 The budget was a chance for Rishi Sunak to promote his vision for the British economy, but more fundamentally than that, it was a chance for him to promote himself. Earlier in the week, the Treasury put out a flashy video all focused on Rishi's first year as Chancellor. It's a full five and a half minutes long, but we'll just show you a taster. I'll never forget the team said, oh, you've got to have a call. They're someone called Chris Whitty and Patrick Valens sitting in the Treasury in my office around the big table with their team, where they very calmly and methodically walked me through everything that they were seeing. And I remember when we finished the call that there was just silence. Our planned economic response will be one of the most comprehensive in the world. Once we knew we were going to have to lock down huge parts of the country, we knew we would have to do something equally radical to try and protect people's jobs. It was going to be an enormous challenge to get something like that designed and up and running in the time we had. Today, I can announce it for the first time in our history, the government is going to step in and help to pay people's wages. You know, I didn't sleep the night before furlough launched. Everyone was expecting it to be challenged. But the team at HMRC did a genuinely heroic job. Now, Rishi Sunak's massive ego isn't really news to anyone, but many people did question why that piece of self-promotion was made by the Treasury. So that was made with public funds. It was clearly akin to a party political broadcast, yet the taxpayer paid for it or the Bank of England paid for it. However, we want to talk about these things now. One reason why it seems so ridiculous to be spending Treasury money on that is because public money is already being splashed on boosting Sunak's image. Now, you might remember this from last year. This was after Sunak announced the furlough in 2020. The BBC, so Britain's public broadcaster, introduced us to a new superhero. This is the Chancellor imagined as Superman flying. And then we can also see the Chancellor imagined as Superman helping old ladies. So that was both created by the BBC. So he gets that propaganda from the BBC. And then he also pays his Treasury PR people to make even more glowing imagery of himself. And I said that was last year, the BBC. This year, they've got another piece of equally forming propaganda, which they put out this morning. From newly elected backbencher to Chancellor in less than five years, Rishi Sunak has made light work of Westminster's slippery slope to the top. He's now got to figure out how to fix one of the biggest economic challenges this country has ever faced. So who is he? And what does he believe? Someone here is very bright and very smart. Oxford and Stanford educated, smoothie, really. He immediately struck me as somebody that was going places. When politicians rise quickly through the ranks, they're often raised eyebrows, jealousy, maybe even a bit of scandal with Rishi Sunak, not so much. It's really quite boring as a journalist. You try and write a profile on Rishi Sunak because you call around lots of MPs and people who work for him, try and get the dirt and everyone just tells you how lovely he is. I think because of the speed of Rishi Sunak's rise, he hasn't really picked up any enemies yet. He's lovely. He's smart. That's political journalism. That's what it looks like now. That was a four and a half minute video. We only showed you a minute of it. They did mention a couple of criticisms of Rishi Sunak. Someone mentioned Eat Out to help out his role in transmission and there was a sentence about people left out of COVID support. But those two points took up about 10 seconds in a four and a half minute video. There was, of course, nothing on the fact that Sunak has more blame than anyone when it comes to us going into late lockdowns. I should say anyone other than Boris Johnson because he made the final call or that Sunak was crucial in opposing the circuit breaker. We're used to it by now. The BBC politics team have no interest in bringing up the fact that 12 months into a pandemic, Sunak still hasn't bothered to pay people to self-isolate. This is not someone who should be getting glowing, uncritical reviews from the public broadcaster after the year we've had. Do you think the way that Rishi Sunak is treated by the press is exceptional? Is it a sort of exaggerated example of how we normally see them sort of defer to the party and government or is there something special about this guy that just has them entranced? You know, in that sort of Twitter meme, people say, oh, I met so-and-so once at Charity Dude, they were very charming and so down to earth. This is how the political editor of the Daily Mirror, that was Pippa Craira, by the way, the Daily Mirror is talking about a Tory chancellor who is worth an extraordinary amount of money who, as you say, in a number of ways really fails to deliver when we went through the biggest crisis in this country, I think at least since 1940. So, is it unusual? I think we have to put it in a sort of broader context, which is Britain's media is moving effectively a sort of post-democratic status quo, which is to say the BBC has been neutralized, anything they say that's critical to the government, the sort of the subtext is they're worried about losing money. Channel 4 was frozen out for doing their job. Good morning, Britain was ignored when they started asking the tough questions. The Daily Mirror wasn't allowed on the Tory battle bus at the last general election. Boris Johnson didn't do an interview with Andrew Neil for the BBC, and I think the Tories have got this right in so much as they feel, we don't need to do two-thirds of the media if we don't want to, between social media, between favourable coverage in the print press, these media oligarchs, which are, you know, the telegraph, the sun, the times, we're fine. And I think that's accurate. And so, for people who say, well, where's Britain going to be in 2030, 2035, look at Victor Orban's Hungary, you know, and I don't say that as an exaggeration. Look at the sort of political appointments right now going on the BBC, people very faithful to the Conservative Party. So it's, it's explicable, it's getting worse, and it's structural reasons, you know, it's not just because some journalists are bad people. This is that this is an expression of a broader problem we've been going through now for a decade. The thing they say are always quite nice and charming, probably true. And that is, I think, probably why, or one of the reasons why he gets such fawning press from, from people like Laura Koensberg, from people like Katie Balls, who you saw in that clip there, someone who works for the Spectator. And it is because political reporting is so much about what dinner parties you go to, who has charmed you, who you get on with. And if you are someone who is a smooth talker and can get on with people who are also members of the ruling class, then you don't get critical things written about you. And it's why, so long as you're well educated and charming and don't challenge any of the powers that be, if you're not particularly critical of the establishment, you're not like John McDonnell, who says that, yes, of course, business elites and the BBC are going to be biased. If you're just there and you say, no, look, I'm going to be charming to everyone. Then no one bothers writing about the fact that you didn't pay people to self isolate, which would have been the one policy which would have helped us to avoid the disastrous consequences that we saw this winter. It's why people don't bother writing about the fact that you were one of the main lobbyists for a herd immunity strategy in Downing Street throughout the year. And it does make me wonder about the journalism of someone like Katie Balls, who seems like a nice enough person. But if you're saying it's boring writing a profile about Rishi Sunak, maybe you're not doing your job properly, because there's a lot to say about this guy, right? There's a lot to say about this guy, which would be in the public interest for you to be making known. But people are just interested in saying, oh, if there's no MP that doesn't like him, then what am I supposed to write? Maybe do some research other than checking your WhatsApp messages when Tory MPs message you. What they're basically saying is, well, nobody briefs against him. So I haven't got any dirt. Like you say, you're not doing your job. Oh, he's charming. Do you know what? For the electorate, they don't care. Nobody cares about whether he's charming. They're never going to meet him. They want to know in terms of the consequences of his actions relating to public services to pay to housing. Will my mortgage get more expensive? Can my kids afford to go to university? Will I be able to access decent elderly care in a couple of years? The nursing home my mum or dad is in, you know, is that is that going to get more expensive, less expensive in the public sector, private sector? How are they going to pay for it? That's what people care about. Nobody cares about Rishi Sunak's haircut or his workout routine or his waist size. I've seen people talk about that before, how he has a waspish waist. Good for him. I'm happy for him. It means he's less liable to get heart disease as he gets older. But as somebody who's voting for politicians or a journalist who's covering them like you and me, Michael, it's irrelevant. If you can't find any bad stories, go find them. That's your job. That's the public interest. The public interest is to scrutinize this man as an individual and as a politician, first and foremost. And if you can, if you're there saying, I can't find anything bad about him, nobody's briefing to me on WhatsApp. This isn't like with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. By the way, it wasn't because those were bad people. It's because there was a vast array of interests which didn't want them getting anywhere near power. It's the complete opposite with Rishi Sunak, hence you're not getting the negative briefings. Really not that hard to work out. Now, I think that ends you. Yes, it says a great deal about how terrifyingly bad our media is, but also they don't realize what they're doing is bad. These are journalists who don't realize what their job is meant to be. And I think that actually shows a real disconnect between what we've got in this country and what you saw in the United States. Yes, it's not perfect. Yes, there are lots of journalists who will criticize Trump but not criticize Biden when he does something broadly similar. We saw that with the airstrike in Eastern Syria last week, but there are still a large number of journalists, particularly on the left, but who have in our mainstream presence who are at least interested in getting stories on people who shape all of our lives. The vast majority of Westminster journalists, the lobby, people who work for press and broadcast, don't actually care. They want to get on with some people at the next dinner party, at the next spectator summer garden party, and they don't want to make any enemies and they want to get up that career ladder, and that's it. That's it. And it's not good enough. And if you have the temerity to not want to do that, like us at Navarra Media, you're an outcast, you're a horrific person, you're evil, you're malevolent, you're a racist, you're a misogynist, you name it, they will go to town. But if you're a conservative whose policy response to a pandemic has left hundreds of thousands of people in real trouble economically, and I think indirectly led to the deaths of many, many, many people, he's so charming because he knows which fork to use at a white tie dinner. You know, when we talk about other journalists being partisan, there'll be people who justifiably say, but you're partisan, you supported the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour at the last general election. But did you ever tune in to Tiskey Sauer and me and Aaron just talk for ages about how charming Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell were? No, even when we support politicians, we don't just say, oh, they're so nice people, we talk, we support them because we wanted the policies, we wanted transformational policies in this country. And that's what we talked about. We never said, oh, whenever, whenever I call up people to ask about Jeremy Corbyn, they say he's so nice. That's, it's just such a silly way of doing politics.