Tag Archives: tessa dunlop

The Edinburgh Festival is in full swing. Broadcaster Iain Dale’s run of All Talk shows was limited to just four days this year because, apparently, the Oasis concerts last  week had booked out all the hotels. These interview shows are always worth going to and often make the headlines.

I was absolutely gutted to miss the first shows with Rachel Reeves and Jess Phillips as I had committed many months ago to look after my nephews.

However I managed to go to both shows the following day. The first was a double header  with his current podcast partner historian Tessa Dunlop (who looks very like Taylor Swift in this photo according to my son) and his former partner in hilarity Jacqui Smith. Their For the Many podcast came to an end last year after 500 episodes when Jacqui was ennobled and appointed a Minister in the Department for Education. Iain now hosts a twice weekly podcast with Tessa called “Where Politics meets History” which I love because Tessa is very good at calling out Iain’s BS and I love both politics and history.

It was a very funny hour. I am sure it can’t be legal to look as fresh as Jacqui did considering she had had 3 overnight flights after a ministerial trip to Japan and Malaysia last week.

If you had told 2009 me that I would really like Jacqui, who was then the Home Secretary and responsible for all manner of Labour authoritarianism designed to enrage liberals, I wouldn’t have believed you. However, she and Iain’s hilarious and irreverent  podcast banter brightened my life through some very dark times and for that I will always be grateful. It was good to see that several of the For the Many superfans had travelled to see the team reunited.

It didn’t take long to get to toilet humour – a discussion of Japanese toilets. Jacqui and Tessa did as I’d hoped and ganged up on Iain quite a bit and he,unusually, didn’t say that much. I felt that Tessa might have gone slightly hard on Jacqui over the Government’s record, as this was more a fun thing rather than the Today programme, but as she said afterwards, she had a Government minister in front of her and wanted to hold her to account.

A very big penny dropped for me not long into it. Tessa talked about staying with her little brother in Dunbar. It couldn’t be Duncan Dunlop, the top of the list Lib Dem candidate for the South of Scotland region in next year’s Scottish elections, could it? And indeed it was.