The News Agents: So Suella's putting asylum seekers on a barge

Here are five things I'm doing to stop the boats.

First, I'm bringing in new laws that will mean if you come to the UK illegally, you

can't stay, no matter how hard you try.

Second, I've secured a deal with France that will help stop the boats at source before

they cross the channel.

I've also negotiated a deal with Albania, which has already helped us bring down crossings

from there by 90%.

Third, I've increased raids by 50% to clamp down on illegal workers.

Fourth, I'm ending the fast of illegal migrants being put up in hotels by the taxpayer.

Fifth, I'm ensuring that the only way to come to the UK for asylum will be through safe

and legal routes.

I know stopping the boats is a priority for the British people and I'm leaving no stone

unturned to get it done.

In case you were in any doubt, that isn't Tom Cruise, that's Rishi Sunak with his own

mission impossible, which is to stop the small boats and what you're trying to do is convey

the maximum amount of action, almost Hollywood movie-esque of all the things you're doing.

But aren't you just drawing attention to the fact that you've been trying to deal with

this for bloody years and you're not making a whole lot of progress?

Yeah, it is August and it is a part of the year where the government tries to take control

of the narrative while everyone's on holiday and this week it is Small Boats Week and as

John said, trying to address a problem that the government has said it's been addressing

for years and years.

So on today's episode, we're going to be talking about something called the Bibi Stockholm,

a barge currently off the Isle of Portland, which today has started to receive asylum seekers

to be there for goodness knows how long.

Welcome to the News Agents.

The News Agents.

It's Lewis.

And it is John.

I'm back from holiday.

Hurrah!

Hurrah!

And later in the podcast, we're going to be talking about Donald Trump's efforts to readjust

the legal furniture ahead of the many trials that he could be facing in the next few months.

I'll tell you why I can tell you just about from holiday, because you're not wearing any

socks.

You're still in pure sandals mode.

You're wearing your full suit, but you've got these black shoes and no socks.

What's all that about, John?

I think this is very personal and I don't think you should be sock-shaming me.

Well, we've got the first gybe in already.

Returning to the Bibi Stockholm, which is just a bizarre name.

Can I start with a problem I have with the Bibi Stockholm?

Go on then.

The children's character from Swedish literature, Pippi Longstocking.

I keep hearing the Bibi Stockholm and I'm thinking Pippi Longstocking.

I don't know.

It sounds to me a bit like a sort of adult film star, but anyway.

No, Pippi Longstocking is the most lovely children's story.

Yeah, well, okay.

Maybe it shows our different instincts at work there.

But anyway, Bibi Stockholm is a barge and it is something that has been spoken about

by government ministers for a long time now.

It is this barge which is currently off the Isle of Portland, not far from Weymouth Harbour.

And today, it has a capacity of up to 500 men, we're told, to take some of the huge numbers

of people who are currently in Britain waiting for their asylum seeker applications to be

processed.

They're often called migrants in the media.

Now, the actual real term for them is asylum seekers.

Their application may be rejected, but that's what they are, they're asylum seekers.

And obviously, there has been a huge problem in terms of where to put this vast number.

A big number, not in relative terms, in the sense that other countries like France and

Germany have more, but the Home Office is extremely slow at processing applications.

The backlog is now extremely large.

People who are seeking asylum, people often think that they're sort of living a life of

luxury and we talk about luxury hotels and stuff.

Believe me, they're not.

We've been to some of those hotels, reported from some of them.

They're pretty basic hotels and not only that, but they're not allowed to work, they're not

allowed to access to labor force, they can't claim benefits, they have a tiny stipend.

But you obviously have to have somewhere to put them.

And frankly, the British government has been spending an awful lot of money, billions and

billions of pounds on hotel accommodation, however glamorous or not it is.

And it's running out.

And so this idea in lieu of being able to send them to Rwanda, which is the government's

other idea, has been partly this barge to take up to 500.

But obviously, it is controversial.

It's controversial locally, among people who endorse it, these things always are.

But it's also controversial just for the sheer optics.

And Sky News, I can see it now as we're sat here, have got the Sky News helicopter hovering

above Weymouth Harbor today, looking at this weird boat where about 50 people are due to

arrive today.

And this is a barge boat, which has housed oil workers before.

It has been used before in other countries for people who are seeking asylum.

But the British government have put in bunk beds into each of the rooms to double the

capacity and imagine the smallest cross channel ferry that you've slept on, which is kind

of fine for one night.

But would you be wanting to spend months there waiting while your application is processed?

Probably not.

But there is going to be a problem of overcrowding.

There are various people who've raised concerns about this.

I think the Fibergates have raised concerns about safety issues.

They've been told, oh, well, you're the Fibergates Union.

Of course, you're just lefties and you're just trying to throw sand in the gears of all of

this.

And so the legitimate concerns are sort of being trampled on a bit and you are going

to have 500 people there.

But we should say it is still a drop in the English Channel off Dorset compared to the

over 100,000 people who are still waiting to be processed for their asylum application.

Home office was a calculation done about a month or so ago, which said that the home

office would have to process an asylum application every four minutes between now and the end

of the year for the prime minister to meet his target of clearing the backlog by the

end of the year.

It just isn't going to happen.

I always think that if the home office is a funny institution, right, because it's one

of the biggest parts of government, but it's a part of government that most British citizens

have almost nothing to do with, unless something has gone wrong in their lives.

And I always think if more people had more contact with the home office, there would

be this massive sort of clamour to do something about it.

But for most of us, it's a department which is kind of out of sight, out of mind.

But obviously people who've come here, maybe they've got legitimate claim, maybe they haven't,

but their fate is in the hands of the home office.

And the way the home office deals with these things, because there is no political incentive

for the home office to be better in this regard.

In fact, the home office ministers have literally said, we don't want the asylum system to be

too much more efficient, because they say it will attract other people here.

And they always think that if more British people had an idea of how it actually worked

and what it was like in terms of interacting with it, and the complete sort of computer

says no kind of attitude it has, I mean, I've reported on asylum cases many times.

And the sheer bureaucracy of it, the slowness of it, the kind of way that it sort of just

treats people as if it were like an input machine and an output machine is quite shocking.

And that's the thing, I think this barge, if people were going to be on it for a few

weeks a month, maybe even a couple of months, that might be one thing.

The thing is people will very, very likely have the prospect of being on it for years.

That is how slow the pace of dealing with asylum applications is.

So that's the policy.

What are the politics of this?

Because to me, it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.

You're right, Lewis.

This is small boats week in the government grid, it feels like.

Why are you drawing attention to something which is a problem that has come up on your

watch, which has not been grasped, where the backlog has been growing ever longer?

The number of people trying to cross the channel is not diminishing in the way that Rishi Sunak

said it would as a result of the initiatives that he's taken.

Aren't you drawing attention to failure?

Or is it just to show we're tough, labor is soft?

I've never been able to understand this, John, we've talked about this before.

The argument is among people who look at, say, the illegal migration bill, or they look

at Rwanda, or they look at this new idea about Ascension Island, which has been in the papers

over the weekend, if Rwanda fails sending people to Ascension Island, a British overseas

territory 4,000 miles away in the middle of the South Atlantic.

The idea that is put forward is to say this is a classic wedge issue that works for the

Conservatives, because people say, well, even if it doesn't work, they sort of stroke their

chin and say, ah, but it's great politics.

It's great politics.

It's not really about it working or not.

And I kind of get that.

I get the idea that labor is perceived in some ways being softer on this stuff, and that

it's something for Sunak to rally around.

But as you say, what I don't think works, and I don't understand as part of the logic

of that, is that that's kind of fine if you're a new government and you've just come in,

or if you're in opposition, but when you've been in for 13 years, all you're basically

doing is pointing to something and saying, hey, you see that?

You see that over there?

We haven't done anything about it, but we've got this is a good idea about something in

a way that we can do something about it.

And that's just crazy.

You're basically pointing to and adverting to your own failure.

And at this point now, the margin or the benefit of the doubt, even among the government's

own supporters for them to do anything about it is very slender.

There was an amazing poll at the weekend showing the Conservatives miles and miles and miles

behind on the question of immigration against labor.

Now that is not a position that you want to be in.

And if I were Sunak, I might consider much more strongly, that's the idea of talking

about it less, because if you talk about it less, the papers will talk about it less.

So having small boats week is the equivalent of having failure week put up in big letters

on your own government calendar.

If you look at Donald Trump in 2015, 2016, when he's campaigning to be president, and

he's got that three-word slogan, build the wall, fantastic.

He was in opposition, or he wasn't part of the administration.

He was trying to get rid of the Democrats.

He could say, look at all these Mexicans pouring across the border.

We've got to build a wall.

Fine.

It was very effective.

But in 2020, what, we're still going to build the wall?

We're going to build the wall higher?

We're going to build more of the wall?

And I think that that's where you run into problems.

And this is the Conservatives who've been in government for so many years, and the problem

has not gone away.

It has worsened in that period.

I mean, I think it is worth saying that Labour do seem, yes, we've got to tackle it at source

and we wouldn't have started from here.

Labour don't seem to have a very clear radical alternative to this either.

No, they don't.

And the truth is, John, is that there are no easy answers.

There are just no easy answers.

Believe me, if there were an easy answer, the government would have done it already.

The truth is what we're dealing with here is a problem which states across Europe are

dealing with, which is how to deal with migratory flows, which to be honest, haven't really stopped

since 2015, since the migration crisis of 2015.

They've ebbed and flowed, but they've still been there.

We're dealing with a world, and this is the conversation I wish we could have, and I wish

the politicians in Britain could have, because the way Sunat comes at it and the way that

the whole of the argument is framed is the idea in some way that we've got this problem

because Britain's a soft touch, that we can just stop the attraction.

They keep talking about the pull factor.

They always talk about, we've just got to stop the pull factors.

The problem, as much as anything, is the push factor.

Whether you think there will always be people who abuse the system and aren't legitimate

refugees, there will always be people who are economic migrants, but the fact is, we're

dealing with a world which is more and more unstable, and every European country is dealing

with this problem at their border.

And you think it's bad now?

Look what's going on in the Sahel, as we were talking about last week.

Every country in the Sahel region now is in the grip of either political instability

to full-blown coup.

What effect does that have?

You have more and more people push north into North Africa, and where do they go?

They don't want to stay in North Africa with their unemployment rates of 20% or 30%, say

in a country like Algeria.

They're going to push north and north and north and end up in Europe.

And you think we've got a bad problem here?

Look at Italy.

Look at Greece.

Look at Spain.

Look at parts of the Middle East.

Look at Turkey.

So, I just wish we could have a conversation where a Prime Minister just turns around

and says, look, the truth is no politician of any party has too much wisdom on this.

None of this is easy.

We're going to do our best.

We are an island, but we're not an island.

We can't divorce ourselves from the politics of the world around us.

And this is going to be part of our politics.

We have to have a grown-up, sensible conversation about what to do about it.

And that ain't a sentient island or the Bibby Stockholm for that matter.

Well, as we were talking about the Labour Party, Stephen Kinick, Home Affairs spokesperson,

was on Sky yesterday.

We were quite keen to talk to him on the news agents, but have been told he is unavailable

or the Labour Party say he is unavailable to us.

So we don't have Stephen Kinick.

Here's what he said on Sky yesterday.

The last 13 years have seen the Conservative government's incompetence and neglect destroying

our asylum system.

So we're in a situation now where they're having to scramble to use hotels, to use barges,

to use military bases.

We're going to inherit a mess if we're privileged to form the next government, and we're going

to have to fix that mess.

We will do so as quickly as possible to get people out of hotels and off the barges and

out of the military camps.

But the reality is, on day one of the Labour government, we will have to deal with the

infrastructure that we have and the complete chaotic, shambolic mess that the Conservative

government will have left us.

So Mr Kinick, you would still use the barges then?

We will be left with no choice but to deal with the mess that we inherit.

But what we will have is a five-point plan that isn't based on headline-chasing gimmicks.

It's based on hard grafts, quiet diplomacy and common sense.

It's about having, scrapping the Rwanda scheme, which is unworkable, unaffordable, channeling

that money into a cross-border police unit to crack down on the people smugglers.

It's about sorting out the backlog, clearing that backlog by having a triage system for

high-grant rate countries and low-grant rate countries, getting those people processed and

removed if they have no right to be in our country.

I think you can hear from Kinick's answer there that, again, this is what we were just

saying.

There's no easy answers.

Again, if Labour had a lever that they could pull on, they would.

There is no easy answer.

And that is, to be honest, we just need that politicians to be a bit more grown up about

it and talk to the voters in a way that doesn't assume they're just idiots.

I thought what was interesting there was him saying, we're not going to be like Rishi

Sunak.

We've got a five-point plan.

We've just started this podcast with Rishi Sunak and his five-point plan.

Everyone's got to have a five-point plan.

I feel sorry for the four-point plan and the six-point plan.

You never have a four-point plan or a six-point plan.

It's always got to be a five-point plan.

I mean, I'm making a flippant point, but a serious point, because that talks to the

politics that you were discussing.

Why can't we have serious grown-up conversations about this, rather than just saying, oh, I

've got a five-point plan and everyone goes, oh, phew, that's marvelous.

That's everything OK then.

My one-point plan for you tomorrow is to buy some socks.

You're laboring this.

I don't ever say your shoes need polishing and your laces are undone.

I could have done on many occasions, and I have never, ever done it.

But you carry on, Luke.

It's only Monday.

It's not the army polishing the shoes.

What is this?

And I want you to blank out your belt and brusso the buttons on it.

You're taking news agents HQ a bit too literary, Colonel Sople.

We should talk about the government's position, though, and it's an amazing interview this

morning, and it did again feel like summer for lots of reasons.

Sarah Dines, who is junior Home Office minister, was sent out to defend the government's

position around the Bibi Stockholm and Ascension Island this morning.

And she was asked on a today program by Michelle Hussain, really clever question, I think,

which is, OK, you've got this barge, but we've just had the illegal migration bill become

an act.

It's just passed through Parliament, which the government said, to great fanfare, this

is going to make a huge difference.

It's going to basically criminalize is the process of claiming asylum in Britain.

And she asked Dines, actually, since that has passed, has actually been used.

I don't understand why it's so difficult for you to answer the question about whether

you have used the powers that you sought and gained through the Illegal Migration Act.

We use all the range of powers that we have already.

We use them.

Sorry, you have new powers to detain and remove.

Has anyone been detained since that law was passed?

Well, in relation to detention, these are complex areas, and you wouldn't expect me

to give you examples of what we've done.

Sorry, I would expect you to answer a question about whether you have used new powers that

have become the law.

Well, with respect, what we're doing is focusing on making sure we get the Miranda policy up

and running as soon as possible.

It's not possible to detain anyone under those new powers until you have an option to remove

them.

Is that the point?

What we're looking at is trying to stop the pull factor.

What we don't want to do is to detain each and every person.

You wouldn't expect me to answer your question, really translates as please don't expect me

to answer your question.

I would expect it.

That's why I asked it.

That's why we invite you on a programme.

Yeah, and what it revealed is exactly what we were saying at the time, which is the illegal

migration bill, which again was a sort of what the government has around migration and around

the small boats issue, is like a series of sticking plasters, a series of holding positions.

It's like, oh, it'll be fine once we've done this.

So initially it was the Nationality and Borders Act under pretty percent.

Once that's passed, it'll be okay.

Then things weren't okay.

Then we have the illegal migration bill.

Once that's passed, it'll all be okay.

That's passed.

Nothing has changed.

Then it's going to be Rwanda.

Then it's going to be Ascension Island.

Then it's going to be the BB Stockholm.

Time after time after time.

It's just something for ministers to point to.

But if you're going to come out first thing in the morning and do that, and you're going

to make it small boats week, you should at least make sure.

Even if you're just doing it for political reasons, that the politics is there.

So no sooner.

Well, I say no sooner.

A couple of hours later, after Dines had been out on the radio, there was a lobby briefing

for political journalists.

And Downing Street rode back on two of the key things that this junior minister was saying.

This happened by 12 o'clock.

So even though Dines said that she expected there would be around 500 people on the BB

Stockholm roughly by the end of the week, number 10 making clear that they don't expect

that to be the case.

She misspoke.

She meant that that was the...

I misspoke.

Oh.

And then the Downing Street spokesperson played down suggestions.

The government was seriously considering sending people to Ascension Island.

That's about these reports.

The spokesperson said the government was confident it would win its case at the Supreme Court

and be allowed to remove migrants to Rwanda.

And of course, what it showed is, is that the illegal migration bill now act was basically

a bit of a nonsense placeholder because it cannot be implemented until you have somewhere

to send people, i.e. Rwanda.

And until we have a decision from the Supreme Court on that, because different courts have

ruled it illegal or legal, depending on which courts it is, then basically it cannot be

operationalised.

And that was what was great about Michelle's question because it was basically saying,

all of that stuff you were saying about how important the illegal migration bill would

be was basically untrue because you can't make it work, at least for now.

It is part of a summer syndrome in politics where the number twos take over running the

show and say things over a weekend where things get briefed out to the papers, juniors, spokespeople

are allowed to go and talk to political editors and they brief stuff out and then by Monday

morning the grown-ups come back into Downing Street and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

whoa, whoa, whoa.

Well, we're not doing that.

And then you get ministers who have misspoken on the Today program.

Misspoken.

Misspoken.

We do that all the time.

Just to underline how nothing with this whole issue is straightforward.

It seems that even as the government is trying to get people to board this barge, there are

charity groups trying to urge the asylum seekers not to go on it.

And apparently 20 have been turned back by an organisation called Care for Calais, which

I think, Lewis, you've had some experience of, saying, oh, don't board this vessel.

And so even now, even though the barge has opened its doors, you can board now.

Some aren't.

And that's the other thing about this boat is that it will inevitably become a centre

for political discontent problems that you will see guaranteed.

You will see groups like Care for Calais, other pro refugee groups, refugee groups, consistently

gather, bring them materials, supplies and so on.

You'll see far right groups as well who agitate around it because everyone literally, unlike

the hotels, you can find out where they are, but it requires a little bit of legwork, everyone

knows where it is.

There's literally a map showing exactly where it is on the BBC News website.

So you can understand why local people, however they feel about the asylum seekers themselves,

would be a little bit displeased by the prospects of having this constant agitation, which I'm

sure will happen in the weeks ahead around this boat.

But when we come back, we are going to be talking about Donald Trump and the possibility

that this week, yes, another week will bring another indictment.

Stay with us.

This is The News Agents.

Welcome back.

So last week, we covered the third indictment of Donald Trump, and it looks like we may

while get a fourth this time related to alleged election interference in the state of Georgia.

And of course, you might know, there is one man who was following this all quite closely

last week and was a little bit frustrated to be on holiday so much so that he started

bombarding us with voice notes just to offer his thoughts, totally unsolicited and unrequested,

of course.

But now he's back, John Soaple, in the studio, to give us his thoughts on where we are with

Trump.

You see, now I thought, Lewis, you would take the magnanimous view.

I'm marvellous to have a colleague who is so generous with his thoughts and his time

that even when on holiday, he wants to share his wisdom of the world and the state of American

politics.

Wisdom?

You're talking about dildo madness, John?

You're talking about dildo.

Yeah, I agree the phrase dildo madness was the first time I've used those two words on

air.

Madness I've used.

I don't think I've...

You've got away without the 10 o'clock news, would you?

Anyway, so Fulton County, which is essentially Atlanta in Georgia, there has been a long-standing

investigation into a call that Donald Trump made.

Now, normally with Donald Trump, there are no emails because he doesn't write emails.

He tells people things when he wants to communicate, so there isn't a paper trail.

This was a call that he made to the Secretary of State for Georgia, Brad Raffensperger,

where they recorded it and it got released.

And this is the first time that you've heard Donald Trump directly seeking means to overturn

the election with odd hints of threat that were in this call.

And this is what they are going to decide on, whether this amounted to election interference.

And Donald Trump lost the state of Georgia in the 2020 election by 11,780 votes.

Remarkably, Donald Trump says, you've got to find me those votes.

All I want to do is this.

I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state

and flipping the state is a great testament to our country because it's just a testament

that they can admit to a mistake or whatever you want to call it if it was a mistake.

I don't know.

Yeah.

So just find me 11,780 votes.

When you wanted that, you know, where you've wanted something and you could go to your

bank and say, couldn't you just find me another £400,000 so I don't have to pay a mortgage?

Yeah.

I mean, what I find astonishing about this, right, is that in the Trump presidency, there

was always that sense of, well, what would it take to show that this guy was doing wrong?

And sometimes there was sort of speculation, well, if only there was, you know, a tape,

as they were with Watergate, there was a tape, which actually you could hear his voice.

And here we have him literally saying, I just need 11,000 votes.

And even now, I'm sure when this indictment comes, there will be people who say, no, that

doesn't count as election interference.

He didn't mean that.

He didn't mean I need those votes.

He didn't mean find me those votes.

He was just sort of talking sort of off the cuff.

You can't prove what was in his head.

And to me, that just shows how damaged and toxic and completely lost so much of American

democracy is because when you have literally an incumbent president talking to someone

from his own party, who, thank goodness, by the way, and they probably don't even now

get enough credit, that those Republican officials stood true to their oaths of office and stood

true to the Constitution of Georgia and the Constitution of the United States by refusing

to have any truck in any of this.

But that's what he wanted.

And we should never lose sight of that.

The question is, of course, if it was to happen again, people like that, many of them have

been driven out of the Republican Party precisely because they refused to go along with the

big lie.

But what Donald Trump is also doing, we had the indictment last week in Washington and

again over what happened on January the 6th.

And Donald Trump's lawyers are already petitioning to change the judge because they don't like

the judge and they think the judge will be biased and they're also petitioning.

He wants to choose his own judge.

He wants to choose his own judge.

That sounds good.

And he also wants to move the hearing out of Washington, which votes overwhelmingly Democrats.

He wants the case to be heard in West Virginia, which is much more sympathetic.

And it took me back to something, a guy who was Donald Trump's mentor in the 1950s and

60s, a guy called Roy Cohn.

I'm going to go down a little rabbit hole now, the Roy Cohn rabbit hole.

He was chief counsel to Senator McCarthy over the witch hunts, the anti-communist hearings.

I didn't know that.

Is that right?

Yeah.

So he was enjoying this rabbit hole.

Okay.

So he becomes chief counsel to Senator McCarthy.

He then in court, he's a lawyer.

He represents Carmine the cigar galant, Anthony Fattoni Salerno from the from the Simpsons.

He was the head of the Genovese family.

So don't laugh about him.

Okay.

Sorry, Fattoni.

Overweight Tony.

I read one of the biographies, which he said that Roy Cohn was known for extortion, tax evasion,

bribery, blackmail, fraud, perjury and witness tampering.

So this is his background as a lawyer, but he said something that Trump has always stayed

with him.

He's his kind of MO, if you like, his modus operandi.

And Roy Cohn said, I'm not interested in what the law is.

I'm interested in who the judge is.

And you can see Donald Trump is playing that playbook today, facing these legal challenges

where he doesn't give a damn what the law is.

It's about who the judge is and trying to manipulate things so that you will get a sympathetic

judge who will hear your case.

And if you ever hear Donald Trump talking about Roy Cohn, which he has quite a lot,

he talks about him in these venerated, exalted tones, as if he was the greatest lawyer.

He was eventually struck off for trying to persuade a very wealthy client who was dying

to change his will to make it all in favor of Roy Cohn.

I mean, there was a suggestion on the American papers of the weekend to say that they might

be able to reach a compromise of moving it to Virginia, because I mean, I can see that

if you're thinking about the legitimacy of it, and even though I'm sure that the jurors

in DC will be absolutely fine and fair, I can see that if you're thinking from the federal

government's point of view that you know how this is going to play, that maybe you want

to try and do everything you can to uphold and protect and augment as much of the legitimacy

as possible.

So maybe you move it, not to West Virginia, but you move it to Virginia, which is purple

and roughly 50-50 or mildly democratic.

Do you think though, and we had a Republican pollster on Friday, and it reminded me of

something that you said when the first indictment dropped around the porn star stuff and the

hush money and everything like that, he was saying that he thinks the sheer number of

indictments is working to his favor, because it simply starts to look like the whole legal

system in often democratic states, not Georgia, but often democratic states, is against you.

And I did think that maybe there was something in that as sort of objectively unfair as it

might be.

I mean, I'm sure that in each individual place, the prosecutors are acting properly, because

America's justice system fundamentally is a good one, an affair one, but I can see that

if you were simply thinking about which cases really matter, and there was one person in

charge of it all, which there isn't, you might have said, well, we'll focus on the Georgia

case and we'll focus on the January 6th case, because they are of such utmost seriousness.

What do you think?

Do you think that's probably right?

That Donald Trump is going to have a multi-layered approach and part of it is legal and part

of it is public opinion.

The legal case is I was entitled to free speech.

I passionately believed that I won the presidential election in 2020.

Nothing has ever happened that has dissuaded me of that view, and therefore I was exercising

my First Amendment rights.

I mean, that also has the danger that Donald Trump looks delusional, that he couldn't accept

the evidence of everybody around him who was there advising him saying, Donald, you lost.

You lost.

It's as simple as that.

It's very general on all the rest of it.

So that is the danger that Donald Trump looks.

The defense is, I believe it, but I'm probably delusional, which is not a great look for

going into the 2024 election.

The other case is, yeah, look, I mean, I think that the case in New York was attention seeking

and I think that the legal mechanisms that were being used to try to bring that case

are questionable.

But American law and justice does not work like that, where you kind of take on, well,

let's just have one big case and not do these other things.

Also, I think the idea of moving state where you can hear a case, if you believe in the

justice system, if you believe in the rule of law and due process, then you trust 12

American citizens, true and good, to hear the evidence available and make their judgment

accordingly on the balance of probability.

And therefore, if you start saying, well, you can't get a fair trial in this state or

that state or somewhere else, you can't get a trial in Kansas because it's too Republican,

you can't get a fair trial in Seattle because it's too liberal, then you're saying there

is no proper justice.

And so I think that the idea of moving the state in which a case is held is ridiculous.

Yeah, and the truth is, it's not as if, I mean, you could find a state and a judge which

Trump really liked or was Republican.

He'd chosen them.

You know, you could imagine a situation in which he was a Trump appointee and it's not

as if at the end of it, Trump would then go, okay, fair enough, it's all fine.

You know, of course not.

They're always going to find something.

They're always going to attack the legitimacy of any institution, of any set of norms, anybody,

any set of rules, any set of people they can if they stand in their way.

So in a way, it kind of really doesn't matter in terms of who the judge is and who the jurors

are and where it is, because it's not as if Trump and his team will at any point take

it at face value and engage in it in good spirit and good faith.

Donald Trump is never going to utter the words, I accept I was wrong quite.

It's never going to happen.

So to wait for that mythical moment where finally a jury will decide, a judge will decide,

there will be a verdict and he will say, it's a fair cop.

It is never going to happen.

It is not part of his DNA.

And there was a really telling clip the day before polling day in 2020 where Donald Trump

went over to a place called Roslyn, just the other side of the river into Virginia from

Washington DC to thank his campaign workers and he does this sound bite for the cameras

or he's speaking to the campaign workers and if he says, I win, that would be great.

If I lose, I can't accept losing.

He was already saying the day before polling day, he would not accept defeat because that

is not part of Donald Trump's.

He was Mexican and therefore he was never going to accept it and never will accept it.

Well, he's obviously in pensive and thoughtful mood as a result of all these cases, John,

because he's been sharing some of his thoughts, not on the legal cases, but via truth social

about the women's football team, the US women's football team who lost in the women's World

Cup and he had his own analysis on this, probably auditioning for the rest of his football.

The shocking and totally unexpected loss by the US women's soccer team to Sweden is fully

emblematic of what is happening to our once great nation under crooked Joe Biden.

Many of our players were openly hostile to America, no other country, bathed in such

a manner or even close, woke equals failure.

Nice shot, Megan.

The USA is going to hell, mega.

So there is the, let's face it, when he was in court last week, he got furious that they

didn't refer to him as President Trump and just refer to him as Mr. Trump.

There is the former president of the United States of America lambasting the American

women's football team and it's just pure Donald Trump.

Apparently she missed a penalty because she's woke.

Like, I'm no football expert, but even I know that that's probably off the mark.

She was thinking woke thoughts about something or other and therefore hit the ball over the

bar.

Yeah, she was just thinking about critical race theory and she just ran up to the ball.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can see how it happens all the time.

We'll be back after the break.

This is the news agents.

Welcome back.

It's not just me that's not wearing any socks and has been away on holiday.

Matt Hancock has been on his holes as well.

Oh, good.

I'm just there where I see the love she sees a friend.

What will it take for her?

If you haven't seen it and we're just listening there, you have to just imagine a gunning

Matt Hancock strolling along a beach and miming lip syncing aggressively to that song.

I mean, when I saw the Barbie movie and I saw Ryan Gosling, I didn't instantly think of

Matt Hancock, but maybe that was a mistake on my part.

Why?

Is he all right?

Is he OK?

Who was filming?

Say, Matt, are you sure?

You're really sure about this?

Yeah, I worry.

I mean, what's next sort of stars of the pandemic like Van Tam on Broadway?

Like Witty takes control of the Bibby Stock Home for TikTok.

Like, I don't know.

It's just it's just getting out of hand, Matt.

Back to the Bibby Stock Home.

I'm more interested in Pippi Longstocking.

There we are.

Let's not bring her into this for God's sake.

Don't give Matt ideas.

We'll be back tomorrow.

We'll see you then.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

This has been a global player original podcast and a Persephoneka production.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.