ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Let’s have a look through the Sunday papers now and I’m joined by the former England defender, Sol Campbell, the author and playwright Bonnie Greer and the former Attorney General and Labour peer, Lord Goldsmith, a very good morning to you all. Bonnie, it falls on you to start us off here, the front page lead on the Sunday Times about Labour’s £27 billion spending black hole. This is a tried and tested political technique isn’t it? When your opponents cost up all your pledges and semi pledges.

BONNIE GREER: Before they have even got all the pledges down and I love that they have the quotes, that means it’s kind of a factoid, it’s not really a fact. This is the Economic Secretary at the Treasury who has come up with these figures that there is apparently a black hole, a £27 billion black hole in Labour’s policies and we don’t have them all yet so how they came up with that is an interesting thing. They have also assured us that no civil servants were involved in doing opposition research so we didn’t pay for that, it’s all Freedom of Information. So we shall see.

DM: As I say it’s a tried and tested technique, nevertheless there do seem to be quite a few pledges around, perhaps you can come in with this Lord Goldsmith, it always seems to be bankers bonuses that pay for it. I know they are paid a lot of bonuses but £27 billion might be a lot to get.

LORD GOLDSMITH: It’s an interesting story and obviously it is done on the eve of the Labour party conference but how has it come about? It’s come about apparently through a Freedom of Information request. Now how does a journalist know that somewhere there are already figures done costing these pledges? Well the answer is very clear, some Tory politician has tipped off a journalist, why don’t you ask about this, we’ve got it ready.

DM: Unattributable leaks, we’re moving on to that later.

BONNIE GREER: And as I say, the Sunday Times is covering itself by putting the headline in quotes so it’s a truthie but not exactly the truth.

LORD GOLDSMITH: And some of this, half of this is apparently VAT and my understanding is that there isn’t actually a commitment at the moment to push VAT back so that takes account of £13 billion so we’ll have to see, Ed Miliband will have to deal with this during the conference but it is an interesting story.

DM: What’s your attitude when you see a story like that? Do you just switch off and think I don’t believe any of them anymore?

SOL CAMPBELL: I switch off but one of the things how I look at it, if it was an American kind of way this would have been out a long time ago and everyone would have been exposed. I think in England we have just started to get used to people leaking things and secretly telling people here and there, look at this situation, to kind of have an upper hand on the other party. I think in America they are used to this.

DM: And that leads us into your story, Lord Goldsmith, the Labour Conference and Damian McBride, the former spin doctor to Gordon Brown is releasing extracts from his memoirs.

LORD GOLDSMITH: That’s the other thing that Ed Miliband is going to have to deal with this week, he’s going to have to deal with the spending, he’s going to have to make the positive statements as to what Labour is going to do if it’s in power but he has also got to deal with this past and the problem is I think, it’s not enough just to say – and I heard Yvette Cooper here saying that’s not what we do anymore, that’s obviously important, it’s true but it’s very important but I think there has got to be some way of getting rid of the past and Ed Miliband has got to put some clear blue water between himself and these past stories, because of his association …

DM: But there might be emails that come out that he was copied into, allegedly, about some of this spin operation that McBride was carrying out.

LORD GOLDSMITH: If that’s so, it’s better that he comes out with that, it’s explained, if there’s an apology needed by anybody – and I’m not saying by him – then that needs to be done. He needs to get rid of this otherwise it will continue to fester.

DM: But we all know, don’t we Bonnie, that this kind of briefing, perhaps not necessarily as poisonous but hey, I would think some of it … there is a relationship between politicians and journalists and politicians within parties want to get other members of that and they leak to journalists, they tell them things that are unattributable.

BONNIE GREER: They do but this is kind of a Westminster bubble story, this is a Westminster village people story. If you went out there on the high street nobody would know who Damian McBride was. If you want to plant into the Labour camp, be trusted, okay that’s another story but all of this kerfuffle of Damian McBride, nobody really knows who he is.

DM: I put it to Yvette Cooper when I interviewed her earlier that isn’t this part of this perception of being honest about the past, dealing with it and putting it away. You can’t deny it didn’t happen.

BONNIE GREER: Would you want Labour to do a Savonarola type thing and burn yourselves alive, we renounce everything? She can’t possibly answer a question like that, she doesn’t know the answer, this guy was spinning in his little closet somewhere and he admits it. This is what’s not being talked about in the memoirs, what he admits which is what he said, nobody knew what I was doing. But he keeps going on and on and on.

DM: Do you believe that?

LORD GOLDSMITH: I heard what Tessa Jowell said and I have huge difficulty believing that some of this stuff was not known by Gordon Brown, it is very hard to believe it was being done on his behalf, it is very hard to believe he didn’t know what was going on. Bear in mind, this is not just spinning against the opposition, this is telling stories against one’s own people, against one’s own colleagues and it sort of demonstrates the Westminster adage that the opposition sits in front of you, your enemies sit behind you.

DM: You say Gordon Brown must have known, what about Ed Balls and Ed Miliband?

LORD GOLDSMITH: Well that I don’t know about at all because they’re not the people … Gordon was very tight, he was very close in what he did, he didn’t reveal things to other people so I don’t know about that but I think this needs to be cleared as I said and Ed Miliband needs to say anything that needs to be said.

DM: Moving on, Sol, bring in this story, it’s about a sporting great and what bad luck he really had. A guy you know and played with and a great footballer, a truly great footballer, Ledley King.

SOL CAMPBELL: Yes, Ledley King has got an autobiography out at the moment. I played with him years ago when I was at Tottenham and it is such a shame to look at him now, he’s young and he should be still playing but he was blighted with injuries throughout his career and now he is in a role at Tottenham, trying to pass his knowledge on, doing his badges. He has a great book out now called King and he talks about the difficulties, the ups and downs. I remember I was at Arsenal and I played against Tottenham and I went into my old changing rooms and I saw him on the bench and his knee was just like a football. The stuff he had to go through just to play football was incredible and it just shows the manner, the human being side of Ledley but he should be celebrated and it is such a shame he couldn’t fulfil his career.

DM: I agree with you and on the England side of it, do you think he would have made a difference if had been there alongside you in the defence?

SOL CAMPBELL: Yes, obviously he was my understudy and I played with him and obviously he learnt a lot about how to play the position and that’s how you learn. You need players who have done it before and I learnt from players above me how to play the opposition. As a youngster you can keep on playing but you need that kind of experience side by side just to tell you and teach you the little tricks of the trade, that’s how you grow as a player and ultimately get better and better and quicker as well.

DM: Well best of luck to him and his autobiography. The next story is in the Independent on Sunday, one in three are struggling to feed themselves, that’s quite a statistic, what backs it up?

BONNIE GREER: It seems to me to be … this is a Which survey and because of inflation galloping ahead of wages people are actually literally having trouble with the weekly shop. It seems to me that that is what people are interested in talking about, that is what people are talking about, the fact that moms and dads are cutting back on their own food in order to feed their children and give their children enough nutrition.

DM: We are going to be hearing about this from the Labour conference, about the cost of living, the bread and butter issues but what practically can any government do about that, about inflation when it comes to the shopping basket? We can see when it could work perhaps when it comes to energy bills and petrol and things like that but what can you do with the shopping basket?

BONNIE GREER: Well one of the things you can do is tell the truth and say that this recovery is a no wage, low wage recovery. At least people can say, ah, at least you understand how I live, you understand what I’m going through instead of bigging up this idea that we’re in recovery. We’re in a recovery of something like 2.7% and that’s not really what’s happening, most people on the ground are having a very difficult time and it’s interesting to me that that doesn’t become the news as opposed to this stuff about McBride.

DM: I’m sure it is going to be the news all week coming out of Brighton. Lord Goldsmith, this is a very interesting and worrying story, Labour are vowing action on rape and abuse and apparently investigations and prosecutions seem to be dropping.

LORD GOLDSMITH: This is Yvette Cooper in an interview in the Independent on Sunday and what she is saying is that prosecutions in relation to domestic violence, in relation to rape, investigations on those cases and some other women related issues like female genital mutilation, have dropped. I think it is a problem, Labour did a lot actually to push that forward.

DM: Has it honestly dropped, particularly on sexual abuse and rape, but the focus has been that the number is going down?

LORD GOLDSMITH: I agree and I think it is very worrying but the problem is that austerity cuts, when you cut justice one of the things you end up doing hard is cutting the money to prosecutors, it’s a least favourite son of politicians, paying for the lawyers and the consequences of that is that there is less to investigate.

DM: You being a lawyer.

LORD GOLDSMITH: I’m not paid by the government at all so it’s not my problem but that is worrying so I think it’s right to focus some attention on this.

BONNIE GREER: And I think Yvette Cooper is coming out as a champion for women which is what she wants. One of the problems is the atmosphere in which women have to report rape, we are getting from some newspapers who are starting to question the veracity of women when they make testimony, they are even talking about now why suspects don’t have anonymity when of course in the criminal justice system somebody has got to be named, you’ve got to make a choice. So all of this is really impacting on especially young women as to whether they feel they can go out there and say something so of course the reporting of rape goes down.

DM: Sol, you’ve got this one on management, a lot of new managers in the Premier League and facing a lot of stiff tests already.

SOL CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s how the Premiership has become now, involved now, you haven’t got much time but with Paulo di Canio at Sunderland, his appointment was quite controversial, some people say he is linked to the far right, he says he isn’t, back in Italy, I think that’s up for debate.

DM: I have seen those pictures of him in Italy, allegedly making Nazi salutes. He says he is just waving at the crowd, he was waving with a very straight arm.

SOL CAMPBELL: And as a black player I would actually find it quite difficult to play for him personally.

DM: Really?

SOL CAMPBELL: Yes, I would. If I was there I’d say transfer me, I would be on that level but anyway, he is into his managerial career at Sunderland and it looks like it is tough times ahead and it could be not too long before he might be out unless the results turn around.

DM: So this is Sol Campbell saying you think he will be the first Premier League managerial casualty if he doesn’t turn it around?

SOL CAMPBELL: Well he’s spoken already, if it carries on, he’s put his hand up, the hierarchy will be looking at him.

BONNIE CAMPBELL: Can I ask Sol a question? It is very interesting to me, one thing that the head of the FA has said is that there is a great impact, there’s going to be in 20 years on the fact that England has so many foreign players that in fact there is going to be a shortage in 20 years with the national players. How do you feel about the whole influx of foreign players?

SOL CAMPBELL: Well it’s the money. Long term it is going to be a problem because when you go round the world and you maybe go to Germany or these other places, the German system, the 16s, 17s, 18s, you go there and there may be a couple of Austrians, Swiss players but you are not going to have players from all over the world. When you go into the English, particularly the Premier League, there are a lot of foreign players at 15, 14, 16, 17, 18 so how are the British players or English players going to get through because they haven’t got those two or three years to make mistakes and grow and maybe blossom into a player. If you have other players coming in from literally all around the world it’s difficult. When I started there was one player from South Africa, everyone was British. I know times have moved on but I think the FA should look at it.

DM: And our time has moved on, so much to discuss and so little time to do it. Thank you so much indeed, a very entertaining paper review and thank you for putting that question to Sol, Bonnie. Sol, Bonnie, Lord Goldsmith, thank you all very much indeed for reviewing the papers there.