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- [00:00]
A
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk. Tired of juggling sales tools or spending hours on prospecting just to book a few meetings? Meet Apollo, the go to market platform for finding leads, connecting with buyers and closing deals all in one place. Apollo gives you access to over 210 million contacts and AI that handles all your busy work finding leads, drafting emails and even prioritizing your day. So stop paying for five different sales tools when one does it all. Visit Apollo I.O. and sign up free today. Hello, Chris.
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B
Hi.
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A
Now I always love hearing how bombshells land on the political editor's phone. So how did the bombshell of John Healey's resignation as Defence Secretary mid morning on Thursday land?
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C
So I had just finished writing a piece for the BBC news website and
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A
app along the lines about John Healey's bright future?
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C
No, but it was about the Defence investment plan because I've been talking about it on the Today program and it was obvious that there was one heck of a row going on within government and within the military around the numbers and basically they just couldn't come to an agreement on the numbers. That was obvious. What wasn't was that the Defence Secretary would do what he did and do what he did in the context of politics right now. And then, Adam, you have this sort of. I have this sort of sense of moments like this shouldn't feel normal as a political reporter, but they'd started to, to be honest, because of the resignations that we've had in the last month, six in total amongst ministers, two from the cabinet, and then with the prospect of whatever might happen the other side of that by election in Makerfield in the northwest of England in a week's time.
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A
My first impression was that it was a quite old school resignation in that it was over 20, just a clear disagreement about a particular policy as opposed to disagreement with the direction of the government or Keir Starmer's leadership. It was actually kind of. It reminded me a bit of when Ian Duncan Smith resigned from David Cameron's government because George Osborne wanted to cut benefits and he didn't want to deliver that cut because he thought it was bad.
- [02:11]
C
Yeah, it was in that sense a policy disagreement. It wasn't a scandal involving anyone or anything. It wasn't, as you say, a, at least directly, a wider critique. Although there are parallels in the critique that John Healey has made in his departure that you can draw with other departures from the government. But yeah, here is the central bit of government policy, central challenge for this government. So many governments in The Western world, no doubt the successor to this government, successors of all sorts of political stripes to this government around how you crank up defence spending and the trade offs that come with it. And, and that's the, that's the big picture disagreement that's at the heart of
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A
this to be discussed on this episode
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C
of Newscast Newscast Newscast from the BBC.
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A
Humanity's next great voyage begins.
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B
We are in the midst of a rupture.
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C
Nostalgia will not bring back the old order.
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B
67.
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A
Yeah, it's supposed to be me as a doctor. Daddy has. Has also a special quotation.
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B
Thinking about it like a panto helped.
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A
Do we play music now or what do we do? Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio
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C
and it's Chris at Westminster and we
- [03:24]
A
are recording this episode of newscast at 6:36pm on Thursday. Shortly we'll be joined by friend of the podcast Shashank Joshi, who is the Defence editor for the Economist. So it'll be interesting to hear his take on all of this but just in terms of where we are in the chronology, Chris. So the little reminiscence we had there was about mid morning on Thursday, John Healey resigned and he posted his resignation letter on X. And it's a very interesting letter which we will go through paragraph by paragraph because it reveals quite a lot of stuff. Then just before you and I sat down to record this we got the traditional reply from the Prime Minister.
- [03:56]
C
We did. There was about a six hour window between the two so.
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A
Because normally the letters get swapped quite quickly, don't they?
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C
Yeah. And as we're recording at 6:30 ish on what day is it? Thursday. Thursday evening. And this may be overtaken by events by the time newscasters are listening to our conversation. We still don't have a new Defence Secretary and you can't leave a post like that empty for that long. I don't think because of the very nature of it, because you sit at the apex alongside the Prime Minister of the decision making tree around the defence of the realm, the defence of the country. So I suspect in the next few hours they'll try to find a Defence Secretary. But it's not outwardly a wildly appealing job when you have the kind of smoke and ruin of this defence investment plan and any incoming Defence Defense Secretary wondering about how long the boss is going to last.
- [04:50]
A
Yeah, let's talk about John Healey's letter in a second but just before we do just a few terms. We've already talked about the defense investment plan, the dip that is this financial plan for the military for the next few years running into the tens of billions, potentially, which will both deal with increases in costs for things that the mod were already doing anyway. So inflation and rising costs, but also to implement the Defence Review, which was done for the government last year, Exactly. About the future of what our armed forces looks like.
- [05:23]
C
Exactly. So the Defence Review was done and published pretty much a year ago. Then there was the whole business of how you pay for it. And there's all sorts and a huge level of complexity and detail here. But the big picture is one of the kind of obvious international backdrop and a widespread sense that countries like ours need to spend more on defence. A commitment that the government has made to NATO, to the defence alliance, to get to three and a half percent of our national income being spent on core defence, as it's described by 2035, the government's promised to get to 2.5% by April of next year. And the idea being, obviously, that it ratchets up to hit that longer term target in the years between next year and the middle of the next decade. And you're talking about big numbers here. You're talking about tens of billions and defence spending as a proportion of the economy getting back in the direction of kind of shares of the economy economy than it was quite a long time ago. And in the post Cold War era, people have talked about a peace dividend, about taxpayers money being able to be spent on other stuff because not as much needed to be spent. So was the calculation on defence. And so money could be spent on the health service or on schools or whatever any government chose to, or a lower tax burden, for instance. And here this government confronts a high tax burden for all the reasons we've kicked around on newscast by historic proportions, on average, or all of the pressures there are on other public services and this massive additional desire to spend on defence. And that's the crunch point that this defence investment plan was thrashing through. There was clearly the disagreement that I was trying to report on Today programme this morning, not realising that we were just hours away from the whole thing going, getting rather bigger.
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A
Okay. And we're seconds away from Shashank, from the economist being here. Hello.
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C
Hello.
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B
Good afternoon.
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A
Give me your instant reaction, Shashank, to when you heard that John Healey was going.
- [07:21]
B
I was both shocked and not shocked. Shocked in that, you know, this is an incredibly loyal minister who stuck with the Prime Minister through thick and thin and has been, you know, not even a hint of rebellion in public, but also not shocked in that I've Seen the fact that the dip had become a laughingstock in military circles, how much frustration, even anger there was in the private sector, in the military. And so something had to give. And if the Prime Minister hadn't found the funds to get this over the line by now, he wasn't going to find it. And therefore something like this reckoning was coming anyway.
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A
Right, let's go through John Healey's letter because it reveals quite a lot of things. So I think if I start with paragraph 1, 2, 3, 4, I've printed it off paragraph 5. He says this new era for defence required further investment through the Defence Investment Plan that's discussed. The excellent and extensive cross Government work that completed in January, overseen by you, me and the Chancellor, confirmed the scale of the challenge and the rising demands on defence. Now, why that's interesting to me is that this was almost like a done deal, almost in January, and they agreed what they needed to do in January. But it's taken till now for them to fall out this spectacularly and it's taken a long time. It's been rumbling away, Chris, for a while.
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C
It has, yeah, it has. And we've been anticipating this Defence investment plan for ages, and it was forever sort of pushed back. And it was pushed back for all the reasons that are now in clear daylight and have been increasingly clear to those of us prodding and poking around the Ministry of Defence and elsewhere in Government, which is back to, you know, our old friend trade offs, and then the scale of those trade offs, given the scale of additional money that the Government outwardly has said it wants to put into defence. And then the arguments that have been going on between John Healey and the treasury and Downing street, both the treasury and Downing street, as we record, pretty bruised by all of this, as you'd expect, given.
- [09:22]
A
Well, yeah, because then the next happened, then the next sentence says, since then, you, Keir Starmer, have been unable and the treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats. In other words, treasury are wrong, Prime Minister, you're useless. And the combined effect is that Britain is less safe.
- [09:40]
C
Yeah. And the argument that you hear back from folk in Downing street and folk in the treasury as they talk about, you'll be familiar with this line, the biggest uplift in spending on defence since the end of the Cold War, and an argument that says, look, we were still talking, we were still debating, we were trying to make this happen. But in the end, obviously, the exasperation for John Healey has boiled over. And I think that line, in particular, the unable and unwilling line, that has a political zing to it, because obviously it's referring specifically to defense, but it has parallels with a critique, firstly, that we've heard, I've heard frequently in public from ministers for months, but, sorry, in private from ministers for months. And increasingly in the last month or so since those elections, we've heard from departing ministers in other parts of government, in other words, a critique from those who have served within government that the government of Keir Starmer, in the end, is failing to deliver.
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A
Oh, I've got the news on in the studio for once because we've left the TV on and Donald Trump has canceled his planned strikes against Iran that he was threatening to do tonight. So some other defense news just breaking as we're recording this episode, could do a whole other episode about that. But let's stick with what the subject we've got in hand right now. Shashank. This is where it starts to get into number Wang. But is it true that the MOD and John Healey, the number that they wanted from the treasury and Downing street, was about 28 billion pounds over sort of three, four years?
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B
That was the case, but my understanding is that had come significantly down as other savings were found in the budget. And that figure had come down, you know, down to 18 billion or so. So there's still a gap, but it was a much narrower gap than some of those gigantic numbers we were hearing just a few months ago. I think the other thing that I understand is that part of where this additional money has been found is that there's a pot of money in the mod budget that is ring fenced in certain areas because it's ring fenced in case there are additional demands on funding Ukraine. And so the mod wasn't allowed to shift that money. It was a contingency. And what's happened is the treasury has taken on some of that risk instead of leaving it inside mod, and that's produced some of the extra cash. So when you hear phrases like treasury trickery, I think is one of the phrases I saw in the reporting today
- [12:00]
A
used by an ally of John Healy when they were talking about the figures he was presented with.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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B
So actually, I'm not sure how fair that is. I think there's an element of real efforts to try to take risk off mod. But having said that, yes, ultimately there was still a chasm. Now, I think what we don't know, and I've got to stress this, is we don't Know where the up and down arrows are on different bits of the budget. Because it's entirely possible this budget could be very good for some things, you know, like a hybrid Royal Navy with more drones. And it could be very bad for other things, like, you know, carrier strike or the army. And until we see the details published next week, until we see where these cuts are falling and where the gains are falling, we may know this isn't enough to do everything the Chiefs wanted, but we won't really have a sense as to what choices have been made. And for me, that's always what this was about. It's about, what are you prioritising, what are you deprioritising?
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A
Well, and also if it's transformational to our armed forces, or is it just more of the same stuff we've already got?
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B
Exactly, because you could have all of that 18 billion spent, every penny of it spent on exactly the same forces that you would have had in your budget five years ago, prior to Ukraine. Or you could imagine significant cuts to certain legacy forces which would have a pretty rough impact on those forces. But some of that would go into capabilities that would be very emerging and novel. Now, the other problem in all of this is the timeline. A lot of the really totemic capabilities like the GCAP program, the sixth generation fighter jet, those are very important for jobs, very important for the aerospace industry and very, very important for diplomacy, because of course, we're building that program with Japan. And the Prime Minister of Japan is on her way to the UK just now. But if you talk to some people, they'll say, well, GCAP would not have yielded a useful military capability until well into the 2000 and 30s, well after the Russian threat is significant by the end of the decade. So there's a quarrel here, not just about money, overall money and pots of money, and not just about drones versus Tanks, but also about the right time horizon on which you need to spend. And you can't understand this debate without really factoring that in as well.
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C
And on top of that, and absolutely all of the detail is key here, and detail we don't yet have, because obviously this thing has not yet been been published, is an asymmetry. And this often happens when you get a Cabinet resignation. An asymmetry in. In what? In the timeline of things coming into the public domain. In other words, a departing Minister will leave with a, a critique and a, a sketching out of, of the, the numbers as, as they present them, etc. Etc. Speaking to other folks still in government tonight around all of this, as I say, including some who. Who do feel, as is often the case in these situations, wounded by what has happened. They are also limited in what they are able to say publicly in response, because this document is still not out there. And of course, given the nature of what has just happened, how much of it that may have only been, well, was, in theory, as far as Downing street saw it, only days away from seeing the light of day. How long is it until it's. Until it does, given what we've just. Given what we've just seen. Yeah.
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A
The departing Minister always gets a sort of moment in the sun. But I suppose we got a hint about what the government wants to say publicly about this, because, Chris, we then got Keir Starmer's response to John Healy's letter.
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C
We did.
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A
So I'm now jumping to another letter before I then jump back to John Healy's original letter. So this is like an epistolary novel
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C
and a test for how quick it takes your laptop to open a PDF file. But I've just opened up the Prime Minister's letter that we got at about 20 past 6, I think, on. On Thursday evening. And by the standard of these things, you become something doing the job that I do, you become something of a scholar of the returns of letters when ministers depart. And by the standards of these things, it's quite perfunctory, it's not oozing in warmth.
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A
It doesn't end with, and I look forward to your long career in politics and maybe you coming back.
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C
No. Which sometimes these things do, or sometimes they're all handwritten or whatever. There's a handwritten Dear John and a handwritten Kia, but beyond that, I think it. What does it do? It sets out. I don't know if you want to do the paragraph by paragraph textual analysis here, Adam, but effectively what it sets out is a kind of precis of what the Prime Minister says the government has achieved in terms of defence and talking about Ukraine and talking about the Straits of. The Straits of Hormuz. And then he said, paragraph four is the key one. I would say, let me do my counter bottom of page one. We are backing this. Oh, I see, yeah. So he talks about the Defence Investment Plan doing what he thinks it is necessary for it to do, delivering an unprecedented increase in defence spending in a sustainable way. That's a reference to the trade offs and also a reference to. If you were to, as he might see it, either overtaxed or over borrow to pay for something, then that might not be politically Savvy. He says the increases in spending that underpin this plan will be sustainable and fair. They will mean significant reallocations of funding from across government departments and the right choice to protect our nation. Which translates as this plan did involve cuts to other departments for the benefit of defence. And then he says, strong public finances are part of what keeps us safe. Irresponsible borrowing only puts that at risk. There is definitely a pushback from the Prime Minister around that sense of safety, because John Healey was talking about a sense that the plan could leave the UK unsafe. But, yes, the final lines. Taking these decisions is never easy. I'm determined to rebuild our country after years of being buffeted by crises. I am sorry that you will not be part of that work going forward. So, yeah, there you go.
- [17:46]
A
Goodbye and good night. Right, Shashank, let's go back to John Healy's letter, the first letter we're looking at, and I've lost track of which paragraph it is, but there's a one about where he just talks about the trajectory for defence spending in the next decade or so, which Chris alluded to just before you, before you came onto newscast. Just talk us through the numbers that are being tossed around there.
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B
Yeah, well, the interesting thing here is how specific he is. It's a very, you know, speaking of sort of passing the language, what we saw from Healey is that he says, look, it's good that we've got the 2.6% next year, but he's saying by the end of the decade, then if you cast forward to 2030, just before you get to 2030, you would be at 2.68% of GDP. And that's pretty feeble. And it's feeble because the government sitting at the NATO summit last summer, the Prime Minister at the Hague. I was there. I saw Donald Trump brandishing a phone with Emmanuel Macron's text messages on it. And, of course, Mark Rutter's famous text messages he signed up to saying, we will be spending three and a half percent of GDP on core defence, plus another one and a half percent, of course, on related stuff by 2035. So if you've gone up, there's two problems here. First of all, you're barely going up between now and the end of the
- [19:04]
A
decade by 0.08 percentage points.
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B
Yes, it's pathetic. It's hardly anything. So it's all backloaded. And not only is it backloaded, but in the next Parliament, so there's no obligation on this government. You know, you can't bind a future parliament and then in that next parliament, when will that kick up the 3.5%, 3 to 3.5%? Well, the answer is nobody knows. And if it's all the way to 2034, are we supposed to believe that this government's going to go from or the next government will go from 3% to 3.5%, 0.5% of GDP, which is an enormous sum of money, of course, in the space of a year. That's completely preposterous.
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A
It's just worse.
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B
Therefore, it gives right, it gives rise to the view that the hate commitment is a nonsense.
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A
And just to remind people, we're talking about spending on defense as a percentage of the overall country's economy. This isn't about 3.5% of the government's budget. This is 3.5% compared to the whole economy. So that's why it's such huge sums, even though the actual percentage increases don't sound like huge numbers. It's, it all works out at the when you apply it to the whole economy. Yeah, Chris and I mean, that is quite damning that paragraph, isn't it? Because then John Healey links that to the Prime Minister sort of not sticking to his word and the word that he sort of gave to the whole world completely that or at least all
- [20:21]
C
the NATO members completely that and that sense that it just wasn't a credible plan, that it wasn't believable and that it was, you know, beyond the extent of this parliament and therefore could easily be seen as kind of pie in the sky and just not amounting to a credible program to deliver the very promise that the prime Minister committed to at that NATO summit in the Hague of a year ago and just weeks before the next annual NATO summit, which is in Ankara in Turkey in about three weeks time. And from Mr. Healey's perspective, there's been a lot of focus politically on next Thursday because of the the small matter of that by election Mr. Healey was due to be as Defense Secretary going to NATO HQ in Brussels next week, this time next week for a meeting of defense ministers from NATO member countries. And I guess ideally he would have liked to have been going there with something that he, you know, believed in and you know, and I guess for a, for a departing minister, wrestling with the conscience question of whether or not you can live with something and look into the eyes of your opposite numbers around a table, etc. Etc. As well as the people within the building in the Ministry of Defense, you know, a factor that will have been in his mind, no doubt.
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A
And also he was meant to be doing a news conference and a visit with his Australian counterpart who had flown from Australia to Britain today. And that those events didn't happen.
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C
Well, they went on a morning run this morning, which is something of a tradition between the two of them. And there was photos of that on social media. And I hear that the traveling Australian press pack delighting in these. The English summer of pouring rain on June, whatever it is, June 11th we're on a train to Portsmouth anticipating this moment of their the respective Defence Secretaries talking about all things UK and Australian defence. And you might remember on newscast our discussions about orcus, the deal between the uk, Australia and America around joint military programs only for said Aussie press pack to discover that the whole thing was binned because. Because the host, or at least the the original event was binned because the host, John Ely, had walked the plank.
- [22:38]
A
Now, Shashank, I could imagine a scene where Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is considering all of this and she says to her officials, bring me a list of all the mod's big prestige projects they've done for the last 30 years and put a tick next to the ones that have gone massively over budget, ended up costing way more than people expected, didn't, didn't deliver as much as people expected, had bits falling off or, I don't know, made soldiers sick when they rode in the armored vehicle that we'd spent loads of money on. And I imagine the list would be quite long and there'd be a lot of ticks next to things that hadn't gone well when it came to spending money.
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B
Yeah, absolutely.
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A
Is that a realistic scenario? I've just pictured there.
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B
I think you've had a bug in the treasury, clearly, because I think that's a verbatim transcript of what's probably been said. And you'd be right. Of course, we could all name Ajax and carriers and other things that have gone over budget. These are big capital intensive programs. I'm not sure by the way. Defence is always worse than every other part of British life when it comes to big capital intensive multi decade projects. But that's a separate point. I think my response to that would be to say the answer is reform the way this is done. And that's what was done last year we had a defence review. It was conducted by external reviewers at great cost and over many, many months. It took months to agree, about six months to agree when it was drafted, finally to when it was accepted and that envisaged reforms to the way Defence was organised. You had for example, a new National Armaments Director appointed who came from the outside. This is someone who oversees lots of big procurement projects. You have something called a military Strategic Headquarters, mshq, all sorts of procurement reforms and acquisition reforms. Exactly. To address the problems you describe. So my question to government would be is as a government, you have overhauled Defence. Last year you told me how wonderful those reforms were and now I'm supposed to believe that, that the reforms are so minimal and cursory that the Defence Department still can't be trusted with money. So what's happened here was a review bunk. Were the reforms made up or fabricated? Or in fact are we kind of getting. Relying on old stories to justify a lack of spending? And that's my concern. We've forgotten everything that happened last year.
- [24:50]
A
And Chris, I remember chatting to Fiona Hill, one of the people who was doing the Defence review, because she came on newscast the day it was published and it was a really interesting chat, as conversations with Fiona Hill always are. And I remember her talking about things like, oh, we need to have a big national conversation to change our mindset about what defense is in 2026. I made a joke about like, oh, you're saying we need to bring back Dad's army. And she said, no, I don't mean that, but we need a conversation where everyone, every citizen realizes they've got a bit of a role to play here. And we haven't had any of that, have we?
- [25:21]
C
No. And I think this, this will be, you know, if, if the arc of the conversation around, you know, countries like the UK and their defense policy posture in the next couple of decades follows the trajectory that many think it, it will. In other words, you know, heading towards governments attempting to get to those targets by the mid-2030s etc. Etc. You can see this being a kind of early chapter title in that story because I, I've, there's so many people I've talked to around Westminster and beyond in the last couple of years, in fact more than couple of years around exactly that. You know, that, that sense of having to have a sustained national conversation around all these huge trade offs because otherwise, frankly, you won't win the political argument. You have to do that within political parties, but beyond political parties to try and make that case. And perhaps this alongside the, if you like, what seems like more micro or short term politics, that this is taking place in the context of that John Healey's resignation is a symptom of, of that and perhaps the Lack of clarity around that debate made both within and beyond the Labour Party.
- [26:37]
A
And, Chris, in terms of politics, I mean, at the start of the week, Starmer's friends let it being known that he would stand and fight in any leadership contest, not that one's been triggered yet. And they were feeling quite chipper because of things like Andy Burnham had done that interview on Newsnight with Victoria Derbyshire, which some people interpret as him not knowing what the fiscal rules were in the Treasury. And it felt like Starmer's team had a little bit more oomph this week than they did in previous weeks. What does this do to the oomph levels in Downing Street?
- [27:06]
C
Well, I think the by election campaign in Makerfield has for the last couple of weeks put something of a cork in the bottle of that story that we were telling on newscast of a couple of weeks ago, when there were the resignations and there was talk of whether an MP would get 81 MPs in order to challenge the Prime Minister and all that kind of stuff. And then Andy Burnham finds a seat that he can fight and a by election campaign gets underway. And let me point newscasters in the direction of the full list of candidates on the BBC News website. And things felt like they had returned to a brief period of vague normality at Westminster, where you had the Prime Minister trying to outwardly project a sense of getting on with the job. And, by the way, trying to get this out of the door was a case study in trying to do precisely, precisely that alongside what we're expecting about social media for younger people and clamp down on that, perhaps coming early next week, but where there was this, as I say, cork in the bottle that was almost sort of repressing that wider conversation, because there was a recognition within the Labour Party that it couldn't properly resume until the by election had either returned Andy Burnham to Westminster or hadn't, and then the party could resume the conversation. In the light of those circumstances, I think in reality, a already very weak Prime Minister has been weakened further by this. I think if it wasn't for the by election, certainly what I'm picking up from Labour MPs is that it wasn't for the by election. We'd be in the zone if we hadn't been already around how long he would stick around for, etc. Etc. And it clearly, you know, everything else being equal, weakens that argument about, you know, his desire to press on, et cetera, et cetera, because one of the conditions of even being able to vaguely contemplate That, I think was him managing to hold the Cabinet together. Now, the loss of one Cabinet minister is not necessarily instantly terminal, but it's off the back of the loss of West Streeting. It's with this countdown to Makerfield a week away and that heightened sense I'm picking up as we chat, that, yeah, we get the other side of that by election and irrespective of outcome, we're straight back to where we were a month or so ish ago with a raging conversation about who might soon be our new Prime Minister.
- [29:33]
A
And because the Makerfield by election is slightly strange for reasons we've discussed many times, I'm sure Robert Kenyon, the Reform UK candidate, will be asked what he thinks about the Defence investment plan and which areas of capital spending and other government departments should be cut to pay for it next time he does a phone in or appears on BBC Radio Manchester. So, Chris, thank you very much, Tar and Shashank, thanks to you too.
- [29:53]
B
Thanks so much.
- [29:54]
A
And here's our own newscast tribute to John Healy, the outgoing Defence Secretary. Because when he was on this podcast a few weeks ago talking about the threat posed by Russian ships in British waters, I had to ask him to confirm a story first reported in the New Statesman that he carries everywhere he goes with him around the world on unofficial and official business alike. A little bottle of HP Sauce.
- [30:15]
B
Sauce. It is true, I've always done it.
- [30:21]
C
I guess, you know, as a politician's
- [30:23]
B
answer would be, I'm an mp so
- [30:24]
C
I carry HP Source. But actually the hard truth of is I love HP Source.
- [30:28]
B
Yeah, and these days you too often get a brown sauce substitute.
- [30:31]
A
Yeah, you've got to take the real deal.
- [30:33]
C
You got to take your own.
- [30:37]
B
She's one of the best selling music
- [30:38]
A
artists of all time, rising to fame as a member of R B group
- [30:42]
C
Destiny's Child before launching a solo career
- [30:44]
A
that's produced, produced chart topping hits and era defining albums. And with a business empire spanning hair
- [30:50]
B
care, whiskey and entertainment, it's fair to
- [30:52]
A
say she's more than just an artist, she's a global brand. Good Bad Billionaire is taking a closer
- [30:56]
B
look at the life and fortune of
- [30:58]
C
Beyonce Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.
- [31:01]
A
Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. I'm sure he'll be having extra lashings of HP Sauce with whatever dinner he's having tonight as his first dinner not being defensive secretary. Right, that's nearly it for this episode of newscast. It cannot have escaped your notice that the World cup is about to start or by the time you're listening to this episode, it will have started. We are resurrecting our gimmick supporter reporter. Do you remember we started this a few months ago and then the news went dulali. So we've sort of forgot about it, but we're bringing it back. Now that we're firmly in World cup territory. We're trying to find a newscaster who is in every single country of the 48 countries represented at the World Cup. If you are currently in, either permanently or temporarily, one of the countries, let us know. We'd love to hear from you and what what brought you there. Newscastbc.co.uk or you can WhatsApp us on 033-01-239480. I hope you enjoy whatever condiments are coming your way with your next meal. Bye bye.
- [32:10]
C
Newscast Newscast from the BBC, you've come
- [32:13]
A
come to the end of newscast. Some people, and you know who I mean, might say you ooze stamina. Can I encourage you to subscribe on BBC Sounds and you can get in touch with us anytime. Email us@newscastbc.co.uk, you can WhatsApp us on 0301-239-480.
- [32:38]
B
She's one of the best selling music
- [32:39]
A
artists of all time, rising to fame as a member of R B group
- [32:43]
C
Destiny's Child before launching a song solo
- [32:45]
A
career that's produced chart topping hits and era defining albums. And with a business empire spanning hair
- [32:51]
B
care, whiskey and entertainment, it's fair to
- [32:53]
A
say she's more than just an artist. She's a global brand. Good Bad Billionaire is taking a closer
- [32:57]
B
look at the life and fortune of Beyonce.
- [33:00]
C
Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.
- [33:02]
A
Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.