 We've talked about how, you know, Morris Johnson has been treated with kid gloves, how his speech didn't say that much, and how it was potentially a bit inappropriate to sort of talk about how successful Britain's strategy has been when 40,000 people have died. But, and I don't normally do this, you have to give him a little bit of credit for what he actually said. And that's because he pushed back actually against the idea that we should immediately end the lockdown. And there are some pretty powerful people in pretty powerful places who are pushing for this to happen right now. Most notably, they seem to hang around the Daily Telegraph. And so throughout this crisis has been most notable on their comment pages, and particularly with neo-facturites like Daniel Hannon. I want to show you a headline from a comment piece he did back on the 11th of April. So to contextualize this, this was the day after it was announced that 980 people had died in a 24-hour period. When we were all sort of, you know, talking about how serious this was, how tragic this was, Daniel Hannon was penning this. It's time to start loosening the lockdown. It beggars belief, okay? But this push has now made it from the comment pages to the front pages. The front pages are obviously more important for obvious reasons, but it's also, you know, you see when something has become political common sense that it makes it from the comment section to the news section, and that's happening now. And so on the front page this morning, the Telegraph had a headline about Boris Johnson being, you know, preparing to ease a lockdown and all the pressure there was for that. But unsurprisingly, even though this is, you know, supposed to be news, not comment, it relied on quite a lot of misleading statements and misrepresentation. This particularly pertains to them sort of exaggerating public support for an ending of the lockdown. An opinion poll published on Sunday showed that the public is increasingly supportive of a staggered exit from the lockdown with more than half of people wanting restaurants, offices, shopping centers, and schools to reopen as soon as new infections decrease, though a majority want sports stadiums to remain closed until there is a vaccine. Now you read that and, you know, any sensible person when we're reading that would think, oh, people are desperate for this lockdown to end. They want to reopen all of these, you know, unessential places, restaurants, offices, shopping centers, as soon as new infections decrease. And to be honest, we already know that new infections do potentially seem to be decreasing. That doesn't necessarily mean it's stable, or that's a long-term thing. But right now that appears to be happening. The problem, this is a complete misrepresentation of what people actually told the pollster, right? So the question only gave one option, which was more pro lockdown than the one that, you know, we would reopen these institutions when infections decrease. Let's look at what the actual poll said. So asked about offices, only 18% think that once cases go down, we should open offices as usual, right? 55% a much bigger number think we should, but only with monitoring and restrictions. 11% want to wait until we have a vaccine. We can also look at restaurants. So only 13% want them to reopen as usual once cases go down. 55% think they should, but only with monitoring and restrictions. 21% think that we should wait until a vaccine has been found to open restaurants. That's 18 months, right? And you can see here there's two huge problems with the telegraphs framing. So first, these people aren't just saying they want them to be opened, right? They're saying opened with restrictions and with monitoring. This is not people who are gagging for everything to go back to normal as the telegraph headline writers seem to be hoping for. Second, if you're only given two options, which is open them when infections start to fall with restrictions or wait until a vaccine, then, you know, the moderate position is to open them when infections fall with some restrictions, because waiting until a vaccine, like, I don't think we should wait until a vaccine to reopen the economy, but I'm not gagging for an end to the lockdown, right? Aaron, I'm going to go to you. I mean, what do you think is behind this? I mean, often quite transparent, but very manipulative attempt to basically misrepresent public opinion to try and make it look as if there is a drive to end the lockdown when, you know, no such swell in public opinion exists. Yeah, it's just remarkable, isn't it? I don't know if it was that data, but there was perhaps another set of data which indicates that I think 60% plus of people were effectively very happy for the lockdown to continue as is. I'm going to interrupt you, because we can get that data up and then I'll go to your proper comment. So this was you gov today is even more sort of striking piece of data than there was in that telegraph poll I just pointed out. So they asked an even more sort of conservative question, which is, would you like to see a plan to end the lockdown? So not even would you like to end the lockdown now, but would you like to see the plan? And only 32% of the public even want to see a plan to end the lockdown now, let alone actually end it. 63% think the government should wait until the situation is clearer before coming up with an exit strategy. So sorry, I just, sorry I interrupted you. I just wanted to get those steps on the screen because you referred to them. Yeah, it's really helpful. What you heard repeatedly, I think yesterday I was listening to Westminster hour on purpose. On purpose. I don't know why I did that. I then tweeted about Lucy Powell and it got as a retweets and then she said apparently I was dog piling her even though I literally repeated her words back to her without attacking her. And they were saying the sort of tenor of the comment you were hearing on that show was, or people are getting restless, you know, people want sort of CNN's the lockdown. This is the most popular policy of the last decade. This is an incredibly popular set of measures. It's not because people want to do it. It's popular because people know it has to be done because we've seen 20 possibly 40,000 plus people die despite the lockdown. If we hadn't done it, it would obviously be significantly worse. You know, the ballpark figures are a quarter million to half a million people dying if we did nothing at all. And so I agree with you, Mike. It's just another sort of instance of this is just completely detached from reality, at least with the Boris Johnson stuff. It channels certain national myths, you know, of the sovereign of a certain class deference, which does pervade British society. I get that. But this is just a complete, you know, complete detachment from reality. And what was really interesting was some of those numbers about, for instance, 40 to basically half of people don't want stadiums and nightclubs to reopen until we get a vaccine. You're saying 18 months. I mean, it could be, I mean, a more, I think a more realistic number is three years. By the time you produce it, actually physically produce them, roll them out. Everybody has a vaccine, right? We need tens of millions of doses. I think it's perfectly fair to say three years, two years, three years. In which case, you know, that's 50% of people don't think we should basically have Premier League football. They don't think we should have people going to nightclubs. And that's really significant for large parts of the economy. I mean, three years, I was just thinking maybe Spurs will have sorted out their back line by then. So I mean, that's, well, I mean, the match, well, this is the interesting thing. You know, I was, I'd go through Google, Google news and you see sort of transfer gossip and all that this player's going there, this player's going there. Are you kidding me? The second, like biggest source of revenue football club is gate receipts. And that might not be coming back for a couple of years. So it's just like, you know, this stuff that people just take for granted, going back to usual, this is huge. And what's really striking and I'll finish with this is that the every woman, every man on the street seems to be more in tune with that than political editors and people writing for the front pages of our national media. And it's really, really striking. And you have to ask why? I mean, so I think I could take a punt at why the editorial direction of the telegraph and the spectator as well, makes a lot more sense when you realise that who they're writing for is a handful of maybe 100, 150 people concentrated around SW one. And that's who they want to influence and the wheeled public opinion, a bit like a mallet to battle those people into doing what they want. But ultimately, that's their audience. And you would look at what's happening now. It's not damaging the conservatives in the polls. Really, one bit, you do have a decline in the percentage of people who think the government are doing well, but it's still above 50% most of the time. And you've still got relatively high approval ratings for Boris Johnson. But what's getting chipped away is the core of their ideology and the core of their ideology, which says that it's fine for significant portions of the workforce to be living precarious lives, paycheck to paycheck, often getting themselves into debt just to cover the basics of living expenses. Well, that's gone out the window when you've got a three month mortgage holiday, got conversations going on about reductions in rent payments and deferrals of rent payments. And you've also got a very grateful society towards those on that sort of low wage front line work in a way that you haven't seen for very many years. You've got huge numbers of people turning towards universal credit as a source of income support. Now, universal credit being an utterly miserable experience which would drive people into penury, starvation and even suicide. Well, that's okay when that's not your core voters. When you've got more and more numbers of people who were self employed white collar doing all right for themselves who are now turning to universal credit which system designed itself as punishment for the crime of being poor, then you've got another problem. And then going forward, you've got what I like to think of as the Churchill problem. The Churchill problem is being a very good wartime leader. But because you've overseen a system of government which demonstrates that it's possible for a government to centrally plan and run an economy during the state of emergency, during wartime, is that it then undermines the claim that the government shouldn't have a role in the economy in peacetime. So outside of that state of emergency. And I think that this is what Keir Starmer is trying to position himself. But unfortunately, he doesn't have a Bevan yet at his side, he's supplying those big ideas that he could then put into action. So he's got the soft left, you know, sort of technical procedural bit down, but he needs those big ideas. Because a time like now, and this is what I think Rishi Sunak is very worried about, this sort of think Dominic Cummings is very worried about, this is what I think Arch Thatcherites like Daniel Hannan and Toby Young are very worried about, is that you've normalized the idea that the state can take a major role in planning the economy, a major role in supplementing people's incomes, and that the collective good is more important than individual success and endeavor. So you've got the heart of their ideology being demolished day by day. And that's why they're so worried about the lockdown continuing, because the longer it goes on, the more their foundational way of thinking is just crumbling away under their feet. I can't believe the crude Marxists at Navarra Media haven't yet said that it's just rich bastards that want to make some short-term profit. Because whilst I think, you know, your answers were way more sophisticated than that, the Sunday Times suggested it might be a bit more crude than we've all been thinking. I want to go to this article from the Sunday Times. They led with the story Tori Grandi's tell PM it's time to ease the coronavirus lockdown. Now looking at the headline, you might think that's, you know, ex-prime ministers, big dogs in the government, people who care about the long-term ideology of conservatism, the kind of thing that Ash has just been talking about. But actually, it just turns out to be real rich people, rich people with no political pedigree whatsoever. Let's go to the first quote from that piece. So the billionaire financier Michael Spencer, a big donor to Johnson's leadership campaign last year said, we should start loosening up the lockdown as soon as we reasonably can and allow the economy to start moving forward. We should really begin to offer a narrative of how and when it's going to stop. Steve Morgan, the former boss of the Housebuilder Redrow, who gave £1 million to the Conservative General Election campaign said, we're actually in danger that the medicine, if you want to call the lockdown that, is more harmful than the cure. Now, some of our viewers who follow American politics or have watched, you know, our previous shows with, you know, great guests like Michael Brooks or Sarah Jaffe, will maybe remember this comment as being from Donald Trump. So Donald Trump has repeated this so many times. We can't let the medicine be worse than the disease or the cure will be worse than a disease, whatever the particular phrase is. I think they both say it's slightly different. We're in danger of the medicine is more harmful than the cure. Apologies. Now, he is saying this specifically because against all scientific and medical advice, what he wants to do is get the economy moving super quickly, however many lives it costs, because he is desperate for the stock market to go up by November, because he thinks that's going to be what wins him the presidency and also because he's obviously in the pockets of America's billionaire class. Now, you've got people who have given £1 million to the Conservative Party, who are getting big pieces on the front page of the Times or quotes on the front page of the Times saying exactly the same thing.