately you get contracts, right? So taxpayers money will be going out thanks to this and actually way more than the cost of refurbishment because you give 58,000 pounds for refurbishment. Who knows how many billions of pounds you might get to produce masks that don't particularly work. Anyway, this is a government minister and this is I suppose the status of their arguments when it comes to this. Finally, let's quickly go through the issue of what is going to happen next. Dahlia has talked a lot about whether or not there will be consequences here in terms of public opinion. I think that's still up in the air. It's kind of too early to say really, and when it comes to what the formal investigations will imply. So the first is the one by the Electoral Commission. So I think there are a number of investigations. The first is the Electoral Commission. This is a genuinely independent body. So it's not particularly toothless and they decide if a law has been broken. We can look at their statement from today. We have been in contact with the conservative partants late March and have conducted an assessment of the information they have provided us. We are now satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that an offense or offenses may have occurred. We will therefore continue this work as a formal investigation to establish whether this is the case. The investigation will determine whether any transactions relating to the works on 11 Downing Street fall within the regime regulated by the commission and whether such funding was reported as required. So you can see that the Electoral Commission, that investigation should have some teeth there questioning whether the law was broken, but that's an investigation into the conservative party, not the prime minister per se. The maximum sanction they can impose is a 20,000 pound fine. They don't get to decide if a prime minister should resign. The other type of investigation is into whether or not Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code. This isn't about the law. This is about a code that ministers are supposed to follow. If they break it, they're supposed to resign. So this could have more bite. The problem here is we expect that to be run by an independent advisor or a so-called independent advisor on ministerial standards who just so happened to be employed today by Boris Johnson. Downing Street has also made it clear that even if this person they employed today to run the investigation finds Boris Johnson guilty, Boris Johnson will retain the right to overall him, which led to this quite entertaining headline in the mirror today. Boris Johnson will decide himself if he broke rules over flat refurbishments. There will also be one more investigation as to whether or not he broke MP codes. So did he live up to the standards of an MP? That has an independent investigator who again, they could genuinely be independent. I don't think they're employed by Boris Johnson. It's called Catherine Stone and the parliamentary standards commissioner. But for that to have any serious consequences that need to be a vote among MPs. And I don't think Tory MPs are about to vote that Boris Johnson should resign. So these investigations could be significant in terms of the facts they bring to light, but it is ultimately gonna be the public that decide on this one. Quite frankly, I think that's correct. I don't think we should have bureaucrats that can make prime ministers resign. I think they're democratically elected. They should put into light the situation that happened and then the public can decide. Obviously, if it's a law, that's different, but if it's codes to me, that kind of makes sense. So we will see. Let's go straight on to our next story because we have a guest waiting. And this section is, I mean, there's so much meaty content in here, but we will be coming back to this story very soon. Just a couple of comments before we move on. Jonathan Pye does waving fluster and righteous anger far better, though Boris is inadvertently amusing in that mode, yeah, sadly. Adam Kuzliki with a fiver. The reason the flat is so key is that it's the first time finally that something can be directly pinned on Johnson rather than just a minister. I do think that is important. And it does raise questions about his judgment and Simon Garrett with a tenet. Just a quick shout out for unite members and workers at the Kraft Dau Egbert's factory in Bambry who will be protesting on Saturday against a callous fire and rehire policy. Very important comment there, obviously fire and rehire practices. I quite hadn't realized the extent of the freedom that bosses have to do this until we spoke to engineers with British gas, a complete disgrace when it comes to the law in Britain, when it comes to the relationship between bosses and workers. If you haven't already do like the stream, we're gonna go on to our next story. Arlene Foster. Today announced she will be resigning as leader of the DUP as well as stepping down from her role as First Minister of Northern Ireland. Her resignation comes after revolt in her party with a majority of her colleagues in Stormont and MPs in Westminster signing a letter calling for her to stand down. Now this was the end of her statement released this afternoon announcing her resignation. For almost five and a half years I have been incredibly humbled to have had the opportunity to lead the Democratic Unionist Party. I have sought to lead the party and Northern Ireland away from division and towards a better path. There are people in Northern Ireland with a British identity, others are Irish, others are Northern Irish, others are a mixture of all three and some are new and emerging. We must all learn to be generous to each other, to live together and to share this wonderful country. The future of unionism and Northern Ireland will not be found in division. It will only be found in sharing this place we are all privileged to call home. That was the statement released to Arlene Foster's social media accounts this afternoon. Now to discuss why Arlene Foster has resigned and its significance for Northern Ireland I'm joined by Amanda Ferguson, a writer and broadcaster based in Belfast. Thanks so much for coming back on the show and for waiting for us to get through all the disgraces that are going on in Westminster right now. To begin with I suppose the basic question why has Arlene Foster resigned right now? Why was there this revolt within her party? Well it's been bubbling for quite a while and we know that there have been moves to sort of disrupt her leadership over the last year so I'm prior to that. But last week in the Assembly the Austro-Unionist party brought a motion on banning the so-called gay conversion therapy. Now the majority of DUP MLAs voted against that but Arlene Foster and four others abstained. Now they didn't vote in support of it, they abstained and that seemed to cause some of the more evangelical elements within the party membership to be upset about it. Now we know that there were a few letters sort of rolling around the place. The local media reported that constituency associations have been in touch to say that they were upset with Arlene's handling of the Brexit protocol of perceived as being soft on women's rights which is pretty laughable considering what we know about how Northern Ireland women are traded as part of the UK but that's for another time. So that came out in the press and then whenever Arlene Foster was on a youth visit she was at a visit to youth centre with the education minister. She was asked about do you have the backing of your party and she kind of dismissed it as I've got a job to do these stories pop up from time to time. Now it then emerged later in the evening that a majority of the MLAs, Albert Stormont, had signed a document that a document had been distributed to all the MLAs and to the MPs essentially saying that they indicated their support for a leadership contest. They didn't have confidence in Arlene Foster anymore. So her position became untenable. Like as soon as sort of 75% of your MLAs are saying that they don't want you anymore, it wasn't gonna be long before she was resigning because it just wouldn't have been sort of tenable. It wouldn't have been realistic for her to enter into a leadership contest that she was never going to win. So she took the decision to announce her departure from politics. She's gonna be leaving the role of DUP leader and first minister. So the DUP leader element will be on the 28th of May. The first minister put by the end of June. So it's now up to the party structures to find her replacement or replacements. That's another thing that might be happening instead of one person taking on both roles. It may be split across two politicians. And you've mentioned I suppose a few issues there in terms of this divide on the ban on conversion therapy which I wanna go on to in a moment in terms of what side is the hard line side in the DUP? First of all, I wanna just I suppose spend a little time on Brexit. And most of the coverage in the rest of the UK seems to be suggesting that Arlene Foster's downfall is mainly due to how she played her hand when it came to Brexit. So obviously the DUP were the people who were most responsible for Theresa May's deal falling. Theresa May's deal actually probably would have kept the integrity of the union to a much greater degree than Boris Johnson's deal. So the DUP basically have to take some responsibility to put the Northern Ireland protocol that's now hated by unionists. Is Brexit the big picture here really? Is it her behavior over Brexit which meant that her leadership became untenable? I think that we know that the DUP were king makers at Westminster for a while and they've been accused of squandering the influence that they had of trying to go for a hard Brexit and a backfiring on them. We know that the fingerprints of quite a few senior DUP politicians are all over that. They reject the idea that Brexit is the problem. They just say it's the protocol that is the problem. And I think that what we've seen is support ebbing away among grassroots. Perhaps the more hard line elements would be drawn to Jim Alastair's traditional unionist voice and perhaps the more moderate elements of support would be maybe going away to the Alliance Party or maybe to the Elsevier Unionist Party. It's hard to tell but certainly it's a contributing factor. It's been a very turbulent tenure. She's been in post for five and a half years. For three of those years there was no devolved government at all. We know that the storm was restored in January of 2020 and then by March everybody was in lockdown and the focus was on COVID and then there's the disruptive relationship between the DUP and Sinn Féin at the top of government. But certainly I would also add in that I think that there is more than a hint of misogynism around all of this. Considering that the two previous leaders of the Democratic Unionist Party would have been involved in pretty controversial episodes in their time. They seem to have lasted a lot longer than perhaps Arlene has and it was interesting to note in her statement today that she mentioned misogyny. She mentioned the abuse that women in public places face including politicians, including pretty much anybody with an opinion, journalists, whoever else. So there's a combination of factors that have fit into this but one of the problems is going to be that all of the issues that there are around the Brexit protocol, around perceptions that perhaps she's not been tough enough with Westminster or over their interventions on abortion rights, the LGBT rights element of all this not being firm enough or tough enough on Sinn Féin. They're not really in the control of the DUP leader to sort of fix those things and all of the grievances that have been there previously will they just be waiting for whoever takes over from her? I mean, are the DUP in a kind of crisis that they're going to struggle to get out of? I know there are elections to storm on next year. Is it possible that Sinn Féin become the largest party and so the next First Minister, well, not the next one because the next First Minister will be whoever replaces Marlene Foster as leader, but the First Minister after the next elections will be from Sinn Féin. Is that a possibility and what would be the implications there for Northern Irish politics? That is indeed a possibility. We know that a lot of people don't realise this but the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister are, it's a joint office. One can't exist without the other. That's why the late Martin McGinnis was able to sort of collapse government and that put Marlene out of her job at the time. But the Deputy element is the thing that is psychological within the politics of here. So, the DUP often fight elections on, you know, vote for us or it'll be a Sinn Féin First Minister. Now Northern Irish demographics are changing the political landscape is changing. People are moving perhaps a little bit more. So, well, some people are moving a little bit more into the middle ground. It seems as if we're sort of dividing up into threes, a third of Unionists, a third of Republicans and a third of others. Now those others do include Unionist and Republicans as well but there are also people that could be swayed either way. So, it's a difficult time and I just don't think there's been any preparation within Unionist leadership to tell people that this isn't the Northern Ireland of 100 years ago. You know, this is the centenary of Northern Ireland this year. This isn't the Northern Ireland of 50 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, it's 2021 and she's had to struggle within her party. There being elements within her party who are very socially conservative and have particular views on women's rights and LGBT rights and then there's another perhaps element that are maybe a little bit younger, a bit more progressive. But, you know, you can't kind of ride two horses. You either have to be one or the other and if you're not concrete on what you're offering then you're gonna lose support along the way. So, you know, we're facing into the prospect possibly of an early election, you know, it may not last until next year. It really depends what happens but certainly that is a definite prospect and, you know, even if you hear the Sinn Fein, Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill refer to herself as Joint First Minister. Now, that's not the official title but it is the outworkings of the position that's there but I think psychologically for Unionism it will be difficult for them to not have the First Minister role, to not be the biggest party. You know, that would certainly be, you know, something new and something that they haven't been prepared for really. There's, it really is a sense that all of the sort of changes that are taking place in our society and, you know, being realistic that the leadership, some within the leadership of Unionism just haven't really grasped that, that it's not a dominant sort of, it's not a dominant, one dominant community over the other anymore. And I think that that is tough for some people to deal with. Really interesting stuff. Amanda Ferguson, thank you so much for coming back on the show Super Insightful as ever. And thank you all for your super chats so far. As I keep your comments coming, I'm including by tweeting on the hashtag TiskeySour. Now, if you are enjoying tonight's show, we do it three times a week. So do make sure to hit subscribe to get more Navara media content. We're gonna go straight onto our next story. The disgraced Prince Andrew is back in the news this week and he's back in the news for teaming up with a disgraced banker who like Andrew is accused of sexual abuse. Yes, you could not make this story up. It was in the times this week. Now, let's go through it. They report that last summer, Prince Andrew went into business with former Coots banker, Harry Keoh. Now, Coots is a bank used by the very rich, including the royal family. And Keoh has apparently worked as Prince Andrew's private banker for over 20 years. However, this is the important background, Keoh left Coots in 2018 amid claims of sexual harassment from numerous people. Very serious claims. Let's go to the description in the times of the issue. They write, at Coots, he was accused of touching a woman's groin while demonstrating the site of an injury. His behavior was said to be so toxic that some female staff refused to work with him. The private bank carried out an investigation in 2015 and the chief executive recommended he leave according to the Wall Street Journal. It was decided that he should stay but he was disciplined and eventually resigned in March 2018. Now we should know a friend of Keoh told the Wall Street Journal that Keoh denies the allegations though he's unable to speak about the matter after signing a non-disclosure agreement with Coots. Now, this is phenomenal, isn't it? Prince Andrew is someone who is currently, he's trying to launder his reputation. We saw him on the BBC a couple of weeks ago. We talked about it on the show talking about the death of his father. He's saying, I should be able to come back into public life because whilst I hung around with a pedophile, a convicted pedophile, whilst I hung around with him after he was convicted and whilst I am subject to allegations about sexual abuse of an underage girl, I should be allowed back into public life because I don't know what his explanation is. He still thinks that should be the case. While he is trying to reestablish his reputation, he goes and starts a firm, a business with someone else who has had to leave their job because of very, very widespread credible allegations of sexual abuse. What is this guy thinking? It's, as I say, you could not make this stuff up. The article has some defences of all of it. None of them are very good, but let's go through them. So on the association with Keo, the Times explain that the source or a source close to the Duke said the allegations against Keo don't appear to have been subject to any investigation by law enforcement or independent third parties and nor have they been tested by due process in a court of law. So it's all fine. None of this was investigated by the police. It was only investigated by his workplace where multiple people complained about sexual harassment and he ended up having to leave. It's also similar to Andrew's defense, although one of the reasons he hasn't been questioned by law enforcement is because he's refusing to go over to America, which says a lot about his integrity. Let's look at what the company does, I mean, not quite as shocking as both of their histories when it comes to sexual abuse, but still unsavory, let's say. The company, what it was planning to do was to be a vehicle to allow Prince Andrew to secretly invest his money. Ultimately, it was supposed to serve as a trust fund for his daughters. Some of the facts about this company as well as that he was teaming up with an alleged sexual harasser. So first of all, what it would be called, this is funny. So first we're told the new venture is named Lynn Sells after the 18th century battle against the French in which the British were commanded by the Duke of York. Now I love this because, I mean, it tells you so much about Prince Andrew's self-perception and the reality. His self-perception is he is someone who's leading troops into battle. He is a really significant guy who's sacrificing for his country and leading men when in reality, what he's doing is setting up a very secretive company with a fellow alleged sexual harasser to what he looks like, basically hide his money. Now I'm saying hide his money, let's go on to the nature of this company, the structure of this company because we are told it was set up as an unlimited company and this means that it is not required to file accounts with company's house or report its profits or income. That's in fact why people set up these unlimited companies because they want to be shrouded in secrecy. The flip side, why you might say, why doesn't everyone set up an unlimited company? No one wants to be transparent. The reason is there are some downsides which is that in that limited company which is a limited liability company, if you get into lots of debt, that debt doesn't accrue to you personally. If you're a director, it accrues to the company. So the company goes bankrupt, that doesn't mean you necessarily will. In an unlimited company, if the company goes bankrupt, you go bankrupt. There's no limited liability, but the upside is that you get to keep it all secret. For some more details on what this means and what an unlimited company means, we can go to Ella Leonard who is a corporate expert at the law firm, Vlad Gay, and she told The Times. As the name suggests, the shareholders of an unlimited company are liable if it cannot pay its debts should it have to be wound up. The main benefits of an unlimited company are reduced disclosure obligations. Unlimited companies are usually exempt from delivering annual accounts to company's house and filing notifications that new shares have been issued as well as having some greater flexibility in returning invested cash to shareholders. It is fair to say that we do not come across unlimited companies that often, precisely because of the shareholder liability point. And so there must be a very specific reason for using one. It's worth noting David Cameron, currently embroiled in the Green Seal scandal, also controls one of these secretive companies as does Andrew Mills, who is a former government advisor who last year brokered a PPE deal with the government worth 250 million pounds. Who are the people that govern us? This is so depressing. Darlia, I need your comments to do this. I want to bring you in both on, I mean, Prince Andrew is setting up a company with someone who is also, you know, subject to serious, serious allegations of sexual abuse. And then, I mean, setting up a company which seems to purely be to keep his investments, I mean, secret. I mean, what can you say about this? Yeah, I mean, the question is, why do we allow these things? But we don't have that much of a choice, do we? I mean, the whole point of being a royal is that you literally answer to no one. And nobody encapsulates that better than Prince Andrew. And I actually looked this up. So the monarch, so in this case, the queen can't actually ever be arrested or prosecuted for anything because of sovereign immunity. And no other member of the royal family can be arrested if they are in her presence or within the surroundings of a royal palace. In 2002, Princess Anne was fined 500 pounds and had to pay compensation to a family when her dog attacked a child. And that's the first member of the royal family to ever plead guilty to a criminal offense. Now, I know when it comes to this unlimited company, we're not dealing with a criminal offense. It's terrible, but it's legal. But it kind of gives you an understanding of how this class operates, right? Like, it's essentially a public law. And so, you know, why would he not engage in beneficial and lucrative behavior and make decisions that are bad form? You know, all he risks is embarrassment. And I think Andrew has proved himself immune to that, immune to feeling embarrassed or ashamed. So, you know, when we create a system of people who are by almost by definition unaccountable, then we can't really act surprised when they behave in a messy way. But I think for me, you know, and trying to follow the money of rich people is or understand why they do, like what kind of company is for what and all of that. It's like it makes me feel, it gives me a stomach ulcer because it's deliberately difficult to understand, right? But what stood out for me here was, you know, the fact that once again, we see this like embeddedness of shadow finance, of shadow banking in the operation of our economic and political systems. You know, the whole point of this company that he set her up is to be able to move money around, to invest without any kind of public scrutiny, without any scrutiny by regulatory bodies. And that fits in, that's an incredibly important part of our economy. Like that is an integral part of our economy. And it also fits into the role that Britain plays in the world. Like a lot of the, you know, this facilitating of offshoring, of concealment, of secrecy, of, you know, of all of these kind of things that have come to define actually the majority of banking activity, you know, they have their legacies in empire. A lot of the territories that are still under British control, places like the British Virgin Islands, are, you know, offshore tax havens. And a lot of global financial markets operate in that unregulated space which relies on secrecy, informality, untraceability. So that is the norm. It's not the exception. And I think, you know, can we even call it corruption when that is actually the backbone of how our economic system is set up? When you look at the concept of an unlimited company, the only person who's gonna set up an unlimited company is someone who's rich enough to be liable in the case of, you know, bankruptcy. So it is literally a mechanism that is exclusively for only the very, very, very rich to be, to evade any kind of public scrutiny or transparency. And so I think we actually miss a trick when we talk about this. And I actually, you know, think the same thing about how we talk about Tory, democracy and, you know, even calling it corruption. I think that you can't call something corruption when it is the embedded logic of the state and the economic system. So I think we miss a trick actually when we act as if Andrew in this particular case is doing something particularly egregious because actually this kind of behavior represents the majority of financial activity. So the question isn't, why do we let it happen in the case of Andrew? The question is, why do we let it happen at all in my view? I mean, one thing Prince Andrew is, I mean, I take your point, it might not be particularly exceptionally egregious, but I think he is exceptionally incompetent. So I use the past tense in some of that, the first part of that segment because it turns out that after taking the reputational hit of setting up a company with an alleged sexual harasser, this firm named after a Duke of York, a previous Duke of York, or a battle that a previous Duke of York fought in, it has never in fact channeled any of Prince Andrew's investments. This was a story in the telegraph which suggests that after making this very, very secretive company with this very, very dodgy guy, Prince Andrew was told this would be inappropriate and so it has never made any investment. So he's taken this hit and I mean, it's flopped. So the telegraph, right, the Duke was advised that while such ventures are fairly standard for ultra high network of individuals, they were not appropriate for a member of the royal family as such, the company was abandoned and has never been used. I mean, I suppose that this is a guy who thought that a good defense was that he was eating at Pizza Express when he was asked about a picture of him with an underage girl who had accused him of sexual abuse. So, the fact that he starts a company without having for, oh, maybe look a bit dodgy if I do this and then having to shut it down before it does anything is not particularly surprising. I do want to return to one thing in this tires piece as well because it is worth pointing out this isn't the only project Andrew has had to abandon. Now, giving background to another man who was involved in the Duke's unlimited company, the Times wrote, Lynn Sells, sole director is Dominic Hampshire, the secretary of the Quad Centenary Club, which was set up to raise funds for the Royal Blackheath Golf Club in London and which counts the Duke as its chairman. Hampshire, who describes himself as a golf professional on Compass House filings was also involved in the Duke of York Young Champions Trophy, a golf tournament for under 18s which was axed after the Epstein scandal. So, the guy who ran Prince Andrew's secretive firm, so he was the director, Prince Andrew was a controller alongside this guy from Coots Bank. He was told he had to close it down because it looked bad for the Royals. This same guy also ran a Young Champions Trophy which had to be shut down after Andrew was found to have closed associations with a pedophile. Why would you keep entering into projects with this guy? The first one you have to shut down because he's been hanging out of a pedo and this is a competition for young people. The second time you agreed to be the director of this limited company, unlimited company, sorry, which is gonna be investing his money for his kids which then has to be shut down because Prince Andrew was such an idiot. He didn't ask anyone who would tell him that actually, if you're in this, you know, quite delicate constitutional arrangement where the Royals are trying to retain their legitimacy, you probably shouldn't set up secretive companies, you know, as if you're just any old international financier who wasn't paid for by the taxpayer. Darlie, I want your final comment on this. And I mean, why does anyone associate with this man? I mean, I think it just comes back to, he doesn't feel shame, he doesn't feel embarrassment. In fact, I'm sure that Prince Andrew feels deeply victimized by this entire, by everything that has happened over the past several years. He's thinking, I'm just doing what everyone else does, you know, everyone else in my class. And I both mean that in terms of, you know, this kind of shadow financing stuff. I also mean it in the harassment of underage women, like, you know, and thinking, why am I the one who's getting the flack for this, you know? So I think that it's a combination of being, you know, shielded from consequence by virtue of his position and that kind of creating delusion and creating his own sense of his own, you know, which we can see in the naming of his company. But it's also a sense of, I am sure that he has created this massive victim narrative for himself and that's what helps him sleep at night. I mean, I think that's a very good analysis of his psyche actually. I think you've got it there. I would say he should hire you as a therapist, but you wouldn't want to do that job. Let's go to some comments. Joshua Youngerman with a $5 donation. Someone should ask Prince Andrew whether he enjoyed the dough balls at Pizza Express. They should. Five pounds from Henry VIII, fake, thank you. And they still support Andrew, more proof of why the royals need to go. Absolutely. Although I don't know what that, can they excommunicate someone from the family? I don't know. I suppose they must have agreed to let him go on BBC the day after Prince Philip died. So they are presumably somewhat implicated in his attempt to launder his own reputation. And before we go on to our final story, thank you so much for the super chats tonight. And thank you for anyone who is a regular donor to navaramedia.com, you are what keeps the organization ticking over. We really do appreciate it if you haven't already do go to navaramedia.com forward slash support. And as you know, we ideally ask the equivalent of one hour's wage a month so we can keep growing. Let's go to our final story of the evening. Joe Rogan is the world's most successful podcaster, which you might think should mean he'd be careful about what he says about something as important as vaccines in the middle of a pandemic. Unfortunately, he's not. And this week, Rogan has been telling the younger members of his audience not to bother getting a COVID jab. Let's take a look. And people say, do you think it's safe to get vaccinated? I've said, yeah, I think for the most part it's safe to get vaccinated. I do, I do. But if you're like 21 years old and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I go, no. Are you healthy? Are you a healthy person? Like, look, don't do anything stupid, but you should take care of yourself. If you're a healthy person and you're exercising all the time and you're young and you're eating well, like, I don't think you need to worry about this. Now, this is a really, really bad argument. And it's a really bad argument for a simple reason, which is that getting vaccinated isn't just about you. You know, getting vaccinated doesn't just protect the person who gets vaccinated. It also protects everyone around you because as we know, getting vaccinated reduces transmission. There are some people who can't get vaccinated. Even if you personally are at a great risk from COVID-19, then it's the right thing to do to get vaccinated because that will protect people who can't get vaccinated, right? And it means that we can all go back to normal because we get herd immunity and we won't have the virus moving around anymore. And I mean, he just didn't think of that. I mean, you have so much responsibility if you're hosting one of the world's most successful podcasts and he just, I mean, he just didn't think of it, didn't mention it. Didn't mention it to his audience. Let's look at a bit more of that discussion. That was quite a short clip. And it's interesting where this conversation goes. So this is what happened next. But there's a lot of jobs that will tell you you need to have this. Well, that's what's starting to happen now. People are worried about them doing it for their children. And we talked about this earlier. There's that you might have to have your children vaccinated. And, you know, I can tell you as someone who's both my children got the virus, it was nothing. I hate to say that. If someone's children died from this, I'm very sorry that that happened. I'm not in any way diminishing that. But I'm saying the personal experience that my children had with COVID was nothing. One of the kids had a headache. The other one didn't feel good for a couple of days. Like, I mean, not feel good like, no big deal, no coughing, no achy, no like an agony, there was none of that. It was very mild. It was akin to them getting a cold. Again, this is a conversation that is fair enough to have in a pub. You know, it's a conversation, not everyone has to be an expert on COVID-19. You know, and everything he's saying there is reasonable. He's saying kids, yes, they are not at a big risk from COVID-19. Absolutely not. Which is why when we discuss vaccinating kids, we're not talking about their safety. We're talking about the safety of society as a whole. It's also important to mention it. I don't necessarily think we should vaccinate kids. I don't know which way we should do this. I think there will be serious discussions among scientists at this point. Maybe we'll get herd immunity anyway, so we don't really need to. If we get herd immunity at 80% of the population, then we might not have to vaccinate under 16s. There's a serious discussion to be had there. But the framing of that conversation by Joe Rogan is just misleading his audience because he is continuing with this frame, which is to say that the only reason you might get vaccinated is to protect yourself. There's no other possible logic, which is just a misrepresentation of the fact. And it's also an incredibly dangerous misrepresentation of the fact because he has lots of young people who watch that show and we need those young people to get vaccinated because that helps us get herd immunity. It means we can go back to normal. It means that people who the vaccine wasn't very effective on will be safe because we as a society don't have much COVID moving around. And even though he's got millions and millions of listeners and this stuff isn't, he doesn't have to understand the complexities of COVID-19. This is basic, basic stuff. If you were any kind of journalist, you have a responsibility to learn this basic, basic stuff, especially if you host the world's most successful podcast. I mean, it's just really stupid and it's incredibly, incredibly irresponsible. Let's look at one final clip of this discussion. This is where it gets, I mean, just quite frankly ridiculous. Yeah, and you can have this thing where it's like you were saying this virtue signaling and this kind of theatrical display of I get the vaccine, what a good person I am, I care about everyone. But you're like, look, my daughter's a lot younger than your kids, but I'm like, yeah, I'm not injecting my daughter with something to fucking virtue signal. I'm not doing that. If there's something that she's of no risk, statistically has no risk from. I'm sorry, I'm not taking any experiment on her in that. And that's my attitude toward it. But it's amazing that that's controversial. That even saying that I'm not going to inject my child with the vaccine is controversial. It's crazy because again, we are not talking about even the flu that we just found out killed 22,000 people last year. We're not talking about that. We're talking about something that is not statistically dangerous for children. But yet people still want you to get your child vaccinated, which is crazy to me. Like you should be vaccinated if you are vulnerable. You should be vaccinated if you are vulnerable. Again, completely. I mean, I'm certainly like a broken record now, but it's an important point. Getting vaccinated isn't just for you. It's for society. It's for people more vulnerable than yourselves. I mean, the thing that really struck out here was this use of the term virtue signaling. Now I'm not someone actually who says, oh, virtue signaling is a meaningless term. I think people do virtue signal. And I think there are some big examples of virtue signaling, especially from big corporations. So for example, you might see Nike tweet, hashtag Black Lives Matter. That's virtue signaling because there are serious significant things that Nike could do to influence policy and to materially improve the condition of black and brown people in the world. For example, they could pay decent wages in all of their factories around the world. That would be something which would have a material impact, but it would cost them, right? So instead what they decide to do to prove they're one of the good guys is they tweet a statement which doesn't cost them anything which has no consequence, but just signals they are virtuous. That's virtue signaling. Now vaccinating your kids. And again, it's not clear we need to do this. It will become apparent, will be advised by the various health bodies, whether or not we should do it, but they are not gonna advise us on the basis of, oh, we should vaccinate them because vaccinating people has now become sort of a trend, it makes you look good. It will be because they have assessed that this is a necessary thing for us to do to stop the transmission of COVID-19 to more vulnerable people. It's why we give, or one of the reasons why we give kids the flu jab. It turns out flu is actually a bit more dangerous than COVID-19 for young people, but one of the big reasons, and the NHS are explicit about this, that we give the flu jab to kids is because they tend to be super spreaders when it comes to spreading flu to older people, more vulnerable people. So again, a completely misinformed, lazy discussion about probably the most serious topic, and it's the most serious topic because our actions matter. So if you're telling that to your millions of people audience, you can quite concretely undermine the effort to move beyond this pandemic. Dalia, I wanna bring you in on this. What did you make of that discussion? I mean, are these people trying to keep me locked in my house forever? Like, I'm so mad. It's just, like, let me be released and stop slowing it down with this idiocy. Obviously, entirely egregious, completely scientifically illiterate, not only because, not only the idea that the only reason you get vaccinated is for yourself, as you've noticed, but also firstly, that whole idea that exercising a lot can help you prevent, getting impacts from COVID, like negative impacts from COVID can stop you transmitting COVID. You don't know if you're vulnerable to COVID. We have so many stories. One thing that's so scary about this illness is that there are so many instances of people who consider themselves very healthy, who might not know if they have an underlying condition in all these different ways, being knocked out by this virus. And not to mention, I feel that, you know, I need to walk around with these discussions with a megaphone just screaming long COVID because this is always so missing from the conversation. We think, okay, coronavirus, the impact of it is either you have mild symptoms or you even have a really bad flu or you're in the ICU. There's a huge number of people who sit in the middle of that, who have long COVID or have these unknown long-term effects from coronavirus. That data is still emerging on what the possible long-term effects can be even if you make it through the initial illness, completely fine. And I think this is partly to do with the fact that in general, our society doesn't really know how to talk about or engage with chronic illness. Like we just don't see it in our understanding of what it means to be unwell and what it means to be sick. So, you know, for me, like for me, my main, as well as, you know, lowering transmission, my main reason why I want to get the vaccine is because I'm scared of getting long COVID. I'm scared of being taken out, you know, and not being able to as many of my friends have who are healthy, who have healthy diets, who are young, who exercise, who, you know, it's been six months and counting and they are still deeply affected. And, you know, I think in the case of the vaccines, you know, there are some cases where I think, you know, vaccine hesitancy is something that should be dealt with sensitively. So, you know, especially in the US, like the long history of black and brown, indigenous communities who have been heavily abused and experimented upon by, you know, health by pharmaceutical industries, by, you know, healthcare institutions, vaccine hesitancy in those communities, you know, I don't think it should be dismissed. I think it should be engaged with carefully in that kind of understanding that a lot of trust needs to be rebuilt there is definitely, you know, so there's not all cases. This case, absolutely egregious, absolutely irresponsible. And also, but it also reflects, and I think I talked about this at the very beginning of the pandemic when we had this whole culture war emerging out of masks, the whole, you know, when they tried to make masks into a culture war. And it's this idea of, you know, it's my liberty, it's my freedom to not wear a mask if I don't want to or if I'm not scared. And it's again, this whole idea of this conception of freedom, this conception of liberty, this conception of being in society that is so individualized, this mentality of I don't owe anyone to any, I don't owe anything to anyone. The mobility of vulnerable people is irrelevant to me. If I'm not vulnerable, I'm not accountable for making the world a better place for people who are vulnerable for whatever reason or that my individual behavior is only relevant insofar as it has consequences for me as an individual. And, you know, this is the kind of doctrine that we hear from people like Joe Rogan, it's that like Jordan Peterson style kind of thing that, you know, it happens at that kind of podcasting cultural level, but it has its knock on effects all the way up into government, all the way up into policymaking. We saw an incredible, incredibly slow uptake of masks in the US under Donald Trump. And we still are seeing slow uptake of masks in a lot of states that have very right-wing governors. So it has real life consequences and it is absolutely irresponsible. It's not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. And it's to spread a message like this in this moment when we are so close to such a watershed moment and not to say that the vaccine is gonna solve everything, but we're so close to things getting a lot better, especially for people who have been shielding for such a long time and who have had to deal with the impacts, the mental health, the physical impacts of that, to roll us back at that point is so deeply, deeply unacceptable. I mean, I think that point you make about, I suppose the individualism of it, they can't think of COVID as a collective problem. And what I find, I suppose, so interesting in that clip is if Joe Rogan had said, look, I get there is some collective benefit for having the vaccine, but I'm a moral individualist that I don't think individuals can have responsibility for wider society. We should be egoists or whatever. I disagree with him, but at least it would be an intellectually informed argument. Yeah, if you are just an egoist, if you don't think that individuals have any responsibility for the rest of society, yeah, if you are 21, don't get vaccinated. I mean, I don't want to get clipped, but if you have that really unattractive, basically moral doctrine, which is to say what I do, I don't care about anyone else's health, then maybe you won't bother going to the chemist, but he's not being honest about that. He's not saying, yeah, I don't believe in collective values. I don't believe in having any social responsibility to anyone other than myself. And that's why I'm saying this. No, he just, I mean, he basically misrepresents the facts to have an individualistic conclusion. And that's what I find so, I suppose, I suppose distasteful about it. Maybe that's the word to use. Do some basic research, Joe. I mean, that's the main, I host a podcast. It doesn't have as many viewers as your one, but I do some basic research before I go on air, and I don't think that is too much to ask for people, is how I would conclude. Nice try mate with 4.99, really robust criticisms. Keep it up, I've witnessed a fair amount of Rogan, pretty sure he doesn't read, which can be an issue. Yeah, don't be, that can't be an issue. You don't even have to be that. People should read all their fucking tomes of theory before they host a podcast. I'm not like that at all. And actually, one of the reasons why Joe Rogan can be watchable is because he's quite open and questioning. But there are some, there are some basic things you have to have covered, especially if you were talking about something as serious as a global pandemic, when the actions of your audience really, really matter, not just to themselves, but to everyone, then you have a responsibility to learn some basic public health. This is not complicated and there is no excuse for having a conversation that ill-informed at this particular moment in time. As Dahlia says, we are so, so close to getting out of this. Don't fuck it up. Dahlia, let's end there. It's been a great show, very enjoyable as ever. I wanna make a quick shout out to our Twitch audience as well, if you haven't already go follow us there. What is Twitch? I still don't understand. Twitch is a streaming platform. We still need to, I'm still trying to persuade Aaron to use it on the regular where he just watches TV shows and comic, because it's like a slower pace, basically. You can do streams that are like 10 to 12 hours long. So it's a bit like this, but with less preparation, you're responding to stuff directly. It is quite engaging and I mean, there are lots of, Hassan Piker is the biggest one. It's huge, massive audience, mainly for gaming. I don't game. I'll have to check out Navarra's Twitch then. At the moment, it just has Tiskey Sour. So I mean, but in future, it's gonna have lots of original content. We will end it there as ever. If you haven't already do hit subscribe, also hit like, and thank you so much. If you are a regular donor, we do really appreciate it. It means the world to us. We'll be back on Friday at 7 p.m. For now, you've been watching Tiskey Sour on Navarra Media. Good night.