The News Agents: Suella’s own goal

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This is a global player original podcast.

When you think of the great heroes, the great figures of humanitarian aid,

development around the world, you probably think of people like, you know, Bill Gates or...

Bob Geldof. Bob Geldof even. Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa. You probably don't think about this woman.

Two months ago, the Prime Minister made a promise to the British people.

He said that anyone entering this country illegally

will be detained and swiftly removed. No, no half measures.

The illegal migration bill will fulfill that promise.

It will allow us to stop the boats that are bringing tens of thousands to our shores

in flagrant breach of both... Yep, it's Suella. It's our Suella, the accidental hero,

nay, heroine of international development. Because of an unintended consequence, an own goal,

in the way her illegal migration bill has passed, and we're going to explain

just what's happened on today's episode. Welcome to the news agents.

The news agents. It's Lewis. It's Emily.

And we are going to be talking to you today about a story which hasn't got that much attention,

but we think it's actually going to be really, really... Well, it's going to really matter

in terms of public spending, but potentially in politics as well. This all goes back to...

And we've covered it on this show many times now. This all goes back, as we were saying,

to the Illegal Migration Act, then bill, which was really rammed through Parliament

over the course of the last year or so less. And the government obviously had a political

imperative to do that. It didn't really matter that it came hot on the heels of the nationality

and borders bill passed under the Johnson government and the Patel home secretary ship,

which we were told would solve the small boats crisis. But because Sunak had made,

stopping the boats, stopping the boats, stopping the boats, one of the cornerstones of his

premiership, he needed something to be able to point to. He needed something to be able to say

that, yes, the boats are coming now, but help is on the way. And that was coming in the form

of the Illegal Migration Bill Act, which would be really draconian. It would effectively criminalise

the prospect of claiming asylum irregularly in the UK. Anyone who arrives in a small boat,

then you are not an asylum seeker. You are not a refugee. The UK government would have the

legal power it never had before to instantly say you are effectively a criminal and therefore

outside of the asylum seeker system. And that's why that name was so important,

that you would be calling everyone who arrived by small boat an illegal immigrant, not an asylum

seeker, because the government argues they had all come from a safe country. In other words,

they'd come from France if they were catching small boats, they'd come from somewhere that was safe

in the country they'd just left. What has happened, however, is that in redesignating asylum seekers

as illegal immigrants, they have cut off a source of potential funding worth billions of pounds.

And we're going to try and explain to you why. Because up until this point, if you were an asylum

seeker, money spent on your welfare, and that includes housing, was coming from the Department

of Aid. International development could be spent on asylum seekers. As soon as this bill changes

its name to make all asylum seekers illegal migrants, the overseas aid department cannot spend money

on helping those people. And where does that money come from instead? The Home Office,

it comes from the very part of government that should be spending on your welfare,

on everything to do with roads and protection and police and security and fighting terrorism,

and all the money that people think is going to keeping this country safe.

It is literally the law, political law of unintended consequences, that in saying that

we're going to be really harsh and draconian in this and we're going to make all people who arrive

illegal immigrants and we're going to put that in law, suddenly you open up a whole different set

of problems. And the reason we're talking about this today is because of something that the

Independent Commissioner for Aid Impact has said, which doesn't sound like a very glamorous title,

but they're basically the body which scrutinizes non-governmental body, they're not controlled

by the government, but they're funded by it. They scrutinize all UK aid spending and they have said

that the Home Office will not be able to classify the cost of supporting refugees in country once

the illegal immigration act comes into full force. And so the net effect of that, as Emily was saying,

is that huge amounts of money are going to have to be found. And let's just take a step back here,

which is to say that the aid budget, which itself has been shrinking under the Sunak Premiership

and indeed his chancellorship, because we used to spend 0.7% of our GDP on aid, which is the

international target. Sunak said we couldn't afford to do that for a few years, so he brought

it down to 0.5%. So the pie was already shrinking. But it is amazing just how much of the aid budget

we have come to be spending on hotels in this country, on putting up asylum seekers in this

country. Nearly a third of it at the moment we're spending on that. The UK aid development office,

which is now part of the foreign office, rather than being a separate department, have basically

had to stop loads and loads of programs all over the world instead of spending it on, you know,

flooding in Pakistan, or the famine we're seeing in East Africa. Instead of doing all of those

things, it's spending them on hotel chains, among other things, in Britain. And now potentially

that money, the development office could end up being very happy, but that money instead

is going to have to be found from the Treasury or the Home Office itself.

Joining us now is Sarah Champion. She's the Chair of the International Development Select

Committee, who was warning that this was coming down the line with the new illegal immigration

bill. We've been trying to tell the government for months that they were going to have an own goal

if they went forward with the illegal migration bill, because for over a year now, they've been

spending foreign aid to pay for the hotel bills of refugees coming over the channel and coming

through routes which they're deeming illegal. And what they've now managed to do is stop that use

of funding. It might not mean an end to that source of funding from the overseas development,

from the aid budget at all, that they can see a way around this. They're not breaking the law,

are they? If they use aid on this? Technically, they will be in breach of the agreement that

they've signed up to. So under the rules, the money that we allocate as overseas aid has to be spent

for the designated reasons. So supporting refugees in our country is a way that they can allocate

and spend this money. So by the enactment of the illegal migration bill, they have effectively

shot themselves in the foot. So what they were doing was using foreign aid to pay for hotels,

for refugees. By saying that those people are now illegal migrants, they have created a situation

where they can't use that money anymore within the rules that they've signed up to. So what's

going to have to happen is two to four billion pounds that they have been spending from the foreign

aid budget is going to have to be found somewhere else. It does seem amazing, given that your committee

were talking about this, and there seems to have been some internal discussion within the

Home Office about it. It seems remarkable nonetheless that the Home Office plowed ahead without

apparently thinking of any provision. Why do you think that's happened?

I caveat this by saying I'm a Labour MP. What we're seeing is a government that's responding in a much

more knee-jerk reaction way. What we're seeing is a government that is ignoring the advice that

civil servants are giving to them. So we actually had the Treasury, the Foreign Office and Home Office

in front of our committee when we were trying to express to them what they were doing was really

against the spirit of the law, and now they're in breach of that law. There just didn't seem to be

the accountability that you would expect on something like this. So I have no doubt that

civil servants were telling them the consequences of the illegal migration bill, but there hasn't

been any planning for where that money is coming from. We've been asking them, who is it that's

going to be footing the bill? What is it you're going to be cutting? And we haven't got any response

to that. So somewhere two to four billion pounds, about six million pounds a day, is going to have

to be found. So something's going to have to be cut as a consequence of this own goal.

So, champion, thanks so much. Thanks for laying that all out for us.

Thank you. I suppose the question talking about law of unintended consequences is,

how did the Home Office not see this coming? Because this is potentially going to have a huge

impact in terms of their spending. Just bear in mind, the cost of the asylum system has nearly

doubled in the year to June 2023 to almost four billion pounds, largely because of the enormous

backlog of people who are in the system are not being cleared out of it. It is almost inconceivable

that they didn't see this coming. And I know that because they were warned that it was coming.

Because about a year ago, last summer, not the one that's just passed, there were civil servants from

DFID, the overseas development, part of government, up in arms at seeing 30% of their budget being

spent on asylum seekers being rehoused here. It's ridiculous. It was a ridiculous amount of money.

Nearly four billion, it was 3.7 billion they were seeing spent on rehousing resettlement of

asylum seekers here. And when this bill changed in July, it rang alarm bells for the select committee,

for ministers who were saying, well, hang on a second, if you're going to call these people

illegal, you can't then go spending aid money on them. They were warned. That's what's extraordinary.

Government ministers were pulled in and they were told that actually, you can't spend aid

money on these people. If you're no longer considering them to be asylum seekers, you're

considering them to be criminals. It's as simple as that. And yet, nobody round that table,

none of the ministers seemed to particularly respond to what they were being told because

they just assumed they could find a loophole. I think it's because this bill was always about

being a placeholder. I mean, and I suppose this is the point of this story, right, which is this

bill hasn't even been, if you ask the Home Office about this, they'll say, well, the laws or the

powers of the act haven't even been invoked yet. So they haven't actually classified anyone as a

non asylum seeker, but as an illegal migrant yet. And so therefore, they can still use the money

from the development budget on them. But then that begs another question, which is, then what was

the bloody point of the act then? They've now had the powers for several months. Remember that we

were told this was the act that was going to bring this situation or partly going to be at least

the thing that brought this situation under control. And yet it hasn't been used. It hasn't

been employed. None of the powers have been employed about it. The act was to send out a political

signal. Totally. We know how highly Sunat rates the solving of the small boats problem. But what

costs for a signal? Right. And we know that this was about telling the electorate that they were,

if you like, on top of small boats, and they did not want Britain to be seen as an attractive

place for anyone coming here. And that means turning around and saying they're not asylum

seekers anymore. If they're coming from France, they are illegals. And once you've done that,

you've created a whole brand new problem in how you have to spend that money. I mean,

I'll say at the moment, while we're waiting for the Supreme Court decision on Rwanda, we can't

operationalize the policy until then, which isn't true. They could find other ways of

operationalizing it. But the point is, is that this is an act which so far has done nothing and

potentially has the effects of costing them and costing all of us a huge amount of money.

By the way, I mean, this whole thing about paying for asylum seekers out of the development

budget is itself kind of crazy. Because what incentive is there for the Home Office, and this

is something Parliament itself has said, what incentive is there for the Home Office to actually

take out or to actually resolve any of the asylum seeker cases? There is right now,

no incentive for them to do so. Not only that. They're not costing them anything. It's costing

the development budget something. Yeah, but I'd also say that when people say, oh, we shouldn't

try and take people out of their own home, it's wrong to have, you know, an asylum system that

takes people away from their own homes. The response is always, yeah, why don't we give

more money to kind of helping people in their homelands, helping people who are fleeing civil

war, helping people who are fleeing, you know, climate change and droughts and starvation.

The money was meant to be going to those people to help them stay in their countries of origin

in their homes. And this was money that was being spent on rehousing them in kind of crazy

hotels around the country. Instead of spending it on holiday and expresses in the other room.

We'll be back just after this.

This is The News Agents.

Welcome back or not welcome back as we're now saying. We're still here.

They wouldn't say that in schools, would they? And we have spent the entire week avoiding the

back to school jokes. But Lindsay Hoyle, the dear speaker in the House of Commons,

walks straight into one today and he could not hide his excitement about being back at school

and being able to tell his MPs in the Commons to STF you.

I understand people are excited to be back at school. Will we expect better behavior? Prime

Minister. I mean, it's often, it's often said that Westminster is like a school,

but it's not usually kind of explicitly said, like everyone needs to calm down, you know,

go outside. He loves it. He loves the sort of sense that he is the only kind of grown up in

the room and they're all basically just fumbling kids. And it was a sort of good example of that

because we all knew what Keir Starmer was going to go on today. He was going to go on the rack

crumbling concrete in schools. And sure enough, it was like this Anton B have gone round, you know,

the UK visiting all the crumbling schools. And we got mention of Graves End, we got mention of Essex,

we got mention of Wood Green, we got mention of Brentford, we got mention of Darlington.

This is Keir Starmer telling us that he's been out and about in the country and he gets it and

he gets real people's problems and real parents and real kids problems with the enormity of this

potential problem of the crumbling concrete. And he tried to contrast that with Rishi Sunak

and with the Education Secretary referring to her refurbishment, as we did in fact,

of her own office. I bet she's got a cracking roof.

Yeah, cracking. Or not a cracking roof. No, not a cracking roof. But a 34 million pound

roof. Yeah. I mean, look, this was the first time Sunak had been outside of a pool interview context,

had been put under pressure about this. I mean, it wasn't like the most electrifying PMQs and

it didn't really move things on much in terms of the concrete story. But what it was for me more

than anything was testament to the power of and importance of narrative in politics, right? Again

and again, Starmer had a story to tell and a set of phrases which captured it. So here is one

where he's talking about the idea and equating the government's response to being like cowboys

and cowboy builders. The truth is this crisis is the inevitable result of 13 years of cutting

corners, botched jobs, sticking plaster politics. It's the sort of thing you expect

from cowboy builders saying that everyone else is wrong, everyone else is to blame,

protesting they've done an effing good job, even if the ceiling falls in.

I'm slightly worried that John Sopor is infecting British politics with bad language.

Ever since he started swearing, everyone just started swearing. I mean, Starmer does this

sometimes. Starmer did that to imitate Keegan because the one phrase of the week.

It's not about John and it's probably not even about Starmer. But I don't think it's a natural

swear. No, he does this sometimes. He does. When he was on the ropes against Johnson sometimes

and talking about him, he would just randomly swear. I think the Boris Johnson's a total

bullshitter. Like he would just do that and kind of, you know, because I think it made him think

he sounded a bit hard. Yeah, well, we all do that. Well, you do. I don't know what you do all the time.

But the point about this is Starmer has now whether he deploys it as effectively as he could is

another matter for what he does have and what the Labour Party has. And we've seen this in their very

effective use of social media in the past few days. They've really been on it. They have a powerful

narrative to tell about Sunak, his government, and to some extent themselves, twin narratives,

one that this is a crumbling country, which is literally being demonstrated before our eyes,

and two that they are feckless and incapable of seeing the problem. And Sunak, by contrast,

and compare this to, say, Johnson, for example, before him, has almost no narrative at all,

either about himself or about the Labour Party. And we saw this a little bit in PMQs before in

the last session. And you're really seeing it now. And you saw it today, really brought to life.

It's like sometimes he is scrambling around on the floor looking for any old beaten up weapon

that he can use to try and take Starmer on. And it's like the kind of often the greatest hits

of the last 13 years, you know, there's no money left, the Liam Byrne note. We even heard about

lockdown in this, right? He's the guy who wanted our kids to be locked up for longer. He's Captain

Hindsight. And all of these things, to some extent or other, were effective at the time,

in some cases, extremely effective. But now it just doesn't feel like they're landing.

Mr Speaker, before today, he never once raised this issue with me in Parliament. It wasn't

even worthy of a single mention in his so-called landmark speech on education this summer. And

if we'd listened to him, our kids would have been off school and locked down for longer.

It's as simple as that. He talks about 13 years. Well, let's see what happened. When we came into

office, two thirds of school were good and outstanding. Now it's 90%, Mr Speaker. Given

that he knew, we all knew, that Kirste Armer was going to go on the school's concrete issue.

I think Rishi Suneck should have honed his responses better. Because he couldn't decide

whether to say, it's actually not that big a problem. Most schools are okay, which is what

their social media strategy has sort of tried to do. Or whether to say, if it was such a big

problem, why didn't you mention it before? Or to say, you govern Wales, Labour governs Wales.

Why haven't you talked about the problems in Wales then? Or to say, actually, we're on it

and you're trying to lock down our kids again, sort of going back to the golden hits of the

Covid era. And I think the fact that, as you said, his response was kind of scattergun in terms of

where he was aiming suggests somebody who, for all we talk about Rishi being a man of detail,

he's across the detail, he's on it. He didn't sound like that today. And he did come up with a few

interesting bits of data. And one of them I thought was worth double checking. And he said,

actually, the whole building schools for the future project was a massive overspend and it

targeted the wrong things. And 80% of the schools in the country weren't included. And so I thought,

well, actually, let's check that. And when we went back to look at the sort of details on that,

obviously, building schools as a project was only for secondary schools, not for primary schools.

And I think the Prime Minister has probably elided all of the schools in the country into that.

And again, is trying to look at something that Labour was doing in what, 2008, 2009? It does seem

a long time ago. Quite a few of the voters were themselves literally in schools at that time.

So, you know, like trying to dredge up. They could tell us about their own ceiling. Well,

quite so. I mean, Sunak himself was probably what in his early 30s at that time. And talking

about that stuff about being a man of detail. And I suspect he might have to correct the record.

We heard him there saying, oh, well, Stammer, you know, he didn't even mention it in his

school speech. I mean, no sooner had he said that virtually two minutes later,

I get pinged on my phone, you know, like so many other political journalists

from Labour HQ saying, actually, he did, that he Stammer did mention, albeit in passing,

he did mention school buildings. Here it is.

A respect to the fact that he's just factually wrong about that. As you say, Emily, he's a guy

who always says, you know, I'm a man of detail, etc. So that's a problem. The whole framing was a

weird one. He basically kept saying, you didn't mention it. Yeah, it might be a problem. I didn't

hear you mentioning it, which is such a weird political defense. It's like saying, oh, well,

yeah, the building's on fire, but I haven't seen you ring for the fire brigade. It's just so odd.

What I would say, though, and this is something that comes after PMQs is we still haven't heard

a commitment from Labour as to whether they would want to re-energize the building schools for the

future project or whatever its new incarnation would. In other words, do they want to spend the

money on it? Do they want to actually put new funding into this? And actually, at the moment,

Labour have found this perfect sort of sweet spot, which is you scrapped this thing that we were

doing that was great, and now the chickens have come home to roost, and it's all terrible.

If you turn that round and go, so sorry, just to clarify, would a Labour government in power

then spend that money? I haven't yet heard the answer.

Well, no, and there's no answer. I mean, basically, if you look beyond all the froth,

the thing that really matters in this is whoever is controlling the Treasury, are they going to pay

for school improvements and rebuilding and the removal of the rack

out of existing capital budgets or the existing school budget, or are they not?

That's the only real question, and that's the thing that's going to have

import, because if the answer is it's coming out of existing budgets, then clearly that has

all sorts of other knock-on effects in the sense that it means that, basically,

you want that school hall that you were going to have replaced? That's gone.

But I'll tell you why I think it's bigger than that, because we've looked at schools,

and of course that's on everyone's minds, because it's the start of term,

and we know that it started with a collapsing roof back in August.

But the question is, as soon as you say all these buildings are potentially dangerous,

you are opening a full can of worms here, not just in your schools, but as we said,

in care homes, in hospitals, in the courts, potentially even in Parliament as well.

And it's a bit like the cladding over Grenfell.

Totally.

If you're saying none of this stuff can stay, you are essentially embarking on possibly the

biggest capital spending, you're talking about re-looking at every single newly built roof

that might contain the wrong sort of concrete before you think that we are living in a safe

country again. And that, actually, for any government, for any colour or stripe,

is a fairly major commitment to have to make when there is no money.

No, indeed. And there are more and more questions about what Keegan knew when and how she responded

to it. I've got my hands on the document that has been sent around from the Department for Education

to other departments, the kind of technical note explaining why they've made the decisions

that they've come to. It's quite a technical document, but I think there are two paragraphs

in particular which stand out in relation to the timeline. And that is, there's a paragraph here

which says this, in May 2023, the department was informed in confidence of a panel having failed

at Queen Victoria School Dunblane, which had become perched, quotes, on a piece of steel work

allowing the panel's condition to be inspected. Goes on to say, the technical report from this

stated that the failure of a single panel which does not appear to have been subjected to any

additional localised load is of significant concern. This would suggest that any of the

existing adjacent panels are equally as likely to suffer from potential failure. So that happened

in May 2023. And then in August 2023, a few paragraphs later, it says that they became aware

of a school in England where pieces of rack had fallen off the edge of a plank that had previously

been rated as non-critical. And the assessments report said, due to Builder's work fixing,

there is an increased risk of the concrete spalling. It requires inspection on a regular

basis. So this is happening between May and August. This is what Keegan's responding to,

but if they're aware of that in May, a lot of time, a lot of water passes under the bridge

from May onwards. So questions within government as to why the DFE and Keegan have taken the

decisions that they took and when. And you can see in the papers today, there is more and more

pressure on Keegan personally. I mean, there's a lot of negative briefing about her in the

Telegraph. In the Telegraph of all places, that doesn't come out of nowhere. It doesn't come

out of the air. There is a crosshair on her now in government and across different departments

because they're increasingly thinking that she's a liability.

They've also published the 147 schools, as they said they would, so we now know exactly

which schools are facing these difficulties. And the problem with that, of course, is that we are

now hearing the testimony from head teachers in their schools who can tell you exactly when they

were first alerted, in one case, just last Thursday, exactly how many buildings they've

lost, in one case, 22 buildings, including all the science, all the computer labs, all the maths

and English classrooms. You're starting to actually understand the detail on a very human scale.

So rather than this kind of just becoming political aether and froth, once you actually get the names,

once you get the head teachers, once you start to invite cameras into your schools and show

people like us exactly what is now out of bounds, closing down, unusable, or massively

dangerous and at risk, I think that there will be more heat on this story, actually,

because you see how it's impacting kids who are only just going back this week.

We'll be back just after this.

This is The News Agents.

Some breaking news. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has been sentenced to 22 years in prison

for charges, including seditious conspiracy. This becomes the longest sentence so far among

all January 6 cases. That was about the former Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, who was described

as the ultimate leader of the Proud Boys, this sort of far-right fascist group of white

nationalists who basically were behind so much of the January 6 riot. And of all the

thousand or so people that have been sentenced after January 6, this is the longest sentence,

an extraordinary sentence of 22 years in prison for somebody who wasn't actually there on the day.

Yeah. And Trump has said previously that should he become president, it won't be just himself

he'll be pardoning, but he'll be pardoning so many of the people like the Proud Boys

who were involved in whatever form in January the 6th.

Yeah. And what is I think really interesting about this conviction is the wording that has

been used because Tarrio is convicted of seditious conspiracy and of obstructing the congressional

proceeding, which is meant to confirm the presidential election of 2020. In other words,

what we call the attempt to overturn democracy and over attempt to turn

the rightful president. Now, if you look at what we've been talking about on the news

agents USA overnight, it's about amendment 14. And amendment 14 is this very old post-Civil War

clause, which suggests that Donald Trump himself could be removed from the ballot paper

because of sedition and insurrection, because of his role in attempting to overturn democracy.

Now, there's a lot of back and forth at the moment amongst historians, amongst

constitutionalists, amongst lawyers in the US as to whether or not you could actually use this very

remote, arcane amendments, how that would actually play. You know, could you really

actually remove Donald Trump's name from the ballot paper? But this question of sedition

comes in here to an actual prison conviction, 22 years from a man who wasn't even there.

I mean, this case sort of working from home to new heights.

I mean, it's not a bad constitutional provision, is it? Not allowing someone to be president who has

been involved in sedition. Well, the point is it's, I mean, it sounds very obvious to us,

but we should remember it was introduced post-Civil War. Yeah, to talk about people who were

trying to raise militias and armies against the other side, right? Yeah, totally. Do you have a

favorite amendment to the constitution? Well, I'm warming to 14 because I feel like I've sort of

talked about it quite well. 21st is the repealing of prohibition. Oh, no, I don't like the 18th.

The 18th is a nightmare. I mean, very rightly. But just to go back to this, I think what we're

seeing here is a concrete judicial process, nailing somebody to the floor to prison for 22 years

for conspiracy to overturn democracy for sedition, for, you know, in other words, for treason.

And how does that play into the whole question of whether Trump, who can also say, oh, I didn't

march down to the Capitol, I was in my little weird tent at the time, does that then put him in a

place where he is then convicted of seditious behavior? So Emily, we might have been conducting

a little bit of sedition of our own today, a little conspiracy of our own, because it is your

birthday, isn't it? September the 6th. So are you just letting me ramble on so nobody cares about that?

No, it's fine. It's all, it's all, it's all worthy stuff. But I do know, we do know you do love a

quiz, don't you? I do love a quiz. You do love a quiz. So we thought we might do this.

It wants to be a millionaire. Got that one.

Emily Maitlis is September the 6th today. Your specialist subject is September the

6th and how it relates to Emily Maitlis. Just a few questions here. Who is the odd one out?

Pippa Middleton, Tim Henman, Robert Mugabe or Emily Maitlis? Tim Henman. Why do you think it's

Tim Henman? It's the only one who plays good tennis. What? Are you saying Robert Mugabe

wasn't a good tennis player? I think he wasn't. I think he might have been. Actually, it's

Robert Mugabe because all of those other people were born on September the 6th,

but Mugabe died on September the 6th. He died on a birthday. Yes. Oh, well, I should be. Miss

that one. You must have been on holiday that day. You must have been. I must have been working hard

on my birthday. Yeah. Which president was closest to you in age when he became president?

Oh, I'm going to say Truman. No, it's not Truman. Go on. It's Jimmy Carter. The one who's still alive,

I'm glad to say. Yes, indeed. I think Truman was pretty close to me, actually. Truman because

he was vice president. Ideologically? Eleanor Roosevelt called him in and it's a great story.

Eleanor Roosevelt called him in and said, Truman, my husband's died and Truman said,

what can I do for you? And she said, no, no, the problem is yours now. What can I do for you?

He was 60. No, we're near. No, we're near. Who was vice president when you were born?

Oh, vice president. Spice president. Who was spice president? Spicy. Had all the turmeric.

No, I don't know. Spyro Agnew. Spyro Agnew. Good old Spyro. Who's name. Corrupt Spyro.

Who's name was lent to Jake Hoover's dog. Is that right? Lovely. Which South African state

became independent on September the 6th, 1968? Current monarch is Maswati III. Swaziland. Very

good. Currently known as, I mean, that is its old name, I mean. Yes, but then I am old.

You only use country names when you were born. Oh, I see. Yes, Ceylon and all that.

Liz Truss became prime minister this day in September 2022. Can you name three of the six

members of her cabinet who are still there today? She had in Grant Shaps. Well, he was

going to be okay. He came back, but yeah, okay, you can have that one. Oh, no, still there today.

I'm going to say Grant Shaps because I think why not? Yeah, I'm going to say Suella.

Suella correct. Famously. Yep. She then resigned shortly afterwards, but came back. Yep. And

I'm going to say... Tom's got it in the box. Go on, Tom in the box. Oh, aren't you cleverly?

Yeah, cleverly. James Cleverly. James Cleverly. Penny Morden, Kemi, Chris Eaton,

Harris, Alistair Jack and Michelle Donnellan. And finally... Well, Michelle Donnellan,

yes, she is there, but she's on the list. Finally, what was Snoopy's original name?

Andrew. I think you'll find. It should have been. It's actually very close. Sniffy.

Oh, okay. Which is quite appropriate. What can I say? Yeah. I love my quiz.

Well, we'll be back tomorrow. We'll do it again next year. We shouldn't have given the answers. We

should have made them hold us up so down. Google's ruined that. Also, because of Anton

Deight, you can't do any competitions these days anyway. Thanks a bunch, lads. Thanks. See you

tomorrow. Bye. The newsagents with Emily Maitlis, John Sopo and Lewis Goodall.

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My brother-in-law died suddenly, and now my sister and her kids have to sell their home.

That's why I told my husband we could not put off getting life insurance any longer.

An agent offered us a 10-year $500,000 policy for nearly $50 a month. Then we called Select Quote.

Select Quote found us identical coverage for only $19 a month. A savings of $369 a year. Whether you

need a $500,000 policy or a $5 million policy, Select Quote could save you more than 50% on

term life insurance. For your free quote, go to SelectQuote.com. SelectQuote.com. That's

SelectQuote.com. Select Quote. We shop. You save. Full details on example policies at SelectQuote.com.

slash commercials.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.