We read the papers so you don’t have to… Today: Hapless handsy health sec Matt Hancock faces the music at the COVID inquiry. Who’ll take gold in the Drug Olympics? And does Elon Musk really have a taste for ketamine? TV and radio presenter Jamie East and journalist Jonn Elledge join Miranda Sawyer to binge on today’s ink.
Follow Paper Cuts:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/papercutsshow
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/papercutsshow/
Illustrations by Modern Toss https://moderntoss.com/
Written and presented by Miranda Sawyer. Produced by Sophie Black. Design: James Parrett. Music: Simon Williams. Managing Editor: Jacob Jarvis. Exec Producer: Martin Bojtos. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. PAPER CUTS is a Podmasters Production.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Miranda Sawyer and I'm holding my nerve as the deadlines approach.

Welcome back to Paper Cuts, the modern newspaper review, where we go toe to toe with the headlines, grapple with the daily's weirdest moments and occasionally give an arms aloft cheer when the papers do something great.

And we have a lovely Nissener review from America.

Wish we had a podcast like this talking up or down.

US Papers says brave girl 01 who's my kind of woman.

We're out mid morning every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

So subscribe on your favourite podcast app and you'll never miss an episode.

Now, here are the headlines for today's show.

Ex-Health Secretary apologises for Covid strategy.

Tory wannabe London Mayor candidate still standing despite sexual assault accusations and pingers for winners.

Businessman proposes an enhanced Olympics where athletes can take any drugs they want.

Thanks for joining us on Papercuts, the show that might have smoked once but never inhaled.

I'm Miranda Sawyer and here to take a heavy toke on the doobie of news.

It's TV and radio presenter and host of the Smart 7 podcast, Jamie East.

And we're really happy to have our friend and colleague, John Elledge back with us after a painful few days.

We've missed him and we're very glad he's here.

So what have we got on the headlines front Jamie I'm going to you first.

Okay in the Guardian story about the government plans to hit net 0 have been pretty catastrophic they've not done a single thing government adviser condemns UK for failed leadership over net 0.

In the mail we have 7 days of NHS chaos as senior doctors walk out.

And also with the mail another breast groping story from Sarah Vine saying how she had her breasts groped at number 10 by Harry Enfield.

Expert warns that 99% of dogs need a holiday to improve their mental health.

Oh, there's a nice picture as well, isn't there?

That's a viszla wearing heart sunglasses, sipping a pina colada.

I'm going to be honest, mine are a bit less cheery.

They're about Matt Hancock at the Covid inquiry.

So we've got from the Metro, we've got body bags are higher priority than virus.

The Express has gone with I want to be brutally honest with the public, which is a take.

And the star being the star has dressed him as a clown and gone with Coco.

Okay, so let's have a look at a couple of the stories.

So we had Sarah Vine there talking about groping.

It started at the beginning of this week.

In the Mail it says, crisis grows for number 10 grope claim Tory.

This crisis is because Daisy Goodwin, who's a formidable TV producer, I have met her.

And she has written 2 articles in the Times and the Mail about her encounter 10 years ago with this bloke called Daniel Korski.

He has got to the final 3 in the contest to become the Tory candidate to become London Mayor in May next year.

So when she met him, he was a spad 10 years ago.

He invited her to Downing Street, said we want to talk about a potential TV show, and grabbed her breast while she was there.

She said, which is amazing, are you actually touching my breast?

But she didn't write about it at the time.

He's someone I feel like I'm almost offended that we have to know who this man is.

He's I mean, he's on the short list of Tory candidates for London mayor.

It's a measure of how well the Tories are doing in London that they're all Could that people from the will every every election campaign in London their candidates get worse somehow We're now several levels below that goldsmith He was once upon a time.

He was deputy head of the Downing Street policy unit He's also had an amazing career in

He was going around asking politicians not to regulate Uber while fervently denying that he was lobbying on behalf of Uber.

A couple of years after that, he started this company called Public.io.

This is an incredible story in which he would help a selection of tech startups win government contracts in exchange for the small matter of 3% of their equity.

Anyway, he is apparently 1 of the Tories' 3 best candidates to be Mayor of London.

So he's, I mean, what's actually interesting about this story is that despite all this, he's been doing quite well within the Tory party.

But Daisy Goodwin has pulled him up on the way that he treated her when she met him.

He's denied it, I have to say, completely.

And what's interesting about it now is that she's actually finally put in a formal complaint to the number 10 cabinet office, so they have to take it seriously.

Before, she kind of did that thing that women often do, which is, okay, it was a bit dodgy, I'll brush past it, we'll just get on with life.

Yeah, I mean, as I understand it, there is a bit of a sort of a row going on over whose responsibility it is to answer these allegations.

With both the government and the Tory parties that are saying it's the other lot's responsibility.

That what they don't want is him to answer for it because he was on, you were telling us before we started recording John, that he was on talk TV.

Talk TV asked him if he'd always been faithful to his wife, and his reply was, look, I have a fantastic marriage to my wife, and I'm really excited that we've built a fantastic family together.

I don't think it would be appropriate to talk about anything else.

The main story is because he's completely denying it.

I think that perhaps if he had said, look, I did do it, It was appalling.

I thought we were kind of, maybe this was a bit of a date and I was really clumsy.

I mean, maybe we could forgive him, but if he just says.

It's difficult to say it was a bit of a date in Downing Street.

And also he was in his mid-30s at the time, which I thought he must have been in his early 20s.

But anyway, in a strange twist today, Sarah Vine has now described a party, I wonder if What she's trying to say is left-wing people do this too.

So she describes a party in 2010 at Downing Street where basically Harry Enfield says to her, do you mind if I have a go and jiggles her boobs?

Yeah, I think there's a bit of solidarity for Daisy as well.

It's kind of like, you know, this is this isn't a unique event that's happened.

Blokes tend to touch breasts or they used to in inappropriate ways.

And yeah, I think it is a bit of like it's not just not just the tour, as you know, famous lefty Lily Allen's godfather Harry Enfield did the same.

But I think slightly not sinister is the wrong word, but slightly less sexually, I guess is the...

He was doing it in a kind of like his comedy character, not that it's excusable in any way, because he touched her breasts against her will, but kind of like did it in a kind of like, look at them bloody things, you know, which is which is equally as horrible.

The main thing that I find, you know, speaking as a woman, he was speaking as a father, Daniel Korski, wasn't he?

But it's the idea that breasts are simultaneously kind of sexy and funny, which we've always had in Britain and we don't seem to be able to get rid of.

That this thing that is literally just part of a woman's body is something slightly to be mocked.

And 1 of the line that really lands with me in Sarah Vine, Sarah Vine is not my favorite columnist, but what she says is that she basically has to laugh it off.

And she says it did rather take the wind out of my sails.

What she's saying is that she felt humiliated, which is exactly what Daisy Goodwin was saying.

It was in the Times today and it was in the Telegraph yesterday.

Essentially a man called Aaron de Souza wants to stage, we can call this the Drug Olympics next year.

This is a serious proposition, he has a website and everything, meaning 1 where athletes can use performance enhancing drugs.

So his argument is that the current system where you're not allowed to use performance enhancing drugs means that people use them but then they pretend that they haven't.

Yeah, they're secretive about their about steroids.

Yeah, so he's saying if we allow all these athletes to use drugs and world records will be broken, you know, we'll all get amazing kind of performances out of these athletes and everything will be fine.

Yeah, he said that the current world 100 meter record stands at about 9.58 seconds.

Wouldn't it be amazing to see someone break that 9 minute barrier?

It's like, well, yeah, it would, but Not if they're just up to the gills on amphetamines.

They may as well be on roller skates, jet-powered roller skates.

I mean, he's a funny character, this man.

He bankrupted Gawker by funding the Hogan defamation case.

And weirdly, at the same time, there's a few other stories about other people taking drugs.

Elon Musk takes small doses, underlining the word small, of ketamine to manage depression, while Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, enjoys magic mushrooms, a report claimed.

Now, I've heard of microdosing mushrooms, I've heard of microdosing LSD, I've never heard of microdosing ketamine.

I'm not quite, I didn't know that was a thing to treat depression.

I did not know it was a thing to treat depression.

What I would say is a kind of thing amongst students, it's a very cheap drug, and if you want to get really out of it, then that's your drug of choice.

It seems very kind of, I like to sit at home in front of my video games.

But this is almost like the homeopathic kind of version of that, isn't it?

Because microdosing is something like 0.2 milligrams.

I sound like I know a bit too much about this already.

I mean, they have become, I mean, they've not come out of nowhere because mushrooms have been around since the year dot, but they always used to be, I used to be really scared of mushrooms when I was a kid.

It was like, because you know, the red and white spotted mushrooms, they'd kill you in an instant.

And you'd have like the big lads going, it's like, let's get some magic mushrooms that's some time by the rugby field.

And they'd go and you'd only see them for days.

Now, I was like, we'd come back from Glastonbury.

I've never, like, it is now the middle class drug du jour.

Mushroom gummies, mushroom chocolate, just mushrooms on toast.

Because it's actually, you know, underlying this is a more serious story I think about how depression is treated by doctors.

Because if people go to the doctor they tend to get given enormous doses of amitriptyline and can't move for days.

So people are trying to treat their angst themselves.

I believe, I believe, you know, I'm an advocate of it.

You know, I know tons of people that microdose mushrooms and it works like a treat for them.

I mean, most of them, the ones I know are Dulwich Mums.

It's literally the new equivalent of Valium, how to get through your day.

Headlines are the lifeblood of the papers.

Sometimes they're worth your cash all on their own.

On every edition of Papercuts we choose the very best ones out there.

Everyone's favourite Englishman, Danny Dyer, wants to die a fucking hero by bumping off Vladimir Putin live on TV.

Not an unreasonable request, why would you not set this up?

This is from a brilliant episode where he appeared with Kathy Burke on Where There's a Will There's a Wake and the headline is dire warning, I'll do in Putin.

Star will choke tyrant with, can you guess?

He's thought about this an unnerving amount

well, it's got he's got form for you They do not remember his infamous 9-11 tweet Where's like still does my nut into this day that those slags flew into that building.

He's like he's just the gift that keeps giving isn't he?

I'm sticking with the I'm sticking with the star as well for my next 1 and This is about Pisces men with beards cheat the most.

So The Sun's got a nice story about I'm going to massively mispronounce this pregashin.

The the guy who runs the Wagner group and have the abortive coup against against Putin over the weekend is apparently he's hiding away somewhere where he feels safe in Belarus, I think.

And the headline is, Warlord's Hotel has no windows.

Because Obviously the most dangerous place in Russia is next to a window.

The Telegraph meanwhile has a lovely report of a different coup going on in a charity called the Actors Benevolent Fund which has been chaired by Penelope Keefe who fans may remember as Margot in The Good Life.

She was the chair of that from 1990 until very recently and there's been a row over the ousting of her and the other trustees.

The telegraph, it's not even the headline, it's the strap line for it on the front of the paper is Last of the Summer Wine.

Mine is from the mail and it's King Charles doing 1 of his meet and greets.

At this point he's meeting people and they're all dressing in dressing gowns because they're at a wellness centre.

And the headline is, so have you come spa?

OK, remember at the top we had quite a lot of Matt Hancock headlines, we had body bag COVID strategy was completely wrong.

I want to be brutally honest with the public.

Matt Hancock has appeared in front of the COVID inquiry.

And at the moment, the COVID inquiry is investigating how prepared the UK was for the pandemic is the preparation bits.

The papers do not like what he has been saying.

Essentially, what he's been saying is that the preparations for the pandemic assumed that everyone would die, which hence body bags rather than protecting the public.

This is his quote, the assumption was that it would not be possible to stop the spread of a disease.

It's a bit, it was a bit of a disastrous performance, wasn't it, John?

I mean, you can see what he's trying to do is it's sort of, I think, an attempt to shift the blame to a point before he was anywhere near the health service, which does sort of make sense as a strategy.

Basically what he was saying is that all the governments of the pandemic policies were about how to deal with an event that caused mass death rather than how to prevent the mass death in the first place.

Which, you know, from some points of view, that is often, like many years ago, I was a health reporter, that is sort of the issue of the NHS is it's very much focused on dealing with the problems when they arise rather than preventing them in the first place.

I think from Hancock's point of view, the reason this went wrong is he's been, he sat at the inquiry saying things like, the doctrine was, can we buy enough body bags?

Totally failing to learn the lessons of the winter of discontent that if you start talking about things like burying the dead and body bags that is going to be the headline next to a picture of your face.

Yeah very much I mean he did I mean a lot of what he said was really quite shocking though I mean you know we kind of guessed it but he did admit that basically he had no idea how many people were in the care homes.

really shocking considering how much they focused on care homes as the story and as a kind of, as a catalyst for containing COVID.

And yet they have, there's no spreadsheet somewhere.

And they also didn't even know what protections were in place in these care homes.

See all Paper Cuts transcripts on Applepodcasts

Matt Han-Cocks it up – plus Elon in a K-hole?