Murnaghan 13.04.14 Paper Review with Ken Livingstone, former London Mayor and Nadine Dorries, MP
ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: It’s time now to take a look through the Sunday papers. I’m glad to say I’m joined today by the former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and the Conservative MP, Nadine Dorries, who is now an author as well, just written her first novel The Four Streets, I can see you brandishing a copy there, £2.99 on Amazon I see.
NADINE DORRIES: Well I hope it gets lower actually because that’s what they do with first time authors to drive sales.
DM: Absolutely, let’s drive through some of the stories in the papers. Ken, you kick us off with the upcoming Euro elections.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: Well the Euro elections, it’s the Telegraph here who has got this poll showing that the Tories will come third behind UKIP and Labour is still narrowly ahead of UKIP and a poll in the Mirror shows that when asked how will you vote in the General Election, UKIP is now up to 20 so I think that is the legacy of those two debates, it really put Nigel Farage very much in the spotlight and I think there are two things that really chime with people. The very strong thing of saying we should not get involved in Ukraine, it’s nothing to do with us and also they use the term working class, a couple of times he has said about the working class and I think politicians have been nervous about using the term working class, haven’t they? Oh it’s the middle, the middle ground, all that and people take the working class vote for granted and I think UKIP has done very well, they are certainly taking votes from Labour as well as Tory.
DM: That’s the point isn’t it and that was clearly a pitch of Nigel Farage, wasn’t it, to get the vote of, as he terms it, the white working class.
NADINE DORRIES: I think it’s the working class, if we’re using that expression, who feel the most threatened by the issues which UKIP campaign on. It’s interesting that this story and this headline is in the Telegraph because I do sometimes wonder, the Telegraph which seems to attack all MPs and all political parties apart from UKIP and runs these stories that the Tories will fall below UKIP in the May Euro’s, I wonder if the Telegraph have an agenda to drive votes towards UKIP almost by default.
DM: Well maybe they do and maybe they don’t but there has been a lot of academic analysis of UKIPs appeal across the board. Do you feel that your party, the Conservatives, can win back that vote? You’ve been critical in the past, haven’t you, of the leadership being out of touch and their social background and flicking through your novel – and I haven’t finished it yet, Nadine – it’s all about being working class, the experience that the Conservatives seem to have lost touch with.
NADINE DORRIES: Well actually that all politicians have lost touch with and I attack all politicians. If you look at Ed Miliband, he got his job because he was in the salons, his father’s Marxist salons, his first job was actually to go and work for Gordon Brown. Clegg, his first job was granted to him by a favour of his father as an internship in a bank and went straight into politics and I’m afraid in my own party leadership as well, so yes, I attack all politics. Politics used to be more relevant, it used to have people from more relevant and working class backgrounds and northern backgrounds.
DM: And Ken, the irony of all this is look at Nigel Farage, he’s an investment banker, he says he wants tax cuts for the rich and all kinds of things that people would say no, I don’t want that.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: If ever people actually sat down and looked at the policies some of the support would leach away quite rapidly but he’s great, you have him on and he answers the questions, he has a laugh and so on and that gets to people.
NADINE DORRIES: He’s a bloke and people like blokes, they like matey blokes with a pint in their hand.
DM: He goes to the pub and has a fag outside.
NADINE DORRIES: And he looks genuine when he does it as well and people relate to that.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: I think he is genuine and that’s part of it, he doesn’t care really what you think about him and what the press say and that’s absolutely crucial. I remember being told two interesting things, that the two most successful Prime Ministers of modern times were Atlee and his government and Thatcher. Atlee never read the papers and Mrs Thatcher was never allowed to read the papers, they were kept away from her. So much of politics now, the politicians are obsessed what’s going to be in the papers tomorrow, can we suck up to the Daily Mail.
NADINE DORRIES: There is an irony to this and that is one of the big issues that UKIP campaign on obviously is immigration and that’s the issue that the Labour party have said sorry about so many times because they got it so wrong by completely opening up our borders. We have no control over immigration yet if people vote UKIP they are going to end up with a Labour government and the only party which is going to guarantee …
DM: It was a little desperate that plea there. We’re talking about the perception of politicians and UKIP is the anti-politics party as it has been termed now and Nadine, this next story feeds into that, it is of course the saga of Nigel Evans, the former Deputy Speaker. “Now pay my £130,000 legal bill”, this in the Mail.
NADINE DORRIES: Well I think this is an absolute travesty, what happened to Nigel Evans. Three of the people who were brought to court by the CPS didn’t even know why they were there or what they were doing in court and what the police did was, one very dubious character in parliament made an accusation against Nigel Evans and anybody who has worked in parliament for a period of time would have questioned this allegation made by this individual and yet the CPS, what they did was they got together a number of very tenuous, what they thought by delving into the past, it was a fishing expedition – ex-partners, ex-relationships that Nigel had had – and they thought that by taking seven very weak, tenuous issues to the court that he would be found guilty of the central weak, tenuous issue and of course he wasn’t, he was completely cleared but Nigel is a good bloke, he came to Parliament – there is an interview in the Mail on Sunday today by Simon Walters which is incredibly sensitive because it actually tells you the human story. This man came to Parliament as a good man, from the north-west of England, he had a destiny and his destiny was to be Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. He’s lost his job, he’s lost his livelihood, he’s lost his ambition and he’s lost every penny he’s ever owned because of a targeted campaign against a high profile person. It has to stop.
DM: Ken, bring in your next story as well because they all relate. It has opened the floodgates hasn’t it about what’s going on with our MPs? Not just about their expenses but about their lifes.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: The Mail is now pursuing this story that MPs that fund this research organisation, it books a room at a hotel at the Tory party conference and their researcher was having sex …
NADINE DORRIES: But there’s no evidence to back it up at all, it’s just a headline.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: There’s no evidence, there never has been any evidence but it still dominates the front pages. What Nadine said earlier about the Telegraph, it looks to me as well that the Mail really doesn’t like this government and it will do anything to get rid of them. It’s like the key Tory supporters in the media have gone off Dave.
DM: Whether or not the story is true, we have all been to party conferences and we’ve all heard the stories about some of the bacchanalia that goes on with all the parties. Is there any way of regulating that? We can understand that eventually we might get a system that can deal with MPs expenses, you can centralise that, it has been tried many, many times, perhaps not working perfectly but what about particularly the way they treat their junior staff, Ken.
KEN LIVINSTONE: That is one of the problems, MPs directly employ their staff, researchers, secretaries and all that. I think they should be employed by the House of Commons.
NADINE DORRIES: Me too.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: So that, if some MPs are pressuring their aides to have sex with them and they complain about it, they are not going to lose their job, they will be reallocated to someone else.
NADINE DORRIES: I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe that MPs are pressurising their aides to have sex with them. I’m sorry, I work in parliament, I have been there for nine years and this just seems like, are people writing about another world that I work in every day? I think I am pretty well grounded and reasonably into what goes on in parliament and I just don’t believe it.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: When I was an MP I remember some amazing stories but our libel laws mean that I can’t repeat them.
DM: There are things we know about, we know about excessive drinking and that came up when Nigel Evans was talking about this, he said he was a silly old fool or whatever, he drank too much and things like that do go on, we all know about it, we’ve read the diaries over the years but you can’t change that though can you?
NADINE DORRIES: I think we have a drinking culture in this country anyway now, I don't think it’s whether you’re an MP or anybody, I think it’s very hard to find people who don’t drink every day now in the UK, I think it’s actually moving that way. There have been moves to have minimum pricing for alcohol because of this problem and we know the issues arising out of drinking.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: When I was a teenager you could go out for a drink on a Friday and Saturday night, you couldn’t afford to drink every day.
DM: You would build up to the weekend anyway when you were a student. Nadine, you’ve got, well this feeds in as well, this very nicely organised way you’ve picked your stories, ‘Women could run Britain but we’ve got better things to do’. We had Harriet Harman there saying what a better place parliament would be with more women in it.
NADINE DORRIES: Yes, this is by Rachel Johnson and she’s really hit on something which I’ve been struggling to get to the nub of for a while actually. Parliament is not actually a place where many women would want to work because of the long hours and there is the fact that if you look around any cabinet table, not just ours but any cabinet table under any Labour government, any woman sat round that table is either childless or very wealthy because to be an MP, to be a woman and to be an MP and a mother and to reach the cabinet, you need a degree of support which is phenomenal and expensive and you can only do it if you don’t have children or you have this incredibly wealthy support behind you so therefore that’s why I’ve always felt that women weren’t there. Rachel makes a really interesting point, that actually if you look at charities, you’ll have somebody coming on in a moment who is President of Mastercard UK, women are actually everywhere but what they are not doing is going into politics and why would they want to? Look at what’s happened to Nigel Evans, look at the front of these newspapers, what woman would …
KEN LIVINGSTONE: Look at that Prime Minister’s Question Time, there aren’t many women who want to drop into that sort of screaming …
NADINE DORRIES: Oh I don’t know, some of us love it.
DM: You had a Prime Minister who did quite well at it.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: I hated it, I thought so much of your time as an MP is a complete waste of time, staying late waiting for a vote that is anyway a foregone conclusion because we don’t get many MPs rebelling much of the time. It’s getting better, more are, but I don't think there is anything in the culture, the way of life, that’s attractive to women frankly.
NADINE DORRIES: No, and I don't think it’s ever going to change either.
DM: Oh goodness me! Well I didn’t want to end it on that but we have to. Thank you both very much indeed, good to see you and enjoy the rest of your day.
