Next up, here's John Power on Miatta Fanbula's revolutionary family history.

Labour may have removed hereditary peers from the House of Lords, but the party has its own dynasties.

This government has a Kinnock, a Falconer, a Miliband and a Reeves, all representatives of famous political families.

But the minister with perhaps the most intriguing ideological ancestry is the Energy Secretary, Miata Fambula.

No one denies that Fambula is an intellectually formidable operator in her own right.

With a PPE degree from Lincoln College, Oxford, she speaks with a poised confidence.

She has described herself as a Liberian refugee, and the inference many will draw from that is that she's a child of poverty, not privilege.

Yeah

...

but there was music getting played in the house.

Um, but I can...

I, I can't remember not closing my eyes and getting that sort of, you know, feeling that music gives you.

That was, you know, that's as far back as I can remember.

Um, I never thought about b- b- being a musician or something.

Yeah.

Do you think that's playing into it

as well? It's so interesting you bring up subprime mortgages because obviously Michael Burry, who's very famous in the big short, has said that he believes that this is just doom-mongering as a way of floating the stock up higher.

So, you know, there is definitely a well-founded perspective there.

I think that obviously there are some differences between how OpenAI, ChatGPT model works to how some of these frontier Chinese ones like Kimi.

And part of that is actually that, to be fair to them, Anthropocene and OpenAI, they're looking a bit closer at how you mitigate some risks.

Yeah.

So as an example with Kimi or some of these Chinese ones, you actually can use real time internet searches, whereas Claude or ChatGPT will make you use a time window that's six or seven months before.

And I guess one of the other issues that you've mentioned is that journalists and politicians, let's say for rivals, are kind of, they sometimes seem kind of too willing just to repeat what ai companies tell them yeah do you think politicians and and people in the media actually have an understanding of what's going on here or are they just swallowing you

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and it just kept going like that, and it was...

You know, 2025 was... an amazing um year for me personally on many different levels you know you know i wrote a new album my daughter got married i walked down i did the speed oasis we got back on the radio with poison vine um you know it's 30 years since all changed there's a lot going on but obviously the oasis thing was just you know people i was living that real time you know people talking about the the documentary that's just been out you've seen it i haven't yet I should have gone down the Premier and that, but I don't know what I was doing.

We've got to watch

it.

No, I think I might take my daughter and just kind of relive it a bit.

Yeah, yeah.

Because it was just...

Next up, we'll hear from John Power on how politicians can harness or at least attempt to harness the power of clipping.

When Mel Stride put out a YouTube short last month, it got zero views.

That surely is worth repeating.

Zero views.

Stride's unloved short was a poorly cropped clip of a GB News interview, similar to dozens of other clips he has posted on his YouTube channel before being sacked as shadow chancellor.

Most of these videos have fewer than 10 views.

Now, Stride was born in 1961, so he can perhaps be forgiven for not being au fait with the latest meta on social media.

Get AT&T Business at att.com slash 5G network.

When Mel Stride put out a YouTube short last month, it got zero views.

That surely is worth repeating.

Zero views.

Stride's unloved short was a poorly cropped clip of a GB News interview, similar to dozens of other clips he has posted on his YouTube channel before being sacked as Shadow Chancellor.

Most of these videos have fewer than 10 views.

Now, Stride was born in 1961, so he can perhaps be forgiven for not being au fait with the latest meta on social media.

Stride's social

Yeah

... making and building reservoirs over 20 or 30 years.

By the early 2010s, attitudes towards this changed within government.

There was a water act passed in 2014, and then at the start of, uh, the last government, they were very, very clear that they wanted to build, you know, the, the, set this target to have nine reservoi- new reservoirs built.

Um, one in particular in the Fens in Cambridge to be, to be done quite early, and also put onto the nationally significant infrastructure project regime.

I guess my, my counterpoint, or it's not really a counterpoint, it's just to say, you know, it's not...

I think there's a kind of structural problem where maybe people are getting policy or policy ideas.

Yeah

Mm.

And I don't feel intimidated by the prospect of writing new material.

Way, way back, it used to be such a big thing to get an album i-i-into gear, into shape.

Now I'm just rolling into the studio, continually trying to write stuff, but I don't have to finish anything.

I just know...

It's very relaxed.

I've never really experienced [laughs] my life like this, really.

Yeah.

And I do hope that every human being on this planet gets to experience what I experienced.

I think what you're saying, you know, in your own words, is very similar to what I think most people have thought.

I mean, look, I've said in interviews that, you know, You look out the window, the world is a vicious place at the moment.

It's volatile.

There's a lot of people feeling anxiety, feeling threatened, feeling whatever, you know.

I mean, there's people getting blown up left, right and centre.

There's all sorts of, you know, I mean...

Technically, your summer kicked off.

What did you discover?

Well, I suppose the key thing here is there's this sort of international dynamic to it.

So there's a lot of money that's coming from the US from these sort of large donor funds.

But another dynamic of it is extremely successful hedge funds and extremely successful hedge fund executives who in some cases, they're using the charity sector as part of their sort of business model.

So there's this guy called Chris Han, who is one of the most successful hedge fund people in the country.

And I think it was named by the Financial Times last year as being the most successful hedge fund manager.

But he got into this, when he started his hedge fund, his sort of I wouldn't call it a trick, but his way of doing it was to set up his hedge fund to give money to charitable causes, a section of the money, which meant that lots of charitable organizations and endowments gave him lots of money to sort of use with his hedge fund.

Do you think there's a world in which Boris can overcome that issue for himself?

What did you discover?

Well, I suppose the key thing here is there's this sort of international dynamic to it.

So there's a lot of money that's coming from the US from these sort of large donor funds.

But another dynamic of it is extremely successful hedge funds and extremely successful hedge fund executives who in some cases, they're using the charity sector as part of their sort of business model.

So there's this guy called Chris Han, who is one of the most successful hedge fund people in the country.

And I think it was named by the Financial Times last year as being the most successful hedge fund manager.

But he got into this, when he started his hedge fund, his sort of wouldn't call it trick, but his way of doing it was to set up a hedge fund to give money to charitable causes, a section of the money, which meant that lots of charitable organizations and endowments gave him lots of money to sort of use with his hedge fund.

checkers.

And i- isn't our, you know, main job as, as humans in a society, but also as the state, is to protect kids before anyone else? So is there not an argument that we have to say, "Okay, we are potentially giving this government or a future government unprecedented snooping powers or control over the internet, but so be it if it keeps our kids safe"?

Well, we...

I mean, we've heard this, this, the, almost the playbook argument for every sort of restriction that happens to people's, uh, individual freedoms is always using the kids.

I think that when it comes to, uh, the specifics of some of the correla- you, you, uh, you rightly used the term correlation.

Um, you know, this consultation, there was a consultation on this to try and see if there was really any evidence at all there's a causative link between social media use with teenagers and children, and mental health problems, uh, being caused amongst them.

It's never been demonstrated.

Lots of people and lots of different studies have been conducted into this issue.

Yeah.

Mm.

There is actually another crisis coming, and it's the, you know...

Uh, one of the stats in the piece is in the last, once we get to November, um, food prices will have increased by 50% in five years.

And in the five years before, um, 2021, it only increased by about 4 to 5%.

So, you know, this is really becoming crisis on top of crisis, which is making people, uh, harder and harder for people on lower incomes to really, you know, enjoy their lives at all.

I would say there is something interesting about the last couple of days in terms of Starmer and, you know, the leadership, uh, candidates.

In a sense, Starmer is actually providing now, uh, and so is Reeves, a new kind of hardheaded approach to, uh, the cost of living crisis.

We're all inclusive.

Mm

... with there is actually another crisis coming, and it's the, you know...

Uh, one of the stats in the piece is in the last, once we get to November, um, food prices will have increased by 50% in five years.

And in the five years before, um, 2021, it only increased by about 4 to 5%.

So, you know, this is really becoming crisis on top of crisis, which is making people, uh, harder and harder for people on lower incomes to really, you know, enjoy their lives at all.

I would say there is something interesting about the last couple of days in terms of Starmer and, you know, the leadership, uh, candidates.

In a sense, Starmer is actually providing now, uh, and so is Reeves, a new kind of hardheaded approach to, uh, the cost of living crisis.

We're all inclusive.

Yeah

... by a police officer, right? You know, the statistics basically bear this out.

So since 2012, which is 14 years ago, we've seen the, um, rates of people being actually sentenced for drug offenses really, really crater.

I think it's about half what it was.

Um, and in a very specific thing with cannabis, uh, cultivation, again, about half, um, the amount of people are being prosecuted for this offense.

So yeah, we're not, we're not really tr- seriously trying to sentence people, uh, for drugs in this country.

A country that really does prosecute war on drugs and as an example would be a country like Singapore.

Is that something that's happening here? Is, is fentanyl flooding Britain's streets as well?