Suella Braverman (LBC) | globalplayer.com
Dangerous Memories (Tortoise Media) | Apple Podcasts
World of Secrets: The Apartheid Killer (BBC World Service) | BBC Sounds
It was sit-in presenters week at LBC, with various MPs (or ex-MPs) covering James O’Brien’s mid-morning show. The station does this every so often (Carol Vorderman, who now has her own LBC show, was a guest DJ in 2023), but there was much more hoo-ha about Tuesday’s substitute presenter than usual. A couple of political writers even wrote entire columns about it. And who was that sit-in? Suella Braverman. All I can say is, well, where were you all two years ago? Then, the guest hosts in that same slot were Matt Hancock, Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Tom Tugendhat and Chris Bryant. (Rayner and Bryant were really good; Hancock, not so much.)
Last week’s guest hosts were not so interesting. If I’m honest, I wasn’t sure who all the five politicians turned presenters actually were. Braverman, yes, and I’m familiar with Emily Thornberry, who hosted on Monday, but I had to look up Jonathan Ashworth (former Labour MP and one-time shadow paymaster general, who lost his seat in the election), James Heappey (ex-Tory armed forces person, who resigned his post and didn’t fight the election) and Alicia Kearns, who is still the Tory MP for Rutland and Stamford. That general election broom has swept aside a lot of familiar personalities.
So Braverman was the star turn and, in the first five minutes, in her introduction, proved surprisingly warm – or at least tepid. Her voice is younger and lighter than you might expect from her rants in the House of Commons and, as she invited listeners to call in, I thought: “Perhaps this will be a revelation … ” But no such luck. As soon as another person – the first caller! – voiced a differing opinion to hers, she whacked down the fader so we couldn’t hear them and started ranting. The topic was “stop the boats” and, in particular, Braverman’s Rwanda policy, which no longer exists, axed by the new Labour government. What a strange thing to talk about. Like extolling the virtues of an ex-partner. Everyone else has moved on.
Anyway, according to Braverman, Rwanda is a fabulous and safe place. It was almost as if she was selling a holiday there. “Have you ever been to Rwanda?” she asked caller Awad, madly. “Because I have, three times!”. Yeah, Awad! Besides, reckoned Braverman, without her Rwanda solution, Labour has no idea what to do. “Are they going to stop the boats?” she wondered. “This complex huge difficult problem of illegal migration?”
Braverman had some tricky broadcasting tics, including not letting the other person make a point, using the words “pretty much” to describe most things, and saying “yeah” as the other person spoke. She definitely won’t be getting a show based on this session. On Monday, Thornberry engaged much more with the listeners who called in: her “Well, what would you do about it?” when discussing the housing crisis with a caller sounded genuine, rather than challenging. Far more human.
Here’s a weird but addictive new series. Dangerous Memories, a Tortoise investigative show that launched at the beginning of this month and has been nestling at the top of the podcast charts ever since, is about a small set of very posh young women who each separately end up in an unhealthy relationship with the same lifestyle guru, Anne Craig. The mother of a mutual friend, Craig comes into their lives by word of mouth: they all know the same people, go to the same schools, visit the same places on holiday. Craig is recommended among these young women as “that amazing healer lady”, the right person for a well-brought-up girl to consult if feeling a bit unhappy or unsure.
But Craig ends up completely dominating the lives of a few of these young women. Gradually, she makes them believe terrible, untrue things about their loved ones, and they cut themselves off from their families and friends, sometimes for years. Sarah, the mother of Hui (pronounced Huey), describes how she didn’t see her daughter for six years as a result of Craig’s “counselling”. These are devastating stories, told by three of the young women who were brainwashed by Craig into believing false memories. Their well-educated accents and polite cadences sound utterly at odds with the awful situations they find themselves in.
Why did Craig do it? Host Grace Hughes-Hallett tries to understand, though I’m not sure we ever will. I’ve heard all six episodes, and remained fascinated and horrified throughout. Being brought up in privileged circumstances can’t protect you from everyone, and sometimes, perhaps, it doesn’t equip you with the cynicism needed to stop you from being manipulated. A sensitive telling of a really difficult story. Recommended.
Another interesting investigative series, though very different, is the BBC World Service’s World of Secrets: The Apartheid Killer, about Louis Van Schoor, a white man who killed at least 39 people in South Africa during the 1980s. All his victims were black and one was just 12 years old. Yet he insists he wasn’t racist. “I was anti-crime, not anti-black,” he says.
This is one of the few investigative shows that actually interviews the killer. Three reporters, one of whom is a white South African herself (Isa Jacobson, an anti-racist campaigner and journalist), are on the case. Ayanda Charlie and Charlie Northcott are the other reporters, and they build up both the story of Van Schoor but also his victims. We hear from the sister and son of Edward Soenies, who Van Schoor killed. Each killing was reported to the authorities, usually by Van Schoor himself – but they were never investigated. He was a security guard and the police appeared to turn a blind eye to him “doing his job”. A fascinating story, but, God, a terrible tale.
