Did we really need Warsi and Baddiel’s podcast?

Podcast fever continues to dominate the political airwaves. The rewards for success are enormous and popular podcasters are able to fill concert halls around the county by delivering a couple of hours of chitchat to willing punters. Since the running costs are minimal, the profits are vast. This explains the gold-rush of media darlings and former politicians thronging into the digital space. Often the shows are billed as acrimonious punch-ups between sworn enemies like George Osborne and Ed Balls or Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. But the presence of a microphone seems to sweeten the mood and to turn animosity into peace and harmony. Listeners are likely to feel cheated. 

The latest bidders for podcast glory are the former comedian David Baddiel and the life peer Sayeeda Warsi, who poses as the scourge of Islamophobia within the Tory ranks. One clear advantage of their new show, A Muslim and a Jew Go There, is that it features their voices, and not their faces. Baddiel has been described on Twitter as looking like ‘a wet thumb dipped in cigarette ash’ while Warsi wears the immoveable scowl of someone who has just handed a winning scratch card to a racist. 

They begin their first podcast by trying to out-victim each other. Baddiel says that he was twice attacked by skinheads while he was growing up. Warsi recalls an annual fight between rival ethnic groups at the school gate. They endured verbal abuse too. Warsi’s headmaster barked at her, ‘you’re making me sick. It’s not the mosque,’ when she sang hymns without a proper display of reverence towards Christianity. Baddiel was accused by his athletics coach of intentionally tripping another runner because he was ‘a Jew’, although he heard the slur second hand after it was conveyed to him by another Jewish pupil. Neither quote a more recent instance of racism. 

Most popular

Katja Hoyer

How the Magdeburg Christmas market attack will change Germany

The love-in continues with smarmy expressions of inter-faith appreciation. Warsi assures Baddiel that she studied Bible stories at school and that she’s a pal of the Chief Rabbi who invited her to dinner at his house. Baddiel gives a reciprocal hug to Islam by offering this scholarly comment about Muslims who ‘curse all Jews’. Referring to the Old Testament, Baddiel explains that it was Moses who first condemned the Jews in this way and that his censure was aimed at a minority of doubters who set up a golden calf in his absence and started to worship it without his authority. Baddiel alleges that Muslims who ‘curse the Jews’ are knowingly quoting Moses and that their criticism is limited to Jews who venerate statues of livestock. Do Muslims really believe that? It seems unlikely. The atmosphere of love and affection is broken by Warsi who tells Baddiel that, despite his Jewish heritage, he looks to her like a typical white male. This is a time-honoured anti-Semitic insult which Baddiel is well prepared for. He tactfully informs Warsi that Jews have long been accused of entryism and of conspiring to take control by ‘passing’ as members of the governing class. 

Then they turn to London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, whom they both adore. ‘He’s a friend to the Jewish community,’ says Baddiel. ‘And he’s really great in the LGBT space as well,’ adds Warsi. Discussing Lee Anderson’s comments about Islamism, Baddiel praises Warsi for highlighting anti-Muslim sentiment in the Tory party. ‘It’s your gig… It’s finally landed. The thing you’ve been talking about for a while,’ he tells her. She basks in his flattery. ‘I didn’t set out to be an Islamophobia activist. It kind of found me,’ she says, as if fanning the blushes from her cheeks. Baddiel mentions a recent poll suggesting that Islamism is considered ‘a threat to the British way of life’ by 58 per cent of Tory party members. ‘When the membership has been falling,’ replies Warsi complacently, ‘then I’m sorry, I’m not going to get obsessed with what a tiny minority think.’ 

Recent fears about Islamism crystallised last month when the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ was projected onto the side of parliament. Warsi, who witnessed the scene, gives her assessment of the mood on the street. ‘That crowd was actually in really good spirits… it was all pretty much good-natured,’ she says. But Baddiel has reservations. ‘I felt a bit vulnerable seeing it projected onto parliament.’ He then revises his stance and calls the phrase ‘a statement of tribal identity’ like the claim made by football supporters that their team is ‘the greatest football team the world has ever seen’. Many Jews would not support that innocuous interpretation. Even gentiles know that ‘from the river to the sea’ is a call to resume the Holocaust. But Baddiel’s softball statement is endorsed by Warsi who claims that the phrase is used to promote ‘equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in the lands between the river and the sea.’ She adds that the phrase ‘has a nice rhythm to it’. Baddiel agrees, and the pair spend a few moments composing a popular song with ‘from the river to the sea’ as the refrain. After this bizarre exchange they discuss potential winners of their ‘gold medal for racism’. They overlook the protestors who illuminated parliament with calls for genocide and instead they hand the laurels to the Conservative party. 

Centrist podcasters often talk about ‘broken politics’ and the gulf between voters and the Westminster elite. The love-in between Baddiel and Warsi suggests that the gap is growing wider. A new podcast, Electoral Dysfunction, sets out to tackle this problem head on. It features Labour’s Jess Phillips, Ruth Davidson (former head of the Scottish Conservatives), and Beth Rigby of Sky News who moderates the discussion while throwing in a few gossipy details of her own. She gushingly recalls meeting Davidson for the first time in 2017. ‘I totally fan-girled you,’ she says. Davidson talks about the social taxonomy of lesbianism. ‘There are cat lesbians and dog lesbians and I’m very much a dog lesbian,’ Phillips chips in, ‘there are so many lesbians with cats in my constituency that it’s a no-go area. We call them the clitorati.’ Rigby mentions that she’s proud of her ‘stocky legs’ which she maintains with an arduous keep-fit regime. Thirty years ago she had a boyfriend who commented on her athletic build. ‘He used to call me a pit-pony and neigh in my ear. We broke up.’ Her fellow guests latch onto the ‘neighing boyfriend’ and demand to hear further details. And they refuse to drop the subject until Rigby has vocalised his pony impersonation. ‘Neigh-hey-hey’ she whinnies. Is this how we mend our broken politics? Maybe. Their show is currently the most popular political podcast in the country.