James O'Brien - The Whole Show

00:02 This is a Global Player original podcast. 00:06 It's three minutes after 10. You are listening to James O'Brien on LBC. The reason I mentioned Alan Milburn a moment, a short moment ago, is because he is, of course, leading the review into Britain's crisis in youth worklessness. And he is nothing if not thorough. 00:24 His latest intervention is, to my mind, extraordinary. 00:29 He is suggesting that primary schools in England, so that are the schools, you know this already, but just to double check, the schools that children attend up to the age of 11, 11 years old. 00:41 Primary schools should be required to identify children at risk of leaving education at 16 without finding a job. 00:49 So, I mean, it's not quite minority report territory, which, of course, looks at the likelihood or the imminent inevitability of somebody currently. non-criminals committing a crime at a specified point in the future but it does feel a little bit um not dystopian because it's not necessarily a bad thing to be doing but certainly um what's the word that i'm looking for uh it's a bit sci-fi isn't it it's a bit science fiction primary schools in england should be required to identify children at risk of leaving education at 16 without finding a job um And I think all I really want to do this morning is ask you how you do that. 01:34 He said, the warning signs are there from a very early age, a very early, early age. You know, frankly, from preschool. So definitely primary schools should be identifying children who are at risk of being neat. And secondary schools and other services should be intercepting, intervening, supporting and helping those young people to get on a different path. 01:59 And I mean, I've bored you rigid, I think, over the years on why I find this sort of stuff so fascinating. Well, actually, do you know what? I hope I haven't bored you rigid. But I'm conscious that I might have bored you rigid over the years with part of the reason why I find this so fascinating. And the reason I labor the point is because I... 02:21 I don't want you to think I'm being all holier than thou. My interest in it is not born entirely of the idea that, oh, we've got to help the underprivileged. We've got to help the people who aren't like me, you know, exercising your middle class privilege. I have an image in my mind of me without having had the advantages that I had from a very early age as a consequence in large part of being adopted, as we talked about with Carol Homden from Coram earlier this week. And that means, of course, that I'm wondering what I would have been like, what my adulthood would have been like, what my childhood would have been like, what my attainment levels would have been, what my academic performance would have been like if I hadn't had the upbringing that I had. 03:04 I don't know that I can communicate to you unless you have a background a bit like mine. I don't know if I can communicate to you how absolutely fascinating I find this. 03:14 I think it might be where a lot of my politics comes from. 03:17 Actually, there's this idea of the, oh, you know that I am repelled by people who were born three nil up and think they scored a hat trick. You know, I was adopted three nil up, if you like, rather than born three nil up. But it never for a moment occurred to me that that meant that I was possessed of particular gifts or attributes. But the gifts and attributes that I was possessed of would not have flourished or been able to grow in different soil. 03:47 Listen, I'm not suggesting for a minute that nobody born into a poor socioeconomic background can't excel or achieve. But I don't think you're not really going to argue with me, are you, over the idea that it is a huge, huge signifier. The context, the environment, the family, the background, the education, the early years that you enjoy or endure will have an enormous impact on what follows. 04:16 It's at the heart of almost everything, actually. I think it's probably where the word comes from, isn't it? Educate, to lead out. If you take it from the Latin, you're leading out from childhood to the adult. And you've got the Jesuits who used to say that if you give me a boy at seven, I'll give you the man at 18. The idea that our childhood influences and experiences do not influence enormously our adult is, well, I don't even think I need to make that point any more powerfully. 04:48 Think of it, if you like, as Jenny's just, Johnny, forgive me, as a sliding doors moment. Who would you be if you weren't currently you? 04:59 It's not quite a phoning question, that, is it? But I'll do it one day. Who would you be if you weren't currently you? So you would have exactly the same DNA, right? You'd have exactly the same genetic makeup. 05:13 Your hair would be the same color. Your body shape would be more or less identical, although, of course, you may... 05:20 reflect some of the socioeconomic evidence regarding obesity and diet and socioeconomic condition. But everything else would be different. You don't have to be Philip Larkin, do you, to think that your mum and dad may be responsible for messing you up. But equally, your mum and dad may be responsible... For giving you the qualities, the beautiful qualities that you possess as an adult. I just can't. I can't express to you how... I mean, you must have heard me go on about it a lot over the years. 05:50 But I cannot express to you satisfactorily how utterly fascinating I find it. And it's why I think we circle back together so often... 06:00 Two elements of the so-called neat crisis, because it's a central tenet of Christianity, I think, that there but for the grace of God go I. So you look at somebody who has been dealt or is being dealt a really rubbish hand of cards. and intrinsic not only to christian doctrines and i'm sure other religions as well but also to that difference between empathy and sympathy which i think it was charlie and newton abbott when we were talking about men's mental health and and people's responses to his travails and difficulties the difference between sympathy and empathy sympathy is putting an arm around someone and saying poor you and meaning it empathy is is understanding empathy is like god yeah that must be awful for you That must be, you know, beginning to imagine what it might be like to be that person. 06:49 So Christianity teaches there but for the grace of God go I. Empathy teaches the idea that what you are going through is not your fault. And education teaches or gives you skills that you can deploy to end up in different places. 07:06 Who would you be if you were not you? So I, just to drive the point home before we get to the phone in question, I would have been the illegitimate son of a 16-year-old Irish farmer's daughter who got pregnant at 15 and didn't want to stay with the man that had got her pregnant. There's quite a bit of detail in the paperwork that I found and dug out of the attic, to be honest with you, when I wanted to apply for an Irish passport. 07:36 And that's who I would have been. I'd have been the illegitimate son of a rural, well, obviously, it wouldn't be an urban farm, would it, in the middle of Ireland. But I would be the illegitimate son of a single teenage mother in a country that was under the extraordinarily oppressive influence of the Catholic Church, which, of course, we've subsequently discovered the full, or not perhaps the full, but the horrors of what many Catholic priests were inflicting upon children. 08:07 that the illegitimate son of a teenage mother in rural Ireland, a teenage farmer's daughter, not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, there is no earthly way that I would be me today if I'd stayed there. 08:21 Is there? 08:23 There's just no way I'd be me. And yet, of course... 08:27 I'd be me. And that's a massive sliding door. There's loads of little ones. You know, if your mum or your dad didn't smack you when you were little, would you be different today if they didn't shout at you a lot and you are still frightened of loud noises or you still nurse anxiety? If you hadn't had that teacher who turned you on to maths or drama or English literature or poetry or physics or carpentry or whatever it was, if you'd not had that teacher, if your parents didn't instil in you enthusiasms for things that they were enthusiastic about, if your dad didn't drive you to your athletics meetings, who would you be today? 09:02 Who would you be today? Because you wouldn't quite be you. All these little variables, some are enormous, like mine, you know, full on. 09:11 adoption and there's lots of negatives to be taken away from that primal um relationship that first relationship you're responding to the smells and the sounds and the noises and you the womb even it's still fresh in your memory and suddenly you're somewhere else it's bound to affect you a lot of us spend our lives convincing ourselves that it doesn't but it must right i mean it just must to varying degrees and then right through to little things Right through to little things like being forced to eat semolina at school and snotting and snivelling and crying into the bowl because you had an absolute basket case of a teacher standing over you and forcing you to shovel this muck into your mouth. 09:52 You carry that today. 09:54 It will explain in some part your relationship with food or your relationship with something. And how much do we really know about everybody else's lives? Particularly if you bring it down to class and education, which seem to me to be the drivers of almost everything in this country, class, education, and family. 10:16 In fact, it's education and family, isn't it? Because class is an intrinsic part of both of those things. 10:22 And then when Alan Milburn says, you can tell before primary school that not all of the children, but the children most likely to end up leaving school with no qualifications. 10:36 Just sit with that for a while. 10:39 21st century, supposedly one of the wealthiest countries in the history of humanity, currently one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. I know it doesn't feel that way because, of course, they calculate it by adding up all the money, not by dividing it between the number of people that are actually living here and trying to scratch a living. So you sit there and you know that they... 11:03 they think they can tell at the age of four, five, six, who's most likely to leave school at the age of 16 without any prospect of a job or entering into employment or training. Now, half of you, I mean half of you, not half of the audience listening, half of you or 52% of you is thinking, yeah, well, this is blimmin' obvious, James. Of course it is. 11:28 But then the other half of you, if you're anything like me, is thinking... 11:33 God, that's mad. How can we still be on these rails? How can we still be stuck in these furrows? How can we still be stuck in these tracks? 11:45 But we are. 11:47 And I don't want to use phrases like hand-wringing. I was about to. I'm just sort of editing myself. 11:55 It's right to address these issues from the end of the process. Of course it is. Otherwise, you're consigning 1 million 16 to 24 year olds to a lifetime of borderline oblivion. It's right to say, how can we help the young people who are currently needs? How can we help them? 12:13 get into employment education or training. But my goodness me, when you suddenly clock what Alan Milburn's talking about today, the idea of stopping the conveyor belt of needs at the beginning of the process is an absolute no-brainer, right? What's the best way of making sure that 10, 20 years from now, let's say 15, between 10 and 20 years from now, we don't still have a million young people not in education, employment or training. And variables aside, what's the best way of doing it? 12:46 Well, spotting them really, really early. 12:49 then giving them the help that they need I suspect the first bit is much easier than the second bit I'm going to ask you about both bits but I suspect spotting it really early is a lot easier than either working out what help is needed or hardest of all successfully satisfactorily providing it so You know more about this than I do, if you're minded to ring in. There are two, I suppose, approaches to this question that you might adopt. 13:21 One is, I can tell you, James, from the benefits of my experience, I can tell you which, should we say five-year-olds, for the sake of argument? 13:32 Or just under-11s? Which children, which young children... 13:37 are most likely to leave school at 16 without any meaningful qualifications or direction or ambition? How do you spot them? What are the signs that you have clocked? 03456060973. What is Alan Milburn talking about? What is the... 13:59 the red flags, I don't know, the behaviours, the alarm bells that we should be better heeding. It's the first time in more than 10 years that the figure has surpassed a million. But of course, it has, I think, surpassed it before. So this is a systemic problem. This goes back to basics. It goes, but to paraphrase John Major, it goes right back to Not satisfactorily spotting the children who are on this sorry path because I don't imagine anybody wants to be This is a slightly tougher question to answer what was it like to be one of them when you look back now you kind of realize, particularly perhaps, because I don't know how broad your experience is, particularly perhaps when you listen to a very privileged person like me talking about my background and childhood, and I do it a lot because I can't ask you to talk about yours without sharing with you what I think is relevant about mine. 15:01 You look back now and think, do you know what? I think I was doomed when I was five. And you may not have fulfilled that prophecy. I hope you didn't fulfill that prophecy. But you look back now and recognize that you were in precisely the category that Alan Milburn is talking about today. So first question, how do you think you can tell or how do you tell which very young children... are already likely to end their education without any qualifications or directions? 15:37 And secondly, were you one of them? What do you think other people should have spotted about your childhood that might have? And maybe it did. Maybe somebody did. I mean, that was the best story of all, really. That's the call I really want because I'm a... 15:54 I'm a sucker for a good story, for a good luck story. What happened to you that you think pulled you off that path and meant that you didn't end up fulfilling the prophecies that Alan Milburn's work today kind of makes? 16:13 The number you need is 0345 6060 973. I don't know what RONI tools are, risk of NEAT indicator tools. They're already in place in some schools, trying to spot the things that make a young person more likely to be a NEAT. And some of them might be obvious to you, but let's work as we often do together from the principal perspective. 16:34 from first principles, from the very bottom of the story. What are those indicators? 03456060973. And am I talking about you, do you think? Hit the numbers now. You will get through. 16:49 22 minutes after 10. At first glance, it is a little bit science fiction. Alan Milburn says you can spot the pupils at risk of joblessness when they're five, when they're in preschool, and most certainly when they're in primary school. And yet, the more you think about it, the more you find yourself thinking, Yeah, of course you can in many, if not all cases. But what should you be looking for? And don't forget that there will be exceptions. There will be outliers. There'll be children from incredibly difficult backgrounds who somehow managed to thrive in circumstances. And there'll be children of enormous privilege, of great privilege and luck and serendipity. 17:24 who really struggle. That is the rich tapestry of life, if you like. But what would we be looking for? And do you think that this person that we're describing, this mythical child of Alan Milburn's legislation, Alan Milburn's thinking, was you? Was it you? 17:42 Susan Worlingham. Sue, what would you like to say? 17:45 Hello, yes, I'd like to talk about the parents, because parents need... I don't want to judge the parents, but surely that's where it all starts. Rich language experiences, play-based activities, talking with them, guiding them, all of this sort of nurtures curiosity. 18:02 So what would I be looking for at school, at primary school, or even preschool, that would provide me with the indicators of whether or not that was happening satisfactorily? 18:10 Well, children who arrive perhaps with speech delay or not able to have social cues with other children. Also, parents who don't seem really engaged perhaps with their kids and don't come to meetings at the school. I'm a former deputy head and class teacher for many years. And, you know, I think it starts right at the beginning. And it's not about judging the parents. It's about there's no support for parents in terms of not training. But, you know, these family hubs are quite good because that's where it used to be. Sure. Start. You encourage parents. 18:41 You nurture them. We talk about child development. You talk about enriching their language. 18:46 This is another Osborne's razor. scenario if things have got worse as a consequence of sure start being closed down then the responsibility lies at the feet of george osborne's policies austerity policies just for that little element of what you're describing 19:00 Well, yes, I suppose so. But for me, it's about encouraging parents, because when I was teaching as well, the children who didn't, the parents didn't come into parents' evenings either. And I always felt you cannot aspire to something that you don't know. So if parents are not modelling going to work or having aspirations, then children, you know, stay stuck. And COVID did have a problem that parents are staying home Friday after, you know, Fridays, oh, let's stay home and wear slippers. Oh, I won't send the children to school. So they fell for, you know, behind a bit more as well. 19:33 So it's about nurturing that and helping parents understand the importance of the early years. 19:39 How do you break that cycle? I mean, you know, I don't want to do a role play, but let's imagine a parent who never had the things that you're describing themselves, who thinks that school is a complete waste of time. Teachers are all lefties who are always on strike. Whether the kid is going to go and work in manual labor or not work at all is immaterial. How on earth do you persuade that parent to change their attitude to education so that their child has a better chance of receiving one? 20:08 Well, I think that's where early years practitioners, school teachers, there has been that sort of gap where teachers think they know better than their parents. 20:16 Just tell me what you think they need to do to reach that particular father. Yeah. 20:21 engage the parent. 20:22 I suppose I'm asking you how do you engage that parent? 20:25 So break down the barriers between the walls and the bridges and all that. Invite them into the school to hear reading. 20:32 I'm not coming to the school, Sue. Don't be silly. I didn't go to school when I was a schoolboy. I'm not coming now when my kid's there. 20:39 Well, then maybe the family hubs are a great place to encourage parents to see that reading with their children is a really great thing because that empowers the child with all sorts of things. Talking with them, playing with them, aging with them. 20:51 I don't want to badger the witness, but all of these things are kind of self-evident. It's more, and maybe I'm being unduly pessimistic, but it's more about that initial... 21:01 Because this is quite a big ask of a parent who's never thought about any of this stuff before, to expect them to suddenly care about things that nobody cared about when they were young and that they have never cared about themselves subsequently. How do you persuade them to care? 21:16 Well, I think the government at the moment around ideas of screen time is a very important topic, isn't it? Around that, you know, diminishing all sorts of engagement with young children. 21:26 I'm thinking about the parent who's always on their own screen and reaching them with a message about how important it is that their children behave differently from them. It's something we've talked about a lot on the programme. And this is unrealistic to expect you to have all the answers, but I just wonder whether we're starting a bit late in the process. Some of the stuff is indeed self-evident. It's kind of obvious. But what do you do? I'm happy to play the role of the parent who just doesn't really care, not a bad person particularly, just utterly unengaged with education, doesn't see the point of it, didn't see the point of it when they were at school. 21:59 Why would they see the point of it for their child? There must be something you can do for these people. 22:04 um what is it christine's in aylesbury christine what would you like to say hi james um first time call a long time listener you're very welcome um i want to say i would on paper have been a neat at five why tell me why um my father was an immigrant um i was the youngest of five and none of my family had been to university before 22:30 Not necessarily. You wouldn't mean you would have left school. Just on those criteria alone, that you would have left school at 16 with no qualifications or aspirations. I mean, the immigrant experience often highlights the importance of education and getting ahead and the next generation doing better than the last one, even more than some homegrown families do. 22:50 Agreed. But you also then look at what the indicators are that people are going to have to use. So attendance. I was a very sickly child. My attendance was under 80%. Okay. I had undiagnosed autism and ADHD, so I would go completely off the rails if I thought something was wrong. And I had free school meals. There were so many indicators. 23:12 Boxes you would have ticked. 23:14 Yeah, and I'm just really scared that some teacher is going to leave this open on their laptop and there's going to be some colour-coded spreadsheet and little Tommy's going to see that, oh, they don't think I'm going to get a job. I'm not going to bother. And I'm just really scared of the self-fulfilling poverty this could make for a long time. 23:29 Oh, wow, I hadn't thought of that. So it ends up doing the opposite of what it's designed to do and it paints a stigma on a small child's back. 23:38 Yeah, and at the same time as well, teachers are human. You get 33 kids in the class and you're absolutely told by the data, these five down here that keep playing you up, they're never going to amount to anything. Ignore them. 23:49 But that's what happens now. 23:50 Yeah, but it's going to be even worse if someone can go, well, they've always been like this. You know, I'm really scared that it's going to cut opportunities off for people. 23:58 How else do you help the children who most need help if you're not going to identify them first? 24:03 smaller class sizes, more support staff. So things that would help everybody. 24:08 Things that would help everybody. 24:10 Yeah, absolutely, because you have to help everyone. It can't just be targeted on who might be needed. Everyone needs a better opportunity. If you look now, I look at my goddaughter, I look at the other children in my life, and I just worry that the jobs that they thought they might have won't exist anymore. 24:28 So it's not as easy to predict, I think, as it might look like it should be. 24:35 Well, I mean, the indicators that they reach for first don't all apply to you. 24:41 Although I think that neurodiversity and special educational needs are obviously going to be quite a large part of what we're talking about. But being in care, being in poverty and having poor mental health are the first three obvious indicators. And... 24:56 This is really interesting. I hadn't thought of it this way around, Christine. There's an adage, isn't there? There's an old proverb about if you raise the water level, then all the boats rise. I forget exactly what it is. Whereas this is about... 25:09 identifying the boats most in danger of sinking and doing special remedial work on them, as opposed to improving the sea level for everybody, for every boat, which means that all the boats benefit. And of course, the ones that benefit the most are the ones that were previously most likely to sink. If I was taking that analogy to its logical conclusion, I'd point out that even if the water levels rise, if your boat's got a hole in it, you're still going to sink. 25:36 And just as your last caller, where, you know, he's talking about the relationship of parents and schools. If we can improve the school experience for everyone, you will have less disaffected parents who are on the school side from the beginning. You know, I taught in schools for over a decade. Some parents just come in combative because they didn't get on at school. 25:55 Of course. 25:56 And that doesn't help. But it's not their fault. 25:59 What broke the model for you, do you think? Why did you not end up where you think you might have been predestined to end up? 26:07 I... 26:09 Why? Why are you laughing? I used my family as the model of what I didn't want to be. I used university to get out of a very small village and I didn't come back. 26:19 Oh, okay. That's a powerful answer, but I see why it's a slightly discomforting one. 10.31 is the time. 034560973 is the number that you need. There it is. I hadn't thought of it that way around. I mean, is it wrong to try to identify the children most in need of help? Because A, you potentially stigmatize them, and B, you kind of separate them from the herd, as it were. Whereas if you're going to improve all of the conditions for all of the herd... then the sickly child will benefit most. 26:51 A rising tide raises all ships is the phrase that I was somewhat clumsily reaching for. And is it a counterpoint to what Alan Milburn is suggesting? Alan Milburn leading a review into Britain's crisis in youth worklessness, calling for children to be spotted even earlier, I mean really early, as being potentially at risk of leaving school without any qualifications or particular ambitions. The warning signs are there, he says, from a very early, early age, frankly even from preschool. 27:23 And some of the warning signs will be obvious, some of them I think less so. But the question of what do you do to address them or undo their impact, I think is almost impossible to answer. 27:38 It's going to have a lot to do with luck as well. You are lucky if you have an incredibly inspiring teacher or adult, youth worker, care worker come into your orbit. I'd also say something else about the kind of school I went to, which may land a little oddly with you. But I was at school with boys whose parents were entirely negligent and largely absent. I remember the boys who didn't even go home during the school holidays. 28:01 Not the big summer holiday. They'd go home for that, but they often wouldn't go home for Christmas or Easter. They'd either go and stay with other boys' families. And, you know, there may have been a whole variety of reasons for that. But if you've got the money and you send your child to a... A boarding school and a huge amount of the burden of parenting is being done by somebody else. So, you know, there are socioeconomic anomalies built into the idea that poorness equals underprivilege and privilege equals serendipity. I guess the more privileged your education, the more likely you are to be given the tools. 28:34 to overcome some of the impacts of having poorer parents, less committed, less loving parents. Here's a really good example. I never did any homework ever, James, like literally ever. And I remember feeling very lucky that my parents never asked me about it. 28:50 I'm not sure I feel so lucky now. 28:53 So, I mean, that's a really... 28:56 That's a zinger of an example. It's from someone I know, and I know that they haven't gone on to lead a life of neatness. 29:04 But if you were looking for a reason as a teacher to keep an eye on a kid or to be particularly concerned about a kid, the fact that they never did any homework ever would suggest that their home life was not exactly conducive to appreciating the benefits of an education. 29:20 I just wonder now, having spoken to Christine, whether identifying the exceptions is the best way forward. But anyway, I want you to tell me what they should be looking for, what you already are looking for, and crucially, I think, how you undo it. What do you do with the knowledge? So here are the warning signs. What do you do? How do you respond to the warning signs? 10.38 is the time. Sophie is in Winchester. Sophie, what would you like to say? 29:48 Good morning, James. I'm also a listener and my first-time caller. 29:55 Welcome aboard. Why is it taking you so long? 29:57 Thank you. Yeah, quite. 29:59 I agree with what the other two callers were saying. I'm also a teacher and have been for a long time. I'm a SENCO as well at the moment, and I've taught in both state and independent sector. And I've also taught right from year R, four-year-olds, all the way up to A-level. 30:19 And I think ultimately the identification, the early identification is really, really important. I think we are really at risk of getting the identification, we're getting it wrong. 30:32 So lots of children are either missed or they have a wrong diagnosis because we haven't got enough people trained or people that understand all of the ways to diagnose. I also think that we're trying to find reasons for children that are finding it difficult and they often might end up with a diagnosis that's actually not real that actually doesn't matter but I think the biggest thing in all of that is I feel a bit like once again it's the families or the children or the teachers that are going to be getting the blame when actually I think really what we know is the education system is broken and And I think it really is going back to that. 31:15 So if you've got a child that you're looking at thinking, well, they're not going to go into a job, if you can tell that, then surely we need to be looking at the provision and thinking to ourselves, well, you know, how can we change their education? How can we make sure that their education gets them through their little pathway and their journey? and understand their unique brain so that they get to where they need to get to, so that they can contribute to society and community. 31:41 Finding something that they're good at, or finding something that they can engage with. 31:45 Absolutely, yeah. 31:46 Well, I mean, I'm not here to defend the government and it's a little bit early for anyone to even try. But I think that they're making that case as well, aren't they? With the talk of apprenticeships and Lucy, is it Lucy Powell, the education issue? Yeah. Lucy Powell talking about educational straitjackets and recognising that the system... 32:06 inherited largely i think from michael gove but things have never really been perfect in education in this country is massively restrictive and unhelpful for for many children even though it allows adults to sort of grade and mark and and assess almost constantly that so i think that they're making those noises i think that they're not even making the noise i think they mean it you know milburn's appointment as well under the last prime minister under Sir Keir Starmer being relevant to that point as well may even have been before Starmer but but you must also recognize I mean the three things they point out poverty mental health or being in care increasing the risk of a child becoming a neat I don't like that still don't like that word but it's in common it's in common parlance now it's there's no harm in spotting it early there's no harm in saying we better keep a we better just keep an eye on james because he's he's you know he's he's wearing his big brother's old shoes and they're still two sizes too big and he's obviously um he spends half of the year in in 33:09 in care because his mum can't cope there's no harm in doing that surely 33:14 No, absolutely. And I think those things are really important and they are signifiers. 33:19 I think what it's really important is to make sure that the people that are dealing then with those children can adapt in that moment. 33:26 And that's a big ask. That's a really big ask. 33:29 But a child that's five years old and comes in and has slept last night in the stable with the horses and hasn't had any breakfast and doesn't know where she's going to be sleeping tomorrow night... she couldn't give two hoots about how to spell the word treasure. And there's a sound in the middle of it. Her need needs to be met before that. And her need is, you're safe, you're being looked after, you're cared for here, talk to me about it. So it does go back to that mental health, And recognising that really early, certainly. 34:03 And also mental health in younger children is obviously incredibly different to older children. 34:08 And if you're doing that with her, there's 30 kids who aren't getting the attention that they also need in the rest of the classroom. I mean, that is, I suspect, and I hope we'll take this in the spirit that it's intended, I suspect you're brilliant at what you do. 34:25 You explain it all with a clarity that I haven't really come across much in this kind of arena. But what on earth is the answer? So you do identify the children and you silo them? 34:39 You teach them separately? Because that little girl that you've talked about, it's an extreme example, but it's an incredibly helpful one. 34:46 What do you do with her in the context of a better system? 34:51 Well, that's it. Yeah, exactly. You're supposed to tell me now. Yeah, you make it okay for her in that moment. 34:59 And then there's 30 other kids not getting your attention. 35:02 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. 35:05 more training more money please the government well it's amazing how many of the conversations we have go arrive at two simultaneous destinations one is sadly osborne's razor the idea that a lot of the things that we're dealing with are a direct and obvious consequence of austerity although 2020 hindsight's a wonderful thing and and the other is that yes it will cost money today but it will save a flipping fortune tomorrow yes yeah that's exactly right And then we're here again, aren't we? We're here again. I mean it. You do sound as if you'd be brilliant at what you do and up to and including the fact that you're very honest about how hard it is to come up with a really powerful answer to some of these points. 35:43 There'll be personal ones. And by personal, I don't really mean anecdotal. I mean, there will be examples and stories and you might have one yourself of being, if you like, rescued. But that's a sort of almost Victorian language of patronage. I can't think of a better word. Here is a child on a career course, on a heading for a lifetime of being unfulfilled and possibly indolent. Here is a future neat and you rescue them from that future. 36:13 And I suspect that whoever rescued you from that future was exceptional. And that's the problem Sophie articulates is that, you know, your average teacher has got a heck of a lot on their plate without also being called upon to provide exceptional interventions in the lives of a comparatively small number of their charges. Time for your call on this. 0345 6060 973. Maybe there aren't any solutions at the moment, but tell me what you would do in order to rescue these children from neatness. 36:44 It's 1045. 36:47 10.47 is the time you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC, where we... It's gone in slightly unexpected directions, the conversation this morning. 36:57 Looking for the warning signs that Alan Milburn identifies as providing the system, adults, teachers, with... 37:06 Early indications of young people, very, very young people, who are likely to end up being in neither education, employment, nor training when they reach 16, 17, 18 years old. But a real dearth of answers to the question of what you do beyond... you know, the magical inspirational stories, the anecdote, the magical inspirational stories. I think we'll move on in the next hour to a magical inspirational story that has turned out to be nothing of the sort. 37:36 I don't know, you see. I refer to the Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, who has been caught up in this extraordinary avalanche of allegation and accusation, many of which... appear unanswerable, which is probably why he's decided to resign. He's been on full disclosure, you know. It might be worth listening back to that and seeing whether or not you can identify any holes in his stories, because I certainly didn't. 38:06 But I'm not at the moment entirely sure what the phone-in will be. We should certainly talk about it. We should certainly try to talk about it. 38:14 And it is another story of, or it was originally, a story of overcoming epic adversity. and achieving great educational honors. And yet many, many, many, many elements of that story are now being called into question. It's not really relevant to the conversation that we're having now, but it did just jump into my mind when I used that phrase, you know, incredible and original stories of overcoming adversity. 1049 is the time. If you think you can help me out with that conversation, then be sure to stick around. Yasmin is in Morden. 38:46 Yasmin, what would you like to say? 38:47 Hello, James. So I'm assistant head in a school for children with social, emotional, mental health difficulties. So they've all got special educational needs. Most of them are neurodiverse. And one thing that we've noticed, we have the children from the age of five all the way up to 19. And one thing we've noticed is that actually the children don't have behaviours for learning. So research shows that behaviours for learning are due to three things, either the student's relationship with their self, the relationship with the curriculum or their relationship with others. 39:18 And if we identify what those particular behaviours for learning that those children do not have, if we can then teach them to do those things, then they can engage in the curriculum because actually they end up in a classroom where they can't engage in learning because they don't have behaviours for learning. And then they go through the whole school system and I've got children that come to me at the age of 15 and they don't know how to learn because they can't engage in the curriculum and no one has taught them those specific things that they need to do in order to be able to engage. 39:45 Like what? And I know this might be obvious to you, but it won't be obvious to everybody listening. 39:50 So it could be resilience to be able to try again. It might be... 39:56 losing. It might be making a mistake and recovering from it. It might be sharing. It might be speaking with others. It might be a speech, language and communication thing of understanding what other people are asking you to do. 40:09 And I think lockdown has made a lot of those things worse for a lot of children. 40:13 A hundred percent. I mean, that has also caused the literacy difficulties that we've got. So you think our lockdown children that would have learned phonics, early reading in reception, they're now starting secondary school in year seven. So we've got children who have missed being taught by a qualified specialist in reception phonics. And so those children are starting secondary school. Some of them can't read. And then secondary schools are not set up for targeting early reading. So what happens to them? They disappear. 40:42 They have reading ages of perhaps seven, and then their chronological age gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then they end up leaving school at the age of 19 with a reading age gap of 11 years or 12 years. 40:54 And the secondary school system ignores them, really, because to engage with them would be so time and cost inefficient. 41:04 I think that they've got so many other priorities. That's what I mean. You've put it better than me. Yeah, that's the thing. And they're also not trained to identify early reading. They don't test reading ages in that same way. We've also got some children who have never learned phonics, and so they learn to sight read. And you think, well, that's amazing that you're able to sight read because you have memorised the shape of every single word, and then you're able to read phonics. 41:29 But those children can't spell because if you can't sound out things, you can't then spell. And so those literacy difficulties become quite prevalent in every area of the curriculum because they've learned a coping strategy because they've missed early reading. And then we don't know how to... So the way that you teach those children how to read is totally different to early reading because they're never going to get phonics. So you need to do repetition with them. 41:54 So, I mean, you're nudging us towards things that you can use to undo the damage done in the early years. I mean, how easy would it be to undo, forgive me, but all of it? 42:06 I think that you need to identify which areas that are the biggest barriers and then specifically target those. But our education system is broken to the extent that we assume that everybody can learn in a particular way. And they can't. And that doesn't mean they can't learn. But there's other skills that you need to do. And the EYFS do this really well, is identifying what the children need. So that's the early years foundation stage. So when children start reception, sorry, nursery, looking at how they play and all of those things. 42:36 But then once they start reception, we're ready to learn now. But lots of children aren't. And so if we're not looking at exploration, being able, being interested in the world around you, being able to engage in the world around you, realising that the world around you is... 42:52 So just everything that everybody is saying that's helpful boils, if I were to be simplistic, boils down to children getting more attention from teachers. 43:03 people yeah and getting a really diagnostic understanding because you can quantify this um and you can sort of screen it and then you work out okay so we're going to work on this particular child losing and then because we've got classes of eight children and i've got three adults in those two we can we can engineer we can but most schools can't can they they can't even come close and of course just something else that i sometimes struggle with 43:26 If you've got a class of 20 or 25 people and they are in the educational straitjacket and there's been quite rigorous streaming, even if it's a state school and it's run by the strictest headteacher in the universe, you can put them in boxes. You can tie them up intellectually and creatively and turn... that school into an examination hothouse and you can get brilliant results you may still be doing enormous damage to those children but they're possessed of the right skill set to get brilliant results and you publish those and everybody thinks that that's the that's the gold standard the schools that have got all the oxbridge places and the straight a's but the but the but the bad stuff could still be going on not just everywhere else but also there 44:07 Yeah. And those are the children that are most vulnerable. They're the ones that go into become me and they fall out of education because they're ignored. And so they're a nuisance until they become incredibly expensive to the state. Because when I took over as head of sick form at my current job, because I've done a couple of jobs there, is we had more children in prison than we had attending our sick form. 44:30 Wow. 44:31 And that, that, So they were all now wrong. We were responsible for them, but they were more... 44:35 It's just adult intervention. Not even intervention. That's what makes it sound... So it is just interaction. Adult interaction. 44:42 It's knowledge and skills. 44:44 On the part of the adults. Interaction with adults who possess knowledge and skills. 44:49 Who have the knowledge and skills and a different way of looking at it. Not how can I get this child to fit this particular system. 44:55 How can I get them a grade... How can I get this system to work for this child's... 45:00 It's a tricky one, and it is, I mean, underpinned eternally and endlessly by the fact that it will cost money in the short term and save a fortune in the long term. And our political system, let alone our political discourse, is simply not geared towards that truth, whether you're talking about defense or education. Spend a lot of money now. Save a ton of money next. That was brilliant. Thank you, Yasmin. Angela's in Waltham Forest. Angela, what would you like to say? 45:27 Hi, James. I was lucky to be trained in the Excellence in Cities project back in the 2000s under the Blair government, who identified that disadvantage and need. And basically, it's all been done. It's all there. The research is all there. I had the best training that I'd ever had. And I still use those skills today in my job as a SENCO. But at the time, I was trained as a learning mentor in schools who they've practically vanished. And the job of a learning mentor was to identify what was going on for children. 46:02 So they weren't teaching the formal lessons. I would spend... 30 minutes a week we've identified children and how we identified them in our school was a non-verbal reasoning test the potential the potential to achieve and what were their actual test results and if there was a mismatch there was like well this this child's actually a really bright child there you know that they have potential to achieve what's going on for them so the learning mentor role was to develop a relationship with that child through skilled activities and games and find out what's going on here for you that's making learning difficult. 46:44 And there would be a whole host of things that would come from developing that relationship. I spoke to the person that spoke to me on the phone earlier. There was a child I worked with who I remember, when we did the sort of future you, how do you see your future? And I never forget what he said to me. He said, well, is to work or not to work? That's the thing. Because he'd come from a family who had never worked. Wow. So to have the skills and to have resources to help them understand different ways and different pathways, that's what's needed. 47:20 I worked with a girl once who, lovely girl, who when we got to work doing our own mentor work together... it came out that her mother was agoraphobic. She had two older siblings, brothers, who were basically ruling the roost, beating the mother up. She lived in a home with abuse and with a mother with severe kind of mental health issues going on. And, you know, and I've got to say to you, I see these children now that I worked with back in the day, and they're big people now with beards and babies, And they remember the work that you did with them because you're understanding what is going on for them. 48:05 And I still use those skills today in my work in school. So it's about relationship. It's about understanding what's going on. It's about not being judgmental, not being judgmental. When a child comes to school and you say, what you had? And she said, oh, I've got a packet of soft mints. 48:22 Because you know that her mother's got mental health issues. That's not the child's fault. What can I do to help that child to change her pathway? 48:32 And all that training was, it was with the John Moores University. It was the best training ever. Excellence in Cities introduced a short start before you come to school. Learning mentors in school, in primary school and in secondary school. And then Connections Advisors. 48:50 Every teenager that left school had access to a named connection advisor that would help you on your pathway. If you've never had an adult... that's been into further education, how are they going to help you? 49:04 You can't be what you can't see. And that was almost all done away with, was it? 49:09 Oh, it vanished. 49:10 It vanished. 49:11 And listen, just in the interest of understanding things, because I think we're probably on the same side of this issue. I'm sure we are. But for people who are on the opposite side, they genuinely believe... that by sort of cookie-cuttering as many children as possible into exam-passing or exam-excelling conditions, they genuinely believe that that helps break the cycles that you're describing. That's their genuine belief. I think they're wrong, but they're not doing these things for reasons of evilness. 49:43 No, no, but listen, it's about opportunity. It's about opportunity, isn't it? Yes. You know, I come from a family... a spicy neurodiverse family we didn't know then but we know now because all my children are diagnosed and understanding is the key understanding yourself I also love what Andy Burnham is saying about the talk that's been going on about people on PIP I love the tone of Andy Burnham because it's about let's support and understand and let's be honest you know it's not really worked uh the education route for everybody you know my my daughter's worked at h&m and there's there's you know youngsters with law degrees there yeah but but it's about it's about opening your eyes to opportunities and potentials we need more opportunities and potentials for children who find that educational path difficult but let me say some of those educational uh difficulties because of school's not being flexible enough. 50:50 I also have a son who's been excluded three times from secondary school. 50:54 We're back to the straitjacket, aren't we, in a way, that Lucy Powell has talked about. You've made me a little bit late for the news, Angela. It's the only reason that I'm moving on. Interesting that you mentioned, and I've written down exactly what you said, I love the tone of Andy Burnham. Tom Swarbrick talking earlier about authenticity in the context of Andy Burnham, this weird story about him being told to de-bloquify his social media posts. But it made me think of Sir Keir Starmer and the difference between them. When their backgrounds are quite similar, I think they're similarly sincere. I don't think their politics are a million miles apart. 51:26 And yet one of them lands with the public, lands with most of the public, as someone about whom you might say, I love the tone of Andy Burnham. And one of them really, really doesn't. And... 51:35 A little later in the program, I think we might try and pick out what that means. What does it mean to be politically authentic? What do we actually mean when we say he gets it or I love his tone or he's authentic because Burnham has it and Starmer doesn't. And it's hideously unfair on Keir Starmer. But what do we mean when we use that language? I think we'll do that from 12. Up next, we will have a proper look at this story of the academic facing extraordinary accusations, beginning with plagiarism and then moving into almost every single area of his backstory. 52:10 And I'm not quite sure what question I'm going to ask you about this, but hopefully you'll have an answer to it when I finally work out what it is. Six minutes after 11 is the time you're listening to James O'Brien on LBC. Listen, I'm going to say something that's going to make you laugh, all right? Well, I mean, if you listen to the program on a vaguely regular basis, it's going to make you laugh. I do worry about making things about myself too much. 52:34 You know, at the beginning of the last hour, I found myself thinking... 52:40 Should I talk about my own background again? Should I mention my adoption? These are huge elements to my understanding of a given story. But I don't know. I never really complain about it. But I do sometimes find myself thinking, should I try and make it not about me? 52:55 I've got that problem like times a billion with the next conversation that we're going to talk about, because perhaps belatedly, actually, given how the story has been dominating the news agenda this week, and I really do mean dominating. It's still, I think, on pretty much every front page. 53:11 I speak of Jason Arday. 53:13 The professor who is at the center, not just of a plagiarism row, about which I did have some understanding before all this blew up, but also accusations about everything from his charity fundraising to the books that he claims to have written and previous academic positions that he has always claimed to hold. 53:32 And the reason why I have, if you like, a personal investment in the story is twofold. Firstly, he came on full disclosure a couple of years ago, and I really liked him. Not only did I like him, I found his story incredibly uplifting and inspiring. I've got a feeling that I'm quoted in the publicity material for the book that is still due to be published next month, which obviously is going to make me look like a bit of a Muppet now, if the book contains any of the questionable or indeed already disproved claims that appear in the biographical detail that is... 54:05 I mean, I make no apology for that because I take people as I find. But it is my, if you like, personal involvement in this story. 54:14 And I feel, if you're interested, I feel really quite let down, to be honest with you. 54:20 I mean, it was really just... 54:25 not quite luck but the letter of support that many people are now removing their names from that was published last week is something that I might quite easily have ended up having my name on I've been in touch with Jason are they until relatively recently only via texts and things but with the subtext of him seeking and me thinking of offering my support and the point at which this started was an allegation of plagiarism being made by a man who doesn't think black people should be in academia, a man who has gone on the record arguing that if we lived in a true meritocracy, then people of color would only achieve prominence in showbiz and sport, which is, I mean, such an obviously disgusting position to hold that, like, I mean, almost everybody, Your initial reaction to it is to shoot the messenger. 55:26 And, of course, once they started to examine the message, many, many more problems emerged. There's an academic, a professor called Catherine Schofield, who I follow on Blue Sky. And she has put it brilliantly. She's a historian of Mughal and colonial India and his Hindustani music. And she is, I mean, not only active on Blue Sky, but she's, I think, at King's College London. She put it in four simple lines, this story. 55:57 The other problem I've got is the opposite of worrying that I'm making it too much about me. The other problem I've got is that you really might not care. The newspapers have gone absolutely bonkers for this story. You can tell by some of the language deployed why, describing Jason Arday as a diversity poster boy. And using his elevation, if it turns out, it seems pretty likely to be at least in part unearned as an argument almost against all attempts to improve representation of people of color in academia. You can see, well, I mean, The Guardian reports today on a letter circulating at Cambridge that is accusing the university of unleashing grotesque racism. 56:38 Because people will use this story, as racists always do, to make enormous generalizations about all people of color. Think what Nigel Farage did when Henry Novak was killed by a British man who was brown. Think about how on earth Nigel Farage then ends up talking about immigrants when the killer wasn't even an immigrant. You don't even have to think about the Southport story. So the Jason Arde story is a story, it would appear, of deception. 57:04 and dishonesty and it will be used to make points about people who are not jason are they in fact it already is if you're worried about me making this too much about myself dick littlejohn in the daily mail today tries to make it about me um more on that later because even by his standards it's hilarious um and that's the point that i think is interesting It is now impossible to defend him from some of the accusations against him because they are written down. And educational institutions are coming forward to say he didn't hold that role. 57:35 And publishers are coming forward to say he didn't publish that book. And it appears on his record, on his CV. The original investigation into plagiarism conducted by Liverpool John Moores University was quite self-exculpatory. 57:53 It was quite, you know, all they ever really released was an announcement that they hadn't found any evidence of plagiarism. But wiser heads than me would argue that it actually found that they'd let him down by not properly supervising his PhD thesis. The person he's accused of plagiarising is cited 17 times in the PhD thesis. If I was going to plagiarise you... 58:16 I don't think I'd mention you 17 times in my thesis. So up until that point, some of these accusations were certainly refutable. They were certainly arguable. But then the floodgates opened and an awful lot of what came pouring through the floodgates is unanswerable. 58:35 So it began as a witch hunt. It's almost like it began as a witch hunt and they found evidence of witchcraft. 58:42 It's a really weird way of putting it, but it speaks to what Catherine Schofield identifies in this four-point summary of a brilliant article in The Guardian by Jason Ockenday. 58:54 Point one, his academic misconduct and fantastical claims are pretty clear cut. He should not have been appointed. 59:01 Point two, the press stroke public wouldn't have noticed if he wasn't black. 59:07 Point three, they noticed in particular because Cambridge made a huge song and dance about appointing a black person. 59:15 And point four, this is on Cambridge. That's, I think, a fair pricey of Jason Ockenday's piece in The Guardian from a couple of days ago, which also went on, somewhat, to my naive mind, somewhat surprisingly, to give other examples of plagiarism and worse among the Cambridge academic community that have not been widely investigated, reported, or even resulted in sanction. There's one Cambridge professor who remains in post despite having been found to have published an article that contained large parts of essays copied from one of his own students. 59:50 There were also allegations of sexual misconduct, which didn't see Professor Oriel Careers brought to an end. 60:00 And all of this is contained in an article, as I say, by Jason. that appears under the headline, the takedown of Jason Arday has overjoyed the right and must be a wake-up call for the left. 60:13 And I can't really argue with any of that. 60:16 And then you've got the next chapter of that particular process, which is the University of Cambridge's leaders being blamed for the grotesque racism that is now being unleashed by the original appointment of Jason Arday as a professor and the subsequent findings in against him and and some of them are findings some of them are for now at least allegations he resigned on wednesday after more than a week of questions over claims of plagiarism in his phd thesis and other publications and the reason why i'm personalizing a little bit is that when i was in touch with him um a couple of weeks ago he must have known that he hadn't held these roles in academic institutions that appear on his CV. 60:59 He must have known that he hadn't published a book that appeared on his CV. And while he is canvassing for support from people who are sympathetic usually to victims of racism, he must have known that there was stuff there that was going to prompt some people who signed that letter to remove their names from it subsequently when other things came out. He must have known... That there was stuff in his backstory that was not going to stand up to scrutiny and there was no indication of that. 61:29 You know, there's a little bit of me now that wonders whether I'm sort of being unkind and unfair or betraying somebody even by sharing this with you. But you feel personally, I feel, I should stop using the second person here, I feel personally betrayed. 61:48 Sat down for an hour with the man and marveled at his story. Had no reason to doubt it. You don't really doubt the wisdom of an appointment that's been made by Cambridge University, do you? Had no reason to doubt it and was profoundly moved by it. And I'm just a white bloke. 62:05 With a good job. You know, his story doesn't improve my life chances. His story doesn't open or kick down doors that may previously have been closed to me. I feel betrayed maybe a bit strong or a bit hyperbolic, but profoundly let down on a very personal level. 62:26 And I wanted to share that with you because the story is absolutely everywhere. And there's a very strong chance that the only reason why you were aware of him was because of the full disclosure interview that he did with me a couple of years ago. 62:38 So what's the question that we're going to ask? 62:42 I've got almost no idea. 62:45 I urge you to read Jason Ockenday's piece in The Guardian. The Cambridge academic, he writes, has rightly now resigned, but that won't end the targeting of senior black figures or the lazy way that institutions promote faux equality. And as is often the way with polarizing issues in this country, you don't have to pick a side, but almost everybody will. And the people that actually pick both sides, like me and like Jason Ockenday, the people who say this is going to be appalling for black academics, And it is also a consequence of really bad behavior by people who were kind of half-heartedly or insincerely promoting equality. 63:22 That's both sides. What you'll get in right-wing newspapers is this proves that they're always over-promoting black people and that diversity, equality, and inclusion is an evil, evil doctrine that discriminates against me and it's therefore grossly unfair. They won't say... 63:38 Obviously, this story is about Jason Arday. It's not about anybody else. It's about Jason Arday and the Cambridge University selection process, the people that appointed him and defended him. You'll be able to open up. You can open up the Daily Mail today and read why it's all about me if you are, God forbid, a Dick Littlejohn fan. But for the Telegraph, for the Mail, for the Spectator, I presume, for all of the usual suspects, this will be about loads, loads more than Jason Arday. 64:05 So, I think the interesting question to ask, I think the interesting question for me to ask you is, How does this story affect other people? 03456060973. I mean, I haven't listened back to the interview that I did with him. And the big selling point for much of his coverage previously was always... 64:33 that he was the first black professor to be appointed to Cambridge University. And the reason why I mention that I haven't listened back is that I may misremember. But for me, the most fascinating element of the story was that he had overcome not being able to speak. 64:49 Again, every single element of his story is now questionable. That's a terrible situation to have ended up in. But only one person is responsible for the fact that he's ended up in this situation, and that's him. 65:02 But the element of his story that I found most extraordinary and incredible and magical and uplifting and inspiring and, I mean, I'm almost using the word unbelievable, but that's taken on an entirely different meaning in the context of what's emerged subsequently, was the idea that he went from being nonverbal um i think until quite late in life non-verbal until he was 11 years old to being a cambridge academic that is just it's funny isn't it how how that word unbelievable is actually the one that i just reached for and that's unbelievable i say that to you as a good thing right when it's true something's unbelievable it's unbelievable He went from being non-verbal, I've got no reason to doubt that, except that there are so many other things in his story that it turns out there are, and indeed were, reasons to doubt. 65:59 How does this story affect other people? 66:04 How does it affect, for example, black academia? How does it affect other academics who have expressed retrospective surprise at the original appointment with one sociologist saying they'd never heard of him before? When it was announced, I looked for his body of work and it was disappointing to say the least. So these are things that only really fellow academics could understand or talk about. For the rest of us, it was just an incredible story that you couldn't wait to share with your listeners. 66:35 And what I want you to tell me... 66:39 is how it affects other people. Let's talk about the unleashing of grotesque racism. Let's talk, if you want, about the faux equality that some institutions promote. But let's talk also about the impact that this story has beyond the individual at the very center of it. Because I don't really know what what the ripples from this rock being thrown into a pond are going to do. I don't really know. 67:09 I think the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge, forgive me, not the first. But that was, again, part of the extraordinary story of transformation, wasn't it? And overcoming all the odds. 67:24 I don't know. 67:26 quite why this story is as big as it is. 67:29 I don't think that my own fascination with it was born chiefly of Jason Arday's ethnicity. It was the non-verbal, the transformation of a non-verbal boy into a world-beating academic that I found most extraordinary. But the Ethnicity is, I think, what is driving almost all of the coverage. The Daily Mail, the Cambridge plagiarism scandal exposes in chilling detail how many of our institutions have now been captured by woke dogma. 68:01 Does it? 68:03 Or does it just expose one man? 68:07 And what is it about this man that has prompted such an extraordinary level of coverage when another Cambridge professor remains in post despite having been busted for plagiarism? And Financial Times picked up on this story, I think, and found... 68:27 even more evidence of plagiarism than was contained within the original investigation. A Cambridge University professor who copied parts of an undergraduate's essays and published them as his own work will remain in his job despite an investigation upholding a complaint that he had committed plagiarism. Dr. William O'Reilly, an associate professor in early modern history, submitted a paper and on it goes. And this story appears in the Financial Times, possibly some academic journals. 68:54 And And you never heard of it. 68:58 You never heard of it. 69:00 So what? 69:02 What does this story do? 69:05 0345 6060 973 is the number that you need. Do you understand? Can you explain to me why Cambridge academics are furious with Cambridge University and calling for them to hold an independent inquiry into the affair? Can you explain to me why? 69:27 They are describing the unleashing of grotesque racism over this appointment and the subsequent emergence of, I mean, I think pretty much indefensible conduct on Jason Arday's part. The extent to which this appointment was paraded in the media by the university raises questions about whether the university sought public kudos for itself rather than teaching and research from this appointment," said one academic, alleging that Cambridge had been too tempted to cut corners on the hard work of fostering equality and inclusion by opting for a media appointment. 70:10 I mean, these are powerful, powerful words. That's Pri Amvada Gopal, who's a professor of post-colonial studies at Cambridge's English faculty And one of the group organizing the letter condemning the unleashing of grotesque racism. So that's the question I've got is how does this story affect other people? I want you to tell me. 70:37 how this story affects you as well actually or just what what what's your takeaway here because mine is very very personal i can't separate the personal from the public i feel that i feel like a mug actually is the short answer i don't feel uh guilt i don't feel oh you should have done differently or you should have done better because i mean who would who would meet a cambridge professor and immediately start thinking god i wonder whether you actually deserve to be account i certainly wouldn't do that if i was a racist and i met a black cambridge professor then i probably would find myself thinking yeah really black guy professor i don't think but i'm not a racist so it didn't cross my mind But it's more the personal contact I've had with him subsequently that makes me feel like a mug. 71:21 The fact that he thought I was someone that he might be able to persuade to stick up for him when he knew that he'd done wrong. That's the thing. 71:31 That is personal, right? 71:32 You get that. 71:33 So what's your... 71:35 connection with, reaction to this story. 71:39 A few of you reminding us of Ian Duncan Smith's CV, which didn't stop him attempting to become Prime Minister. I don't know how relevant this is. I don't even know if it's whataboutery. But I wanted to get all that off my chest because... 71:53 It's not often that I find myself with a connection to somebody, a personal connection. I've met the guy. I've interviewed the guy. I've talked to the guy. It's the first time ever, really, that this has happened to me. And I just want to know what you think the bigger ramifications, the bigger impacts of the story are. And yeah, me feeling like a mug, as Claire suggested in a text, might be too much of my ego coming into the conversation. But good God, if you're not used to that by now, then you must have been listening to somebody else by accident. It's 1126. What do you think of this story? 72:24 0345 6060 973. 72:28 It is 11.28. Good Lord, that was a long introduction. I clearly had even more to get off my chest than I realised, so I won't insist that Josephine in Westminster squeezes herself into the small amount of time that's available. I will, however, ask you again what you think. Thank you to Chris, who's texted content for the con and compassion for the con. I don't know if that quite applies fully here, but it's certainly a happy thought. This story of... The Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, facing all manner of allegations now, not just of original allegation of plagiarism in his PhD thesis some years ago, but also almost every element of his CV, almost every element of his biography subsequently. 73:11 And I mean, you've never seen anything like it. I've never seen anything like it. But what does it do beyond this personal experience? What does it do beyond his current situation? 73:25 what does it do to the people who are victims of a grotesque racism which is being unleashed according to Cambridge academics what does it do to attempts to improve representation of people of colour in academic scenarios what does it do to you perhaps as a black academic knowing that for good well not for good or for ill knowing that this is going to be a story that gets hung around your neck Seriously. 73:56 If a white middle class bloke on the radio can be somehow held responsible for this story by a Daily Mail columnist, imagine how a black sociology PhD student or a black professor is going to feel about what those kind of people will do with this story. Grant Shapps had about 17 different names. Didn't stop him becoming a cabinet minister or chairman of the Conservative Party. Again, is that what's aboutery? I do not know. 74:22 But I do know that it's half past 11. 74:24 And that Dominic Ellis has your headlines. 74:27 It is 11.33. You are listening to James O'Brien on LBC. I suppose the question is actually twofold. 74:34 And the first question is asked in search of genuine answers. It's not a sort of rhetorical, God, why are they paying so much attention to it? Why do you think this story is so huge? 74:45 The story of a Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and found to have at the very least embellished... many many many elements of his backstory why do you think the story is so huge and what impact will it have and I think that your answers to both of those questions are probably going to involve the phrase because he's black but I could be wrong and I kind of want to be so if you think I am then please tell me Josephine is in Westminster Josephine what made you pick up the phone 75:13 Good morning, James. So I come at this from a very different perspective and not from the racial perspective. But I am, for context, a white middle class girl. I have a degree from Cambridge and a PhD and I come from a family of academics. And I guess my first thought was I was immensely sad hearing the story. And it also really worries me for the future of the humanities in particular and the university sector in the UK. At the moment, the humanities, lots of humanities departments in the UK are closing. 75:46 They're really fighting for their lives, like struggling financially and struggling to stay open. And I feel like this completely, this story just undermines the credibility in the public's eyes and also, you know, the government ultimately, which has... 76:00 So sociology itself is in the firing line as a consequence of this story. 76:04 Sociology and the humanities in general. I mean, most people won't necessarily distinguish between sociology and, say, subjects like anthropology and even history and history of art. So I feel like it really undermines... 76:20 What this represents is really a failing of the university sector as a whole. He held numerous positions, I think, in Durham and other UK universities before he arrived at Cambridge. And then he was appointed to a very prestigious professorship at Cambridge. Not just, I think, the other professor you mentioned who was accused of plagiarism. You said he was an associate professor. I mean, Ade was a really senior professor at at a very young age at Cambridge, which is a very different situation. 76:47 Did you know that before? 76:51 Exactly, his position. 76:53 Did you know in 2023 would you have been of the view that, because this is what one sociologist has told a newspaper this morning, when it was announced, I looked for his body of work and it was disappointing to say the least. So they felt that there had been acceleration or inflation at the point of appointment. I don't think most people did. I just wonder whether... 77:13 I didn't. I personally didn't. I'm not a sociologist. I'm not in that field at all. You laugh there. I wouldn't have necessarily questioned. I would have probably raised, had I been on top of it, I was in Japan at that point, I would have probably raised my eyebrows and been like, it's very young age to be a professor. 77:31 But that cuts the other way. 77:35 That's why it was such an extraordinary story, isn't it, as well? So it is both the positive and the negative of the same story. He was so young. He must be incredible. And then we're back to that word incredible, which is, of course, in a different context, a synonym for unbelievable. 77:48 That in itself is worrying because why did Cambridge appoint him to that position? I don't think that's ever been made clear. Did they appoint him to this position just to be able to prove that or make headlines? Is academia now chasing the viral clicks, the full disclosure interviews, to remain credible? 78:07 Is that where we've got to? Well, that's the accusation. Well, exactly. And this is incredibly worrying for the future of the humanities that we're now actually almost undermining ourselves. in trying to chase the money and the finance to stay alive. So I'm really concerned by this story, I think, on multiple levels. Not just explaining that it represents, but also how this is going to actually affect the humanities and the funding we receive in the future. 78:34 I understand that. And you've explained brilliantly why. And I hope this isn't an unfair, I hope it's not a criticism, it's just an observation. You haven't laid any responsibility at the feet of Jason Arday yet. 78:45 Well, I think you shouldn't have. I mean, to lie on your CV as an academic, I can't understand why you would do this from a personal perspective. From my perspective, it feels quite insulting because a PhD is such, you know, to write 70,000 words of your own original research is such a feat. 79:08 And it's such hard work. And I'm visiting professor in Japan. And to get that position involves so much work and to submit papers that are properly, that are your own original research. This is incredibly, to lie about this, it's just extraordinary. 79:24 I think just for, you know, to be legally careful, I think he still disputes that he's lied. But it's also fair to say that there's stuff on his CV that he never did and that never happened. 79:34 The universities have just said flat out that he wasn't visiting professor there. 79:38 and it seems if you do make it to that position and he is clearly talented why would you need to lie if you're talented why undermine your own all of your talents by lying this might surprise you Josephine but in fact it will surprise you I was reading the review of a biography of the wrestler Hulk Hogan in the New World newspaper yesterday are you surprised yet that I'm mentioning this in the context of this conversation 80:07 Not really. I'm the person to come to you for complete non-secretary. 80:10 OK, well, it's not actually a complete non-secretary because there's a line in this review of the biography. I think it's a quote from another biography of the wrestling star Hulk Hogan. And it said, the thing is that his achievements were so extraordinary, he didn't need to lie. 80:25 And he did. Hulk Hogan had a long list of extraordinary achievements, but he told loads of other lies as well, like the fact that Elvis Presley was a fan when I don't think he was even born at the time. 80:36 So that's the thing, isn't it? That gets lost now. Nobody's ever really, not for a very long time, no one's going to circle back to the qualities and achievements of this guy. They're just going to focus on the embellishments and lies. 80:47 Maybe there's something in human nature. It's like when people obtain money that they can never have enough. They can never have enough money. There's kind of Elon Musk nature to everyone. Perhaps that's the same for kind of intellectual endeavor as well. That once people attain a certain level of fame, they just need to kind of 81:04 they keep going nothing is ever enough it's why not embellish a bit you get a bit addicted to the to the to the admiration and the adulation thank you that's a brilliant really helpful contribution um i worth listening back maybe to the full disclosure interview that josephine alludes to and and just seeing whether you 2020 hindsight is a wonderful thing isn't it to to spot stuff we've done something that we have never done before on this program I got a text. I started reading it, and I signaled to Eleanor, I really, really want to speak to this person, and I am about to speak to this person. 81:37 Joe is in Brighton. Joe, I can't say what made you pick up the phone, because you picked up the phone, because Eleanor rang you. I did, yes. 81:45 Thank you. 81:45 Good morning. Thank you for getting in touch via text. 81:49 Well, just tell me your story and why this is of particular interest to you. 81:54 Well, the short story for me is... 81:57 My father was a very prominent academic fraud, both academic fraud and a fraud in the pharmaceutical community. And as a result of finding out a lot about his fraudulent behavior, I wrote a book about him and about me, which is called The Scientist Who Wasn't There, which is currently out at the moment, if anyone wants to read it. 82:19 Exploring that idea of suddenly, as you have experienced in the last few days, That kind of deep disappointment. And then the question, why? Why on earth did this person do this thing? Not just to me, but to everybody. And that's what the book is mainly about. 82:37 Your dad, Professor Michael Briggs, was forced to resign from his position at Deakin University in Australia after it was discovered that he'd faked results of, you know, supposedly of experiments pertaining to the contraceptive pill. 82:51 So you get hit much harder than sort of mere interviewers by this kind of event in this moment. What did you find? What did you discover? 82:59 Well, yes, I mean, I don't know anything about Professor Arday, and I can't comment on that. But what has happened last week is a direct parallel of what happened with my dad at Beacon University in Australia, which is that the heat started to get too much. There was an inquiry taking place, there were criticisms, there were questions being asked about his work, and consequently... he very quickly resigned and disappeared, not just from the university, but from Australia and moved to Spain, in fact, to a very remote house in Spain, where he died suddenly and unexpectedly about two months later. 83:34 And this was all happening in 1986. So many years passed with me only knowing really about that particular scandal in his life. He died in the midst of this huge scandal, which obviously affected... contraceptive pills worldwide there's really big news in its day but in i think in 2020 i discovered that he was involved in a whole other scandal about which i had known nothing at all 20 years before which is the primados scandal which i know you know something about my friend jason farrell at sky news has done extraordinary work in this field exactly so and so my dad was a was a pin of the primados story 20 years before that scandal that actually resulted in the end of his life arguably and And he was the clinical director or research director of Shearing Pharmaceuticals in the UK at the key time when primidos was on the market and questions were being asked about primidos. 84:28 So we can now cast back into the 1960s and say, well, what we now know about this fraudulent individual, not just that he was carrying out fraudulent research in the 1980s, but what I discovered in 2020 was that he'd faked his qualifications. 84:45 Well, in time... 84:47 largely yes he pretended to have a doctorate from cornell university i actually have the book that he used to have on his shelf which looks like a doctorate from cornell university but it actually isn't one do we know how he made that He must have broken open what was a doctoral... Like a kind of blue Peter, here's one I prepared earlier scenario. Precisely. It's interesting you say that because the craft side of that has always fascinated me. Well, same here. I don't know why. 85:15 Yes, because that's the point where you sit there and think to yourself, what on earth am I doing? 85:19 Exactly. Exactly. That absolutely fascinates me. There's another fraudulent thesis, which I call the red one. There's a blue thesis and the red thesis. another fraudulent thesis which claims to be a doctorate of science, which is sort of super doctorate. And again, he's gone through the process of actually building something, in that case, out of photocopies of old articles. 85:40 Did he ever work for NASA? 85:42 Yes. 85:42 Oh, he did actually work for NASA. I mean, you must have spent the last 20 years just questioning every single thing that you ever learned about him. Some of them turned out to be true and some of them didn't. 85:52 Absolutely. I mean, NASA was very early in his career. I'm just commenting on the age of the person who's obviously the focus of your discussion this morning. 85:59 Yes. 86:00 My dad was very young too. And in his generation, it was more common. You know, this is talking about the kind of mid-60s when people were younger in those sorts of positions. But my dad was only like 33, 34 by the time he was research director of Shearing Pharmaceuticals. He was in his 20s when he was at NASA. He was 23. 86:20 So he was a prodigy. 86:22 Well, in his own mind, yeah. And I think if you present yourself as knowing everything, particularly as a man, I'm sorry to say, I think gender is part of this story. If you get into the periphery of a monoculture, and you stand there and say, I know all about this, I can do this, people won't question whether you're right or not unless they have a lot of evidence to the contrary. 86:52 So it is like a kind of build-up of water behind a dam, isn't it? And there needs to be a hell of a lot of water before the dam breaks. And in both your father's case and Jason Arday's case, it was the breaching of the dam that prompted... The resignation, it became impossible to hold it back. And while I appreciate that you can't talk about Jason Arday, in terms of your dad, and I bet your book is absolutely fascinating. 87:16 What do you think drove him? Because, you know, it's not... 87:20 It's not hard to feel sorry for someone who ends up, well, maybe it is hard to feel sorry for them, but it's a mad scenario that you are utterly, utterly hostage to fortune. What drove him to keep pushing himself deeper or digging deeper and deeper into this whole of his own creation? 87:36 Because this is my dad, obviously, I'm kind of standing very near this story. And I want to find out what you might call the truth. And part of my dad's story has a potential parallel in that he was a working class man growing up in Chatterton in Manchester in the post-war period. And he wants to be a scientist. He wants to be a spaceman, actually. He reads a lot of science fiction. And he's looking at the world and thinking there's loads of people at Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere and MIT, and they're going to get what I want. 88:06 And the only way you can bridge that gap, or the way you could see of bridging that gap, is to kind of stretch the truth a little bit. Because I want to get into that world, and I think I could do well in it, but they won't let me in. 88:17 Fake it till you make it. 88:19 Exactly. And I think that becomes so much part of what you're doing, that you just can't stop doing it, and you forget even... I think he'd forgotten that he'd made up some of this stuff, to be honest. 88:31 What was the first thing he made up? Do you know? 88:33 Well, you see, it's hard to say. I mean, he wrote a book called The Handbook of Philosophy when he was 20 years old, knowing nothing at all, as far as I know, about philosophy. And it's a terrible book. I've got a copy of it. Someone was prepared to publish this thing in Canada. And I think he's got a good result. And I think once you start getting good results, you carry on. Another thing that's important about the Are They story is moving from place to place. Because when I saw my dad... 89:01 history he moved constantly from university to university and it looked like progress when i read it from my standing position but once i found out more about him it's actually flight it's mainly moving away from the possibility because if i move away from these questions then they will not be on that i might have to start again but but the questions disappear because the institution is not under threat anymore by the presence of a potential fraud in its rank so goodbye and good luck Yeah, and you encounter more people who don't know very much about you, who you can persuade again that you know the answer to all their problems. 89:38 This is absolutely fascinating. Absolutely. And as you write in the book, he kind of forgot he was faking it. 89:46 Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I think just to look at the story that you're looking at today from the perspective of race, I think is reductive, really. 89:57 Yeah, I mean, it is from where you're... No, of course it is. But also, I would point out to you that this will be the first most people have heard of your dad's story, although not Vic. Vic's been in touch with So this lady who's going on about her dad, I've heard this story before. Has she been on your show before? If not, can you ask where she's told the story before? Vic embarking. It doesn't really work like that, mate. You can't turn your radio on and then get a bespoke explanation of where the contributor. But you obviously have, you know, given interviews and written the book. 90:26 I did a long interview on the World Service. So there it is, Vic. There you go, Vic. You might have been up late and you might have heard that, Vic. 90:32 The scientist who wasn't there by Joanne Briggs. And you're right, the race element is reductivist, but it's also the biggest element of the story for 80% of the coverage in this country at the moment. 90:41 I couldn't agree more. Yeah, that's true. 90:44 Which is the tragedy, really. 90:45 And perhaps moving into a wider perspective. I mean, I don't want to comment too much on all of the aspects, but sociology has been under pressure for a long time anyway. And they have had frauds in sociology. The thing about my dad's work is he moved from academic work into proper science, as it were, when he stepped across from university into shearing pharmaceuticals in 1966. And at that point, it starts to matter what you're talking about. I'm sorry to say it, but what academics say matters, of course, in a certain context. 91:18 But what you say about oral contraceptives and whether they're safe or not matters in a rather different way. 91:25 And that's an element of the story. 91:28 Listen, I'm going to mention it again because I really think you deserve to sell a few books as a consequence. Oh, thank you. Not just of contributing to this show, but of having done the work, actually. The Scientist Who Wasn't There by Joanne Briggs. You texted me, Jo, so I presume you're vaguely familiar with some of the rubric of this program. 91:44 Yes. 91:45 So you know that we reserve something for people who... 91:49 For people who don't know, we reserve something. I'm not going to explain why, but it is reserved for people whose qualifications for the contribution that they've made to the program are beyond belief. And I think everybody listening would agree that you are 157% in that category. So, Joe Briggs, here it is. 92:11 I'm Ray Liona, and you're listening to James O'Brien on LBC. 92:17 If you build it. 92:20 That's one of my favourite ever, actually, if not the favourite ever. Take care, seriously, and thank you so much for that. What an extraordinary insight into this continually extraordinary story. It's 11.51. 92:34 It is 11.54 and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC. I don't know that I've got time left this hour to have a look at how Dick Littlejohn of the Daily Mail has tried to make the Jason Ardate story about me with a succession of, ironically enough, given that we're talking about embellishments and untruths, a succession of embellishments and untruths, because I want to squeeze in at least one more call, but do not let me go home without... having a proper look at that, right? And indeed, a little reminder of what is, or who is featured on this week's Full Disclosure. 93:05 Dan speaks for many when he writes, please could you stop interviewing such interesting authors? This is a reference to Joe Briggs, whose contribution to this program must surely go down as one of the greatest ever, really, examples of how if you set your stall out right, you get contributions from people whose qualifications to contribute are beyond belief. 93:24 I've just bought yet another book that I have no time to read. That's all right, mate. The royalties still count, whether you read it or not. 93:31 Hind is in Woodthorpe in Nottingham. Hind, what made you pick up the phone? 93:36 Well, I've heard the story a few times on the radio, but I didn't have time to pick up for various reasons. I might stand a little bit biased. 93:44 Go on then. 93:44 I know Jason. Well, so do I. I am an academic. I am a non-white academic. I came to this country 10 years ago. It was bloody hard. 93:55 I'm sure. 93:56 Bloody hard to finish my PhD as a single mom, but have enough money to live and to take care of my daughter. 94:04 A low-finding job, I think there was a bit of luck there, and I might have been hired as a token, but something I want to talk about as well is that we really don't want to be tokens. I mean, that's not the point. We have merit, and maybe just look at our merit rather than making us all the time feel like we're talking... 94:32 But this is a criticism more of Cambridge University, if that's what they've done here. They've kind of let themselves down, and in a way, they've exposed him to a level of scrutiny that his record would never have been able to sustain. 94:46 It is, absolutely, it is. I'm not here to... 94:52 to scrutinise whether these allegations are correct or wrong. 94:57 Some of them are clearly true. So, I mean, you know, claiming that you were a visiting professor somewhere and then the institution comes out and says, no, you weren't, and claiming that you've written a book that's never been published. I mean, some of them are clearly untrue. 95:10 I understand all that, but we're now looking at these, but we're not looking at the achievements as well. I wonder, you know, I cited his work and I wonder, he's written with famous and successful professors like Heidi Safia Mirza, Gehinde Andros, have they not seen that there is an issue with the work? I've listened to him in conferences. I've got him to talk at Nottingham Trent University and there were professors in the auditorium listening and everybody was inspired by his talk. 95:48 I don't think you can fake that. 95:51 No, I don't think you can either. I mean, I don't say it with full confidence anymore, but certainly when I first interviewed him, I thought he was incredible. I mean, truly incredible. So, I mean, two things can be true at the same time. He has done many of the things that he is accused of, but he is also an extraordinary communicator and a brilliant sociologist. I don't know. I'm not qualified to say the second bit, but it could be two things being true at the same time. 96:16 This is what I'm thinking. But again, as an academic, as a non-white academic, I just feel like, oh, it's good that I'm not famous because if I'm famous, people will just try to shoot me, basically. Metaphorically speaking. I just feel like if it's a white academic... 96:36 the story wouldn't have been that big. 96:38 No. I mean, that's chicken and egg, though, Hind, isn't it? This is why the story is so, I mean, difficult in a way, because it's chicken and egg. He is famous because Cambridge and others, and he himself, really... 96:54 cooperated in the promotion of his story. For me, I think that it was, I'm pretty sure it was the nonverbal childhood and the autism and the overcoming of diversity that would be neurodiversity as opposed to ethnic diversity that made the story so extraordinary. But the line is that was hung around his neck from a very early stage that the youngest ever professor and the black professor, the youngest ever professor to be appointed at Cambridge University is black. And that was... 97:26 The problem is that was the thing that inspired many people and that was the thing that upset many people because they were racist. 97:34 But just because... That's on Cambridge. But also, you know, I got the job at Nottingham Trent University and before that I applied to over 60 jobs. Wow. While I was finishing my PhD and basically dog-sitting because I couldn't rent because I didn't have a work contract. Wow. 97:52 Will this make things harder for people like you in the future, do you think? 97:58 It might, but also I'm thinking that, you know, again, Jason has got a job at Roehampton and then got a job at Durham and then got a job at Glasgow. Is it all on them? Was it all talking? I mean, it's just so confusing, but yes, it feels like, As a person of colour and academic, I'd rather not show off my work so much because I might be accused of whatever. 98:30 And who could survive this level of scrutiny? So again, two things can be true at the same time. Most people would not, this level of scrutiny would not throw up anything like as many questions as it has for him. 98:44 But, you know, who would emerge from this level of scrutiny entirely unscathed and untainted, especially if the scrutiny was motivated by a desire to uphold the idea that there wouldn't be any people of color in academia unless they were there unfairly or unless they'd been advanced or promoted there, not because of their work, but because of their skin killer, which brings us back. I really recommend. Have you read Jason Ockenday's piece in The Guardian Hint? 99:10 Not yet. 99:10 I really recommend you read that because it's the best by some distance that I've read and it covers an awful lot of the points that you've both made explicitly and implicitly. I'll just remind you of what Professor Catherine Schofield boiled it down to in conclusion to this conversation, although with the little postscript of how Dick Littlejohn tried to make it about me. 99:32 Number one, his academic misconduct and fantastical claims are pretty clear cut. He should not have been appointed. Number two, the press or public would not have noticed if he wasn't black. Number three, they noticed in particular because Cambridge made a huge song and dance about appointing a black person. And then just to tally entirely with the point you've been making. 99:51 Number four, this is on Cambridge. 99:55 And then they mention in Jason's article, an associate professor, a history don, who was found to have committed plagiarism and who had sexual misconduct claims against him upheld, but who remains in post Cambridge, which brings you back to the point about what would happen to you if you were or were not famous. 100:12 Wow, it's 12.02. It is five minutes after 12, and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC. I don't know how much store you should set by this story. It's a good little story. I mean, I'd have been delighted to get it into the diary columns a million years ago when I was a newspaper journalist, but I don't know... 100:34 how big a deal it is. 100:37 Andy Burnham has been told to tone down his blokish videos by number 10 social media experts. Team Burnham are receiving daily reports from the unit, which includes experts in data and social media analytics. And last week, the Times reports today, they advised the Prime Minister to limit the number of references to football and the pub in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. So it's one of those stories that will do whatever you want it to do. So you need to come at it if you can, without any hidden agendas. 101:09 I think that Keir Starmer mentioned too often that he was the son of a toolmaker. Or did he mention it in a way that created the problem? And listen, you're perfectly entitled to think that there wasn't a problem. I feel quite a lot of sympathy for what you might call continuity Starmer supporters. I'm not going to call you Stormtroopers, as some people have done, because I talked to you just briefly in the last hour about how hard it is sometimes to admit that your opinion of somebody was wrong, that your judgment of somebody was wrong. 101:41 And a bloke you interviewed once is a much smaller challenge than an actual prime minister who you thought was going to change your lives, who you thought was going to be brilliant. So I do feel very sorry for you. I get some very strange messages from people who have managed to turn their love for Keir Starmer into quite a real hatred of Andy Burnham. So I'm not going to join in with that. I think it was horribly unfair that Keir Starmer couldn't cut through, couldn't show people who he really is. 102:09 And one way in which he tried to do that was by talking about being the son of a toolmaker. And I don't think it worked. Sadiq Khan... when he was in campaign mode, which he hasn't really had to be in since his first victory in the London mayoral elections, would mention, again, entirely honestly, that he was the son of a bus driver. I mean, in a way, Starmer left room for questioning. So you've got all sorts of mythology springing up around it, up to and including the idea he wasn't a toolmaker at all. He owned a factory in which 100 people worked. 102:41 My understanding was that he had a workshop at the bottom of the garden or something similar where he did his own engineering work. 102:51 But it didn't work. It didn't land. 102:53 Burnham's never really talked about what his parents do. I happen to know, because I'm a geek, that his dad was a British telecoms engineer, like the bloke who comes around to have a look at your phone lines if they've gone all crackly. And his mum, I think, was a receptionist in a GP's. 103:08 which wasn't quite the job then that it is now. They've become sort of demonised, haven't they, in recent years, GPs, receptionists. But back then it was a sort of much-loved member of the community. Yeah. 103:19 And they will be judging this stuff. I don't really know how you analyse responses and reactions on Twitter because they're usually bogus these days. They're either bots or they're just weirdos harvesting hatred. So I don't know how you say this one's not going down very well, but I'm sure they're better at it than I am. 103:41 We've got people here. Do we have social media analytics here? We just look at how things perform. We certainly don't look at the reactions as a gauge of whether or not they're working or not because our job is engagement. So it doesn't matter whether you spend your whole life on social media writing about what an awful person I am in response to every clip of me that goes up. That's a win for us. So I don't need your vote. 104:04 But if I needed your vote and they could identify things that I do that do seem to turn you off... then it would matter. So if you're in the media, and this is a terrible thing because it explains why there is so much madness and evil on social media in particular, the engagement is the win. It doesn't have to be true. 104:22 The thing that you're engaging with, your engagement doesn't have to be positive. So the thing that you're responding with to the thing that I have done doesn't have to be positive. It's still a win if you respond at all. The more people watch it, the better for us. So if you share it to show everybody what an absolute monster I am or Nick Ferrari is or Sheila Fogarty is, that's a win because the more people that watch it, the better for us. So our analytics are going to be entirely different. 104:49 from number 10s. Number 10 are going to be saying a million people have watched this and that's a disaster because 80% of them come away with a more negative opinion of you than they went in. So... 105:00 Kostama's father was a toolmaker. Didn't work. Sadiq's father was a bus driver. Did work. To the point where he now takes the mickey out of it himself. So if you interview Sadiq Khan now, he might say something. I don't know if you're aware of this, James, but my father used to be a bus driver. And Sajid Javid's dad was a bus driver as well, wasn't he? 105:21 that kind of worked as well, because it's easy to understand. You know exactly what it is. How much of the failure of the toolmaker narrative was caused by confusion about what a toolmaker was? So you've got to start from a negative perspective. You've got to start by not wanting Keir Starmer to come out of this well, and then he hands you something that you can mould into negativity. You can't really do that with a bus driver. Unless, of course, it's not true, just to nod back to the last hour. It turned out he lied about his dad's. Imagine if Sadiq Khan's dad had been a merchant banker and he'd spent 20 years claiming he was a bus driver. 105:55 That would be, particularly for a politician of colour, that would be game over for a politician. But he didn't. 106:04 So what the heck is authenticity? 106:07 What is it? 106:09 Because I heard some brilliant calls to Tom Sawbridge's show earlier. Tom was standing in for Nick this morning, if you weren't tuning in. Nick's fine, by the way. He's off for fun, not anything else. He took calls on this story, prompted by this story, about Burnham being told to tone down his blokish videos. And he got some really moving responses, actually, by people who don't want Burnham to do anything of the sort because his authenticity... is giving people that most hateful of political phenomena. 106:40 It's giving them hope. 106:42 I tried to write about this in my newspaper column either last week or the week before. I think it was the week before, and I use that line I always use with you. A reference back to the Clockwise film. Brian Stimpson, I think, is the name of John Cleese's character, because I can drop it on you without having to look it up. If you're writing it down, you've got to get all the details right. And I can deal with the despair. Joanne, I think he said, was the name of the other character. 107:09 It's the hope I can't stand. It's the hope that gets you. And I think that Andy Burnham is giving people hope, partly because of what he does, but mostly because of how he does it. 107:20 And that's not fair on Keir Starmer. 107:24 think a lot of the mental health stuff that was announced yesterday was already out there but it landed completely differently and that's not fair and for once it's not something that we can chalk up as right-wing media bias because they're going to be just as tireless in their pursuit of Andy Burnham as they were in their pursuit of Keir Starmer so this is something about chemistry this is actually something about chemistry and it is the chemistry of of authenticity, at risk of making it sound like an article for the New Yorker or Prospect. 108:03 It's the chemistry of authenticity. And here's the thing, right? 108:09 Nobody knows the formula. 108:12 Because if they could work out the formula, then a half-decent actor could do it. Who just thought of Ronald Reagan right then? I said a half-decent actor could do it. If you could work out the formula for authenticity, then a half-decent actor could do it. 108:28 Some people have got lucky. They've stumbled upon it. Most people who come across as authentic are authentic. Farage came across as authentic for years, but that's falling apart now because, as some of us have known all along, he dreams of nothing more than being the plaything of foreign-based billionaires who will reward him with £5 million secret gifts for unspecified services, or maybe for no services at all, just because they like the idea of giving five million pounds to a man that they're working day and night to help become Prime Minister. Just an extraordinary coincidence. 109:04 So the blokiness that they refer to is similar to what I would describe as authenticity. 109:14 And that's why I think they're probably wrong. So what I imagine they're getting, and this is why I said you can do with this story whatever you want. 109:23 I imagine they're getting... Some people are getting a little bit bored of the football shtick, Andy. And it doesn't matter that it's authentic. You can have too much of a good thing. Also, you're the Prime Minister. You know, it's fantastic comparing pub snacks with John Healy for a clip, but you wouldn't want to be doing it every week, mate. Right? So I imagine that this isn't quite as exciting or as significant as the... 109:48 headline might suggest. 109:51 Five million views of the pub snacks clip on Twitter, that's a win. But it ceases to be a win when three million of those people are concluding that as a consequence of watching it, they actually like you less than they did before. So I imagine that this is about tweaking the edges. 110:12 a source told the times that the social media team and i quote have cautioned against some of the content advising to tone down some of the blokiness such as the bar snack stunt he is a strong communicator but it's about balance so there comes a point potentially where you find yourself thinking um i don't want my prime minister to be doing this anymore if he was if he did a series of On bar snacks, I had an idea for a... Someone's already done this. I categorically know that someone has already done this. 110:43 But someone brought home some crisps the other night that were prawn cocktail and Bloody Mary flavour crisps. Have you heard of them? I think they're Marks and Spencers, are they? Or Waitrose. Waitrose. Just trying to think who brought them home. Then I'll be able to work out whether it was Marks and Spencers or Morrison's. If it was me, it would have been Morrison's. If it was Mrs. O'Brien, it was probably Waitrose. And I just, I tasted one and I thought, you could do this. 111:10 But I wouldn't want to do it just as you watching me eat crisps. That would be weird. Could you have a book club for snacks? Could you do it online, like a Zoom, where we all agree that we're going to do two snacks tonight, and then we take it into... I'd find that fascinating. 111:28 But I wouldn't want the Prime Minister to be doing it. Do you see what I mean? I don't think the Prime Minister should be doing regular weekly content on bar snacks. But when he did do it, it seemed really authentic. 111:41 And that's the question I've got for you. 111:44 Whether you like it or not, Andy Burnham comes across as authentic and Sir Keir Starmer did not. 111:54 So what do we mean by that word? What is political authenticity? What is it? 112:02 03456060973 is the number you need. I've got a couple of clips by way of an example, but I'll show them with you in a moment first. But that's the question I want you to answer. What is it? 112:15 And you might begin by thinking, who's got it? So Boris Johnson charmed millions of people with an entirely inauthentic shtick. He would put on that personality. Very occasionally, you could see the quite ruthless character that lurked beneath the P.G. Woodhouse-style exterior. But you would probably put Boris Johnson, or you would once have put Boris Johnson, on a list of authentic politicians. 112:43 Is it WYSIWYG, Terry? What you see is what you get. And he was one of the least authentic politicians you'll ever have the misfortune of enduring. 112:50 Liz Truss, I can't even, I'm not bringing Liz Truss into this conversation. 112:56 Andy Burnham has it and Keir Starmer doesn't have it. 113:00 What is it? 0345 6060 973 is the number you need. Starmer didn't have it. Andy Burnham does have it. What is it? 113:13 So the... This is LBC. Good grief. Was that me? Did I press the... I hope everyone's all right. 113:22 The challenge is to persuade the public that you're normal. 113:25 Right, that's challenge one. Persuade the public that you're normal. So here's Keir Starmer offering Rachel Reeves some pancakes from inside his red box. And this was deliberately posted on TikTok in February of this year. 113:37 Chancellor, I've got something for you. Oh, very good. Come in. 113:40 Are you all right? 113:43 Very good. 113:44 Is this your box? 113:47 Happy Pancake Day. 113:48 Thank you very much, Prime Minister. Are you going to have one as well? 113:52 I hope you like it. That's what I keep in here. Very good. 113:57 I mean, maybe you need to see it in glorious technicolour, but there's no one bad involved in that process. There's no one trying to fool you or con you or mislead you. Maybe it was even his own idea. Why don't you surprise the Chancellor by hiding some pancakes in your ministerial red box? 114:15 But it was awful, right? It was cringy. Here is Andy Burnham with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Healy, talking about, sitting in a pub, talking about pork scratchings and scampi fries. 114:25 Real pork scratchings. This looks good. A bit old school, but we are quite old school aren't we, me and you? When did you last buy a pack of pork scratchings in a pub? 114:33 Two weeks ago. 114:38 Number one for me. I'll go two then, just to spice it up. 114:43 Oh, talking about old school. I mean, come on. 114:47 Come on. 114:49 That bit, John Healy comes out of it better. I mean, just absolutely no messing two weeks ago. When's the last time you bought some pork scratches in a pub? Two weeks ago, mate. What kind of a southern pansy are you? 115:02 I loved that. And it really worked for me. I wouldn't want to watch it every day. So what are we distilling here? What are we discussing? What is it that we're talking about? What is it? 115:12 Because however much you would, and that's the bottom line, actually. Keir Starmer's background is every bit as, quote, working class, end quotes, as Andy Burnham's, arguably more so. Keir Starmer's political ideology and motivation is comparable to Andy Burnham's. Many of the policies that Keir Starmer announced didn't get noticed or land properly, but Andy Burnham has subsequently either re-announced them or re-jigged them and received a lot of early praise and admiration. 115:40 There's something going on there that is not about the policies, but it's about the people. What is it? What is it? What do we mean when we talk about political authenticity? Sandra is in Salford. Sandra, what would you like to say? 115:55 Oh, wow. 115:56 First time on the radio. 115:57 Whatever. 115:59 Yeah. 115:59 How exciting. Oh, I feel we should mark the moment somehow, Sandra. We can't just let it pass as if this is the sort of thing that happens every day. Thank you. 116:09 OK. No, I was listening and I thought, well, they're calling it authenticity. But actually, what they're doing is they're dressing up charm, personality and charisma. 116:21 it's just a word that's much more acceptable to people I think because they want a reason for having got rid of care but also hang on but also you don't want to admit charisma because you can have charisma and be a complete wrong and you could be a serial killer and have charisma in fact some serial killers did have quite a lot of charisma so you don't want to call it that do you 116:42 Well, the thing is, I think Antibyrnum's also got integrity as well as those things. 116:46 I do too, for what it's worth. 116:48 Yeah. And he's proven it in things he's done. You know, he's not perfect, but, you know. 116:52 Well, hang on then. So authenticity is charisma plus integrity? 116:57 Possibly, yeah. Possibly. 116:59 Because I think Starmer had integrity. Starmer had integrity, but I don't think he had much charisma. 117:04 Exactly. Exactly, and you can't learn it. People either have it or they don't. Are you sure? 117:10 There's a lot of money in media training, but it doesn't really train you how to be charismatic. It just trains you how not to get yourself in trouble in interviews. 117:17 Would Simon Cowell have run a programme called The X Factor looking for it if you could train it? 117:24 Hmm. 117:25 All right, clever clogs. 117:28 It's a good point, but I'm just trying to think of there was a band. I forget who it was, but they had they had like when I used to knock about with comedians a bit. You can't. I mean, can you teach that? They always used to be very sniffy about the ones that they said had plans. You know, the comedians who had plans had clear career goals and career paths. So they really did think that you could sort of engineer success. And you wouldn't necessarily be the most naturally funny comedian, but you were the one with the best agent and you knew which agent you wanted and which venues you needed to play and which people you needed to suck up to to get the TV gigs. 118:08 So you can kind of finesse or engineer success and achieve more success with less talent than somebody who hasn't got The cynical approach to the thing that you've got. So it's not quite that simple. Can the X Factor be taught? It can't, can it? It can't. You can have two people with brilliant voices and one of them will make shivers go down your spine and one won't. 118:30 Well, who was that girl who was actually on the contest? The Scottish girl. Susan Boyle. Yeah, no, no, not Susan Boyle. She did brilliantly. There was another one. 118:39 She wasn't exactly overburdened with charisma. Well, I don't know what word you'd use to describe her. She was mesmeric. 118:44 Couldn't take my eyes off. There was a charm about Susan Boyle. 118:47 There was a charm. So what are we talking about? What didn't Starmer have? Charisma. Charisma. 118:54 I don't know whether it was the charm or the charisma or confidence or a combination of all three, or maybe he had all of them but not enough of it. 119:01 And Boris Johnson had them in spades and he had no integrity whatsoever. But no integrity. No, you beat me to it. Actually, I think I just beat you to it. Thank you, Sandra. 26 minutes after 12 is the time. 119:12 What is it? Just articulate what it is that we are talking about. And then tell me how you think or what you think about... 119:19 This suggestion that he's coming across as too blokey, as I say, I don't want to undo the phone-in by pretending not to understand what the story is really about. I suspect that this is tweaks and twinges rather than major, major instructions on behaviour change. But is he in danger of being too blokey by talking about football? And pubs, 03456060973, staying in Sandra's neck of the woods. Andy's in Bolton. Andy, what would you like to say? 119:50 I don't think Andy Burnham needs to do anything. I think what he's been doing is just being Andy Burnham. 119:59 it's really obvious when you watch someone, when you see someone's feet talking, you can tell whether they're being themselves or whether they're trying to get themselves across in a particular way. 120:12 What was Boris Johnson being? 120:15 Boris Johnson was never being himself. He was putting on an act and you could see it. 120:20 But people bought it. Massive millions of people thought it was completely real. So it's not as simple as you describe, is it? 120:26 um well i wasn't saying it was simple i was saying in burnham's case it's simple because all he's doing is being himself and i think the more he has to adjust his behavior the more obvious it will be to everyone that he's not being himself anymore i don't know if you remember um the west wing i watched a lot of it when i was younger The first two series, they have a nightmare for the whole thing, and there's a turning point, and they write a note, and they write a little note to the president, and all it says on it is, let Bartlett be Bartlett, and that is the turning point, the crooks on which the entire series turns. 121:08 I didn't know that. 121:10 Yeah, because that's the whole point, is to let the... If someone's got to that position by being themselves... 121:20 then what's the point in all of a sudden starting to micromanage all these little things about their behavior? 121:26 So do you think that Starmer was never Starmer? 121:32 I think Starmer really struggled to get across who Starmer was. Like, I can't tell you really what Starmer had a passion for. He was a human rights lawyer, but... 121:44 You know, his policies didn't really reflect that. That's true. I don't know what he was. 121:51 What does Andy Burnham stand for? 121:54 He stands for, for a start, spreading power out away from London. I think he passionately believes in that because everything he has done has had that running through it. And I think that's how you succeed at something is by being... 122:14 passionate about it and actually wanting it to happen and I think his love of football and stuff is sort of absorbed into that the way he'll stick up for the Hillsborough people and that's true so I mean what do they I mean this may well be a big fuss about nothing but when number 10 wonks or social media experts supposedly worry about him being blokish what do you think they mean 122:44 I think they mean, please don't get rid of us, we need a job. 122:51 I think we've got a winner. Basically, they need to justify their position, which means they need to be telling him something. I know, this is so interesting. What is it that you need to tell him? He's doing fine. I mean, he hasn't been tested yet. Not really. We should be clear about that. It'll be judged when he comes up against real adversity. Let Burnham be Burnham. 123:15 Let Burnham be Burnham. Yeah, let Burnham be Burnham. And he's old enough and he's been around politics long enough to have arrived at a place of comfort in his own skin. Possibly if he was 10 years... Well, we know that he wasn't that comfortable in his own skin when he was in Cabinet and Starmer hadn't really been in politics long enough to feel as comfortable at the dispatch box as he did perhaps... In a courtroom, there's something about being comfortable in your own skin that is relevant to what we're talking about as well. 123:42 I hadn't really thought about that. But, you know, that is true. Definitely. Because it allows you to be yourself and to be natural. And I don't know. It's hard to explain with words. Well, I know it is. I know it. 123:57 That's why it's a phone-in. You know me. They're my favourite phone-ins. It's not a phone-in, James. It's hard to explain with words. Right, we're going to do it. Because it's hard to explain with words. 124:06 Right. 124:06 And here we are, trying to do it. But yeah, I mean, it's all there. Let's see if anyone else can do it with words. What is it that we're talking about? Because Johnson is a fascinating character. Farage less so, because I think for all but the most committed admirers, his gloss has fallen off. His so-called authenticity is... 124:26 circling the plug hole. He can't say he's all the things he pretends to be while he also accepts secret £5 million gifts of foreign-based billionaires and claims that it's none of your business. It just, I mean, it gives the complete lie to the thing he seeks to present to the public. Boris Johnson was more of a... 124:43 A caricature, perhaps, but lots of people bought it. And the thing about Johnson that is arguably the most interesting, innocuous fact about Boris Johnson is that he would ruffle his hair before walking onto a stage. 124:55 He would deliberately ruffle his hair. And then in the opening lines of a speech, he'd pretend he didn't know where he was. He's done it several times. Some people started noticing because they were attending more than one speech that he was doing. Is it Manchester? No, it's Tuesday. It must be Birmingham. And someone would point out, you know, he did the same shtick six months ago when I saw him in Yorkshire. And it really worked. People lapped it up. But it wasn't authenticity. So what is authenticity? 0345 6060 973. 125:27 It might not be a good thing because I suppose if you can fake that, then you've got it made. 125:33 It's 12.32. Amelia Cox has your headlines. 12.34 is the time. It's a missed information technically, but I think it's a mystic, Jim. 125:44 It's a combination of both. Yesterday we made radio history. 125:48 Not in a good way, just in a silly way. Not the kind of radio history that is made when you present the most popular speech radio program in the history of UK commercial radio. 125:58 But we made radio history because we had a single feature that was a missing word around and a woke watch and an unhinged headline. Kemi Badenowt says she'll never do a coalition with reform because they're too woke. If you don't believe me, you can look it up. That was perfect. This one is sort of a combination of Mystic Gym and missed information. Now I come to think of it, they sound quite similar. Don't let me go home without doing that. I want you to call me on the question of authenticity, but I'm not going to lie. I don't think you can. I think Andy and Bolton nailed it. 126:30 He said, you can't really put it into words, James, which is both why I'm doing it as a radio phone-in, because I'm nothing if not a masochist, and why I don't think anyone's going to do better. Well, you proved me wrong. 126:40 Go on, put it into words. What is it that we're talking about? 03456060973, if you're just joining us. Andy Burnham's got it. Keir Starmer doesn't. It's not fair. Football, for example. Keir Starmer's love of football could not be more authentic. His Arsenal season ticket was in his pocket, in his wallet, in his jacket, long, long, long, long, long before you'd ever heard his name. He's been an Arsenal fan since he was in short trousers. Andy Burnham's love of Everton, similar. Identical, in fact. They are both bona fide, or bona fide? Which do you prefer? Bonafide football fans. 127:12 And yet Keir Starmer somehow didn't wear it as comfortably or as easily as Andy Burnham did. And they both play football, even though... They're arguably old enough to know better. They both play football. They are utterly authentic in their love of football, both as fans and players. But somehow it lands differently when Keir Starmer is in the frame than it does when Andy Burnham is in the frame. And I want to know why. 127:36 I want to know why. 127:39 What is it that we're talking about? Whether you call it authenticity or something else, what is it that we're talking about? 12.37 is the time. But as promised, I'm just going to share with you the attempts by the Daily Mail columnist, Richard Littlejohn, to make the Jason Arday story about me. This is what he's written. The far-left defenders of... Just in case you're not familiar with who he is, he's a very prominent Daily Mail journalist who often... provides social commentary on modern affairs by pointing out how different things were in 20-year-old episodes of the bill. 128:09 The far-left defenders of fantasist Cambridge professor Jason Arday have had the rug pulled from under them following his resignation. 128:18 Prominent among them, so this is me, Jeremy Corbyn fans, this is me being far-left, lads, Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. I'm far left now. Prominent among them was the odious LBC radio renter gob, bitter failed Fleet Street journalist and former suits you, sir, inside leg measurer, James O'Brien. Shall we just pick through that slowly? Odious, very much in the eye of the beholder, LBC radio renter gob. Guess who used to have a show on LBC for about five minutes? 128:48 20-odd years ago, and then disappeared down the plughole without ever troubling the scorers. Actually, that's not quite true. When I say the scorers, I mean ratings, of course, but I suppose scorers would also include the radio authority who found that Richard Littlejohn, when he was here, had breached broadcasting rules on several occasions, culminating in a report stating that he had broken half a dozen rules and had incited violence. due to an edition of his phone-in show in this slot, by the way. One and a half million listeners now. I think seven listeners when Little John was doing the same slot. 129:22 So anyway, LBC Radio Rentagob. Bitter failed Fleet Street journalist. That's a terrible thing to say. When I left Fleet Street, I was show business editor of the Daily Express and the Sunday Express. 129:37 And I chose then to pursue a career in broadcasting. 129:40 I am currently, of course, a Fleet Street columnist, although that's a relatively recent occurrence of which he may well not be aware because he certainly used to spend most of his working life sitting in a gated community in Florida writing about how awful everything is in Britain. So maybe he still does. I don't know. I don't really care. But do you know who else was a showbiz journalist on the Express newspapers? A chap called Peter Dacre. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. Peter Dacre was a Sunday Express showbiz journalist, mostly on the features department. I think he secured the first ever British interview with Elvis Presley, which is a wonderful achievement. 130:11 I secured the first ever British newspaper interview with Eminem when I was on the Sunday Express. And then, obviously, I got promoted and ended up being the showbiz editor of both titles, which was my job when I left Fleet Street. Peter Dacre didn't, I don't think, end up as showbiz editor, but had a brilliant career as a showbiz journalist on the Sunday Express. He is the father of a man called Paul Dacre, who is currently editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail and so Richard Littlejohn's boss. So if the showbiz editor of the Express titles is a Fleet Street failure, God only knows what a mere showbiz writer on the Sunday Express would be described as. 130:47 So there's Littlejohn calling his boss's dad effectively a failure. 130:54 I think I'm supposed to be embarrassed about the fact that I had a job in menswear when I was younger and trying to get into journalism. How on earth does he know about that? How does he know about that? Oh, because I talk about it all the time with great affection and warmth. And actually, with a degree of wondering how my life would have panned out if I hadn't managed to get a job in journalism and had carried on working in menswear, which, as you know, because you listen to this program quite often, I absolutely love. I loved my work, but why is that supposed to be embarrassing? 131:26 Why am I supposed to be embarrassed by that? It goes on. Predictably, he spat his usual racist smears at our day's critics who pointed out correctly that the prof's CV was a work of fiction. That's just not true, sadly. I haven't commented on his CV. I pointed out that the original investigation into whether or not he'd committed plagiarism on his PhD at Liverpool had been investigated by Liverpool. And they'd found that he hasn't. And I suggested that there's probably some questions for them to answer about how much supervision he received when he was doing that PhD. 131:57 The stuff about his CV, absolutely indefensible in my view. An awful lot of it, which is why I haven't sought to defend it. But since when did this character worry about telling the truth? It gets worse. 132:09 Still, O'Brien's never met a fantasist he doesn't like. He was the main cheerleader for noncefinder general Tommy Watson's smear campaign against senior Tories and war hero Lord Bramall, based on false accusations of rape and murder made by child molester Carl Beach, who was subsequently jailed for perverting the course of justice. I used to get this a bit when I was on Twitter and it used to confuse me because, look, the show wasn't a very big deal when we covered Operation Midland. But obviously it's quite a big deal now, which is why people like Richard Littlejohn get so upset. 132:43 But I mean, where do you think I was getting my information from when I was reporting on the allegations being made by Carl Beach? I was getting them partly from Exaro, the news site who were talking to him and interviewing him, but mostly I was relying on what the rest of the media was doing to decide what was newsworthy and what wasn't. For example, where do you think this was published? At least 20 high-profile members of the British establishment formed a VIP paedophile ring that abused children for decades, the whistleblower claimed last night. That was in 2014. Or where do you think this was published? 133:15 Did VIP abusers murder a boy? That was in November of the same year. Or this. Where do you think this was published? I saw Tory strangle 12-year-old boy to death claims abuse victim. Writing further, Leon Britton abused teenage boys during sex parties which are at the heart of claims of an establishment paedophile ring. It was claimed yesterday. 133:34 It goes on. Abuse claims that lead to the heart of power. That was March 2015 in the same newspaper. Which newspaper do you think it was? 133:43 Go on, have a guess. 133:45 Because I'm the main cheerleader for this, right? I had what? What did I have back there? About half a million listeners? Maybe a little bit more? I mean, obviously, half a million more than Dick Littlejohn ever had when he was on LBC, but still a tiny fraction of what I've got now. So what newspaper do you think published all these stories? 134:00 Well, it gets worse, actually, because in December 2014, when Scotland Yard described Beech's allegations as credible and true, including allegations that a Conservative MP had strangled a boy of 12 and a Tory minister watched as another boy was murdered, which newspaper do you think said this? There's a clue in what I'm about to read out as to which newspaper printed all of these stories and, indeed, which newspaper printed the phrase that I'm about to read to you next – It comes after months of Daily Mail investigations, the paper reported, describing the Yard's announcement as a victory, wait for it, for the Mail's battle to uncover the truth. 134:40 So there is the Daily Mail literally cheerleading for the fantasist and child molester Carl Beach. Although, to read this Daily Mail columnist in the newspaper today, that was all me with my little LBC show. Little, but still about 50,000 times bigger than the one that Dick Littlejohn had when he was presenting on LBC. More recently, he was forced to make a public apology after reading out on air a fake email claiming that young Jewish children are being taught that Arabs are cockroaches to be crushed. I wasn't forced. That was an authentic and sincere apology made when I acknowledged that I had made an error on air, thanks to the help of an awful lot of guidance and input from people, Jewish people, in fact, who I still respect, value and consider to be friends. 135:23 So that's what you do when you make a mistake that you find regrettable. You apologise. I don't know that Dick has ever apologised for his work regarding the teacher Lucy Meadows, the transgender teacher Lucy Meadows, who took her own life. And I don't know that he ever responded to... 135:40 The coroner at the inquest into her death, who stated that press coverage of her gender reassignment was ill-informed bigotry and that Dick Littlejohn personally had carried out what can only be described as a character assassination, having sought to ridicule and humiliate Lucy Meadows and bring into question her right to pursue her career as a teacher. I don't know if you'd describe that as having somebody's death on your conscience, but you'd need to have a conscience for that to work. They removed the article, by the way, but I don't know that he ever apologised for it. He certainly wasn't forced to, was he? 136:12 Because he never did. And there are other stories as well involving allegations of homophobia and various other bigotries. But probably my favourite was when he wrote a column condemning Haringey Council for using taxpayer funds to pay for hopscotch lessons for Asian women. 136:30 I mean, that's a great story, right? God, can you believe that they're using taxpayer funds to pay for hopscotch lessons for Asian women? Problem was, despite the fact that this was published in his Daily Mail column, it was complete nonsense. There was a centre offering support services for Asian women and their families because they were victims of domestic violence or they had housing problems or health problems and needed advocacy and support, particularly people with learning disabilities. 136:59 And guess what it was called? 137:01 Yeah, it was called hopscotch. 137:04 So this journalistic genius... 137:06 This man who sits in judgment on pretty much everybody else from his Florida beach house wrote an article about taxpayers' money being spent on hopscotch lessons for Asian women because a very important women's center offering desperately needed support to vulnerable Asian women was actually called hopscotch. 12.46 is the time. 137:31 If he'd been a right-wing talk show host, he'd have been sacked unceremoniously years ago. Why does LBC continue to allow this vile smear merchant to pollute the airwaves? They're not smears, Dickie, mate. They're paragraphs from your own CV. 137:46 They're facts. They should be ashamed of themselves. I can answer your question. One of the reasons why they continue to allow me to pollute the airwaves is because I've got the biggest audience in the history of the radio station. In fact, if we did the top 100 shows in the history of LBC, yours wouldn't be in it. 138:03 Mind how you go. It's 12.47. 138:05 And we're back in the room. 138:08 It's 12.49. What has Andy Burnham got that Keir Starmer has not? Elaine's in Dorking. Elaine, what would you like to say? 138:17 Hello. Hi. First time caller. 138:19 Well, welcome. I'm apologised for ambushing you with that extraordinarily unhinged rant that you had to endure a moment ago. But I'm glad you've stayed until the end. What do you want to say? 138:28 I had to pay attention, didn't I? Just in case you popped up. 138:33 Yes. Go on. 138:35 Yeah, my feeling is that you don't just have to be comfortable in your own skin, but you have to be comfortable in the limelight. 138:42 And I think Andy Burnham really is. And I don't think Keir Starmer ever was, really. 138:48 And that's not fair, right? 138:50 No, it's not fair, no. It's not necessarily something you can do anything about. 138:56 Do you think he was surprised to discover that he wasn't comfortable in the limelight, Keir Starmer? 139:03 Yeah, quite possibly, because he was confident in his, presumably, past occupations. 139:12 Obviously, you know, highly thought of. And yet, being a politician and being constantly... 139:18 out there is probably an entirely different experience for him. 139:23 And Andy Burnham probably wouldn't have been like that 15 years ago, but he is like that now. 139:28 Well, that's right, yeah. He's had that range of experiences that have helped prepare him to be out there and be comfortable with it all. And obviously he's very good on social media as well. 139:42 Which again is probably something quite new, whereas Starmer would entrust that... 139:46 It's a terrible thing because Kemi Badenow is clearly on there too much, which is how she ended up defending a former neo-Nazi because he happens to spend a lot of time online bigging up Kemi Badenow. We worked that out on yesterday's programme with Henry Riley. So the temptation is to say to politicians, get off there. But you can't really say that because so many people get their news and indeed their opinions from there. So what Keir Starmer does is essentially... trust people to tell him what to do on social media despite not really having any antennae himself whereas burnham there's no way burnham would have done that pancake thing would he uh no and there's no way really starmer could have done the pub snack thing and seemed so natural even though i'm sure i'm sure he loves a bag of crisps yeah yeah i'm sure he does but he obviously doesn't come naturally to him to be on social media 140:37 And it was fairly clear that that was all put there in front of him for him to deliver. And it looked odd. 140:41 So what's the word then? Can you put it in a word? Just being comfortable? That's what we mean by authenticity. Because Keir Starmer is an authentic person, but we don't put him on this list of authentic politicians. 140:54 No, I guess that's true. Being entirely comfortable in almost any situation. 141:01 And there it is. And hopefully it will sustain. Hopefully it will last. But for now, it's what he's got and what Starmer hasn't got. Thank you, Elaine. A sparkling debut. Paul is in Eastleigh in Hampshire. Paul, what would you like to say? 141:12 Yeah, I think I'm with Elaine. I'm also with the previous caller when you said to him, well, what do you think the Downing Street media team are wanting? He said, well, I can keep our jobs. 141:23 Yeah, there's a great line here as well on that as well. This is from Stephen in Isleworth. Everything is going well and you don't need to change anything, said no consultant ever. 141:32 Yes, well, there you go. I think the reality is, I think, with Starmer, I think he had a lot of pressure on him, you know, as an come from a very well reputed profession to leading the opposition and becoming Prime Minister in a new government after God knows how many years with the Tories. He had a lot of pressure. Burnham has spent his whole career in politics. 142:00 I think, as authenticity goes, I think really with Burnham it comes down to a carefree attitude in respect to himself personally. Keir Starmer's come from a very serious background. And I can't knock him. He's a father. He's the son of a toolmaker. I'm the son of a card trader. We've all got a background. 142:20 I'm the son of a Daily Telegraph journalist, but I try and keep that quiet. Otherwise, Dick Littlejohn might stick it in a column next week. 142:26 Well, that's fair enough, I suppose. But I think, you know, the reality is he's, I think you could look at it as a little bit like dad dancing, right? It's the political, Burnham is the political equivalent of dad dancing. If your kids moan about you dancing, you dance more as a dad. We all do it. But there's a carefree attitude about him. If you put Starmer in a similar situation, he would have crumbled. 142:47 Not crumbled, but we would have cringed. We would have cringed in a different way. That's an interesting point. It's like two flavours of cringe. Because kids cringe at dad dancing and the rest of us... 142:59 Love it. Or the dads love it. Whereas if Starmer did it, everyone would cringe. Other dads would cringe as well. It's got a touch of the Ricky Gervais dancing. But this is brutal on the man, isn't it? Because he's clearly the real deal. He just couldn't communicate that to people. 143:13 I've got a lot of sympathy for Keir Starmer. Me too. More than ever. Similar sympathy I had for him, believe it or not, for John Major. You do now. 143:21 Did you have it at the time? Did you have it at the time? 143:23 I think I did. I don't think you did. I felt like I wanted to fight his corner and I felt like he was getting a lot of undue criticism. For being grey. We talk about him a lot. 143:32 We talked about him yesterday in exactly the same context. The old Cones hotline. 143:39 Thank you, mate. Thank you, Paul. It is just coming up to 12.56. I need to give you a quick heads up. 143:45 for this week's full disclosure obviously I've given several heads up to a rather old episode of full disclosure if you're just joining us the one with Jason Arday the academic who has found himself at the centre of all manner of allegations accusations and many of which have been found to be well founded already that's definitely worth listening to if you just want to get an idea perhaps of why so many people found him so persuasive, myself included. But this week, it's a rather different character, Dr. Ranj, who you will be probably familiar with from his work on the telly and writing, particularly good at communicating with children in medical matters. 144:23 You've probably seen him on Strictly Come Dancing as well, or with the kids on the CBBeast show, Get Well Soon. I really liked him. I didn't know a great deal about him, but I knew that I really liked him. I decided to interview him when I was at the theatre. I think I was watching Elf, with the magnificent Alid Jones in it. And the children were more excited about seeing Dr. Ranj in the audience than they were about... Not my children. They're far too old. But lots of children there were more excited about seeing Dr. Ranj in the audience than they were about seeing the show itself, it seemed. Such was the length of the queue waiting to shake his hand or get his autograph. 144:54 So I couldn't wait to sit down with him. And I'm very glad I did, because he is absolutely fascinating. 144:59 Yeah, yeah. 145:21 I took that challenge head on. And I think I've kept that mentality through my entire life. Whenever someone says, gives me a challenge or says, you can't do something, I come back and say, here you go. And that's what I did. I took my exams. Did you arrange it all yourself? No, no, no. It's all done through the Sunday school. 145:40 So you went up to the teacher at Sunday school and said, I'd like to take my GCSE six years early. 145:43 Well, I think they kind of said, are you ready? 145:46 What sort of shifts were you putting in? 145:48 What sort of homework were you doing? Well, it was a few hours every Sunday and then you get a bit of homework as well. And they said, well, I think you're good enough to take the exam. 145:58 So I did. And I passed. I got a C. And then I took it into my school, my junior school. Primary school, yeah. 146:08 I was naff at sport. 146:10 How old were you? Eight, nine, ten. 146:11 I was eight at that age. Eight years old. Yeah. I wasn't very good at sport. So I never got sports certificates in assemblies. I used to watch all my mates getting swimming badges and things like that. So the first certificate I ever got, I took it in to my headmaster and I said, would you do that thing that you do in assemblies? 146:30 Do the presentation of a certificate. And he said, I remember him saying to me, do you know what this is? And I was like, I've got absolutely no idea. It's like I've done an exam, basically, and I've got this certificate. And he got some other teachers and he goes, this is a GCSE O level, which is what they were called in that time. 146:48 Yeah, of course they were, because you'd have sat GCSEs just looking at your age. When you were 16, you sat GCSEs. But when you were eight, they were still O-levels. 146:56 I was born in 79, so I was, what was it, 1986? 87-ish? 147:02 Yeah, so that's... Must be some sort of record. 147:06 I don't know about that. But I was certainly... It was a proud moment. 147:11 I bet it was. It's coming up to one o'clock. That's it from me for another day. We'll be back Monday morning from 10. If you missed any of today's show, you can listen back on our free Global Player app, or the LBC app, where you can also stay up to date with all the latest news, videos, and opinions. You can listen to a range of podcasts, including James O'Brien Daily, the best bits from my LBC show every day. Download the official LBC app for free from your app store now. Coming up at four on LBC, it's Ben Kentish, who's in for Tom Sawbreak, because Tom was in for Nick this morning. But now, it's the one and only... Tai Chi Fogarty. 147:42 Tai Chi Fogarty, thank you. 147:44 This has been a Global Player original production.