I used a car journey yesterday to listen to Nick Clegg’s podcast, Anger Management, yesterday. I was a bit perturbed that he’s only been talking to white men of a certain age so far, but am reassured that this is going to change soon, with Harriet Harman and Elif Safak coming up.
I decided that yesterday’s sunshine was too lovely to be spoiled by listening to the chat with Nigel Farage, so I listened to the Know your Frenemy chat with George Osborne instead.
I still have some time for the coalition and the things that the Liberal Democrats brought to the table that did make life better for people – better mental health care, shared parental leave, extra money for disadvantaged kids in school and the like, ending child detention for immigration, all the green stuff we did and our work on international development. I am also acutely aware of the mistakes that we made, particularly around immigration (the minimum income requirement to bring your non British spouse in for a start) and cutbacks in social security that caused real misery. Sometimes stopping the Tories doing their worst just wasn’t enough.
So the conversation between Nick and George, a reuniting of half The Quad who made all the decisions during the coalition years, was peppered with several instances of Nick telling George how much he’d infuriated him. Hearing about Osborne’s upbringing was interesting, with his Labour voting mum and Conservative inclined father.
They had an interesting conversation about the media with Osborne, the newspaper editor, speaking up for newspapers and for regulation of social media.
A personal guide to the 13 most essential political podcasts
The Economist’s podcasts – a good mix of audio recordings of selected articles from the print edition together with brief discussions involving the Economist’s expert correspondents. Slightly irritatingly the sound can vary between recordings, so you …