Some truths are hardest to tell the people we love.

LBC presenter Iain Dale hears them on live radio. In this conversation with Sam on The Lonely Chapter, he reflects on the trust that leads callers to share things they have never told their partners, friends or families.

We begin with Constance, a regular caller approaching her 102nd birthday, who wondered whether she would speak to him again. Her call opens a conversation about listening, empathy and the human connection between a radio presenter and someone they have never met.

Iain discusses coming out to his parents at 40, finding his opportunity at LBC at 48, and the online abuse that left him tearful on the train home. Sam draws on his experience volunteering with Samaritans as they explore emotional boundaries and what it means to listen to someone in distress.

They also discuss social media anger, refusing to manufacture a rant for a clip, the future of radio in the age of YouTube, and Iain’s memoir, Have I Said Too Much? My Life in Politics & the Media.

Follow The Lonely Chapter for conversations about the chapters that change us, and share this episode with someone who would value it.

Iain’s podcasts, book and website

• Where Politics Meets History — with Iain Dale and Tessa Dunlop
• Iain Dale All Talk
• Have I Said Too Much? My Life in Politics & the Media
• Iain’s website
• X / Twitter
• Instagram

I want to start off today's conversation with quite a recent moment.

So I was listening to your show last night actually and there was a call that came in from Constance.

Yeah, a repeat caller, some new.

Obviously built up a rapport with.

For the people listening for context.

She's telling 102 today.

There was a point of that call where she said goodbye to you, but also it seemed potentially to the world.

What was it like for you in that moment going through that?

I've probably spoken to her four or five times.

I think the last time was on Christmas Day last year.

And she said in that conversation, well, I think this will be the last time that I talk to you.

And she seemed absolutely certain of it this time.

That was what I took away from it.

And yet she seemed incredibly switched on, lucid.

Everything was still there and it was a bit of a moment and I sort of started to tear up a bit, which I'm doing now.

And Corey, my producer and I, we've often thought, shall we do a full hour long podcast interview with her?

We'll go and see her in her home.

Because if you're 102 years old.

Well, she's seen a hell of a lot in her life and clearly has had a really interesting life.

We should have done this a year ago and then we just have never got around to organizing it.

But he's on holiday at the moment.

When he comes back, I'm gonna say, well, let's go and do it.

And she had a real impact.

My text screen in the minutes after the conversation, I mean it just went ballistic.

People say, oh my God, what a lovely happy birthday and all that.

And it's moments like that that remind you why you do what you do.

Because yes, we can have all the political argy bargy, but in the end I love talking to people who've got stories to tell.

And depending on what the subject is, and I mean last night it was a bit of an esoteric one about cause Harry and Meghan had taken their kids out of school after two days.

It was all about, well, if you were a child, did you move schools quite a lot?

What were the challenges?

Um, and I knew that wasn't gonna generate like hundreds and hundreds of phone calls.

But frankly, if you're doing a, a subject like that, you only need five or six in an hour of people who've got interesting tales to tell.

And my role then is just as a facilitator.

Often when I do these failings I can bring some sort of personal anecdote into it, but on that subject, I just went to a primary school and I went to a secondary school and I had nothing really to contribute.

So you just let people tell their stories.

What's it like for you to become part of someone's life like that someone, obviously, she said you're part of her routine.

Listening to your show in the evenings, is that something you ever really think about or you just sort of get reminded of?

Well, it wasn't when I first started.

I've been doing this now for nearly 17 years and at the beginning that didn't really compute with me.

But once a lot of people said to me, well, I listen to you every evening while I'm doing the cooking or whatever.

You realize that you become the friend that they've never met.

And my partner always says to me, can you stop talking about our private life on the radio?

And I said, well, no, because that's part of.

You have to be real to the listener.

So over time they get to know things about you that you've probably forgotten that you've ever said.

So if you meet someone in the street and they recognize you, they'll say, oh, how are the two dogs?

Still driving an Audi?

Been to see the Hammers lately, all that sort of thing.

And it just makes you relatable.

They don't have to agree with you on everything, but you've got to come across as somebody that is reasonably likable.

But I just think you have to keep.

David Caminois used to use this rather trite phrase, you have to keep it real because people can spot a fraud a mile away.

And if you're talking on the radio for three hours a day, four or five days a week, and you're not keeping it real, people find you out.

And that relationship that I have with my listeners, I mean, I really value that because if you're doing a very difficult subject like suicide or rape or something like that, you often get people ringing in telling you things that they've never told anybody else, even their husband, wife, best friend, brother, sister, parent.

But they're telling you on the radio now, think about that.

I mean, that's actually something quite special.

And I can give you a couple of examples of that if you want.

But it's that bond between a presenter and a listener which you get on the radio, but you don't get on television so much, I don't think, because television is very.

I mean, if you're having a conversation with someone on Television, it's rarely longer than half a minute or a minute, whereas on the radio, in theory, you've got all the time in the world.

And if somebody is telling you a really emotional story about something that's happened to them, you let them tell it.

You actually don't want to cut them off.

But on a general phone in, somebody will have, I don't know, two or three minutes on average.

But you do a phone in.

I remember doing one many years ago now on what's it like as a child to live with an alcoholic parent?

And we had a woman called sue phone in and she ended up talking for half an hour without really me interrupting her at all.

She was just brilliant.

It was just gripping.

And I thought, well, why would I stop her?

I mean, okay, it means that other people aren't getting on, but it was absolutely gripping.

And then I had Anna Enfield ringing in, telling me about how she was raped by a family member at a wedding and she'd never told anyone else about this before.

Wow, she's a middle aged woman.

I mean, not an easy subject to talk about.

Anyway, we talked 15, 20 minutes.

Then the next night she phoned in again.

We were talking about something completely different by then, but she insisted to the producer that she be put on.

So we put her on at the end of the hour.

So I went from talking about HS2 or something to talking about her rape again.

And she started the conversation, she just said, ian, I've told my husband.

I'm like, oh my God, what have I done?

And she said, it's like I can see the blue sky again.

What a relief that was because it could have taken a very different turn.

And it's like, I think if you're talking to somebody who's thinking of taking their own life, you're there to listen.

You're not there to act as an amateur psychotherapist and counsel them.

They phoned you because they want to explain why they're thinking of doing what they're doing.

And you as a presenter in that situation, you know, that one word, one wrong word could have hugely tragic consequences for them and you could lose your job over it.

I mean, bluntly.

So you have to be really, really careful.

And I remember somebody that I'd met at a political conference and we'd swap numbers phoned me at home one evening and I just assumed it was a pocket call.

But anyway, he phoned again.

So I thought, what a better answer is, like midnight.

And he said, you're my number 10.

And I thought what does he mean by that?

Anyway, apparently the Samaritans always advise people if they're thinking of taking their own lives, they should have a list ready of 10 people that they can phone.

And I was number 10.

I wasn't quite sure how that made me feel to be number 10.

But anyway, the other nine hadn't picked up, so I went out into the kitchen and talked to this guy for 45 minutes.

And it was a very odd conversation in a way, because, I mean, he poured his heart out, but he clearly didn't really want to do it.

So I thought, well, there were two things I've got to do here.

Try and make him think of the consequences of if he does.

I said, well, have you got brothers and sisters?

Are your parents still alive?

Yes, he says.

So I said, well, how do you think they'll feel if you do this?

And then somehow I made him laugh.

And when I made him laugh, I thought, I've got you.

Yeah.

And I said, I want you to ring me in the morning just to reassure me that you haven't done what you've said to your.

Oh, no, I'm not going to.

I'm not going to do that.

He said.

And he's probably.

Over the.

Over the last 10 years, he's probably phoned me eight or nine times, and we've had similar conversations.

So you work out in the end, and this was particularly true during COVID that although you're not a trained psychotherapist or counselor, you can kind of.

I know I can have a good conversation with people in that situation, and I know that there are.

And Jackie Smith and I, when we did our.

For the many podcast we used to do during COVID a second weekly podcast, those sort of agony aunt, agony uncle type thing.

And I know that there are at least three people alive today that wouldn't have been had we not done that podcast and had I not done a mental health hour on my radio show.

So I take that sort of thing really seriously.

There's a lot of power in listening.

And me personally, I've.

I've volunteered with the Samaritans for a year on the phones.

So the part about people telling you something that they've never told their closest relatives, people they've been with for years, potentially, is a really.

It's something you're almost grateful to take on in a way.

And you can feel the relief, like we said, when she called back the day after that moment of like, the weight's lifted almost.

How do you begin to hold Space for someone like that personally, how do you do that and how do you stop it taking a personal impact on yourself?

I've really thought about that.

I mean, I'm quite a resilient person.

I am also very emotional.

I think I'm quite empathetic.

I don't obsess about.

If I have calls like that, I don't, then I might think about it a bit on the train going home.

Could I have handled that better?

Could I have said something different?

Did I really make a difference to the person who rang in?

But I don't obsess about it.

I've never been in a situation where I felt I needed any sort of form of counseling or mental health support.

I've never suffered from depression.

But mental health fascinates me because, I mean, we're all built differently, we're wired differently.

And I try to understand why people react in the way that they do, sometimes totally irrationally.

And also, if somebody.

I mean, like, for example, I mean, I've never had a call from a paedophile.

Somebody who said, I'm a paedophile.

What can I do?

I know I've got these urges, I want to stop them, but I don't know what to do.

I mean, that's the ultimate, I think.

And I'm sure colleagues of mine have had these calls because it is such a taboo subject, understandably and quite rightly so.

And that must be the most awful situation to be in where you know that you can't stop it.

Yeah.

And I think I would find that if I did have a call like that, I would find that the most challenging one to deal with.

But do I go home and then spend a sleepless night thinking about people that phoned in?

I don't know.

Yeah, it's an interesting one because, like you say, everyone's different.

Some people do take stuff home, Some people ruminate on stuff for so long.

And, um.

The thing I was always so impressed about with the Samaritans was you did a debrief after each shift.

She's like three hour shifts, four hour shifts.

And you do a debrief with the person there.

Just check in on each other.

And then you would call someone separate who's not in the room with you as well, like a leader.

And it's just checking through that mental checklist.

And I suppose you sort of said on the train home, you might relive a few things, just, could I have done anything?

And then that's almost your.

Your personal debrief, potentially, is you're leaving stuff before you get to your home.

Well, I suppose so.

I mean, I'm slightly surprised here you say the Samaritans do that.

Because I think that can be, to use an inappropriate phrase in this context, overkill.

Yeah.

I. I look, it's.

It.

Different things work for different people.

I can compartmentalize.

Although I do get emotional.

I've stopped being embarrassed about getting emotional on air because a lot of the audience are feeling exactly the same.

I remember when Lee Rigby was murdered, I was on air doing four hours rolling news on it, and I interviewed a person that had been standing literally six feet away when he was beheaded.

So I'd only been doing radio for three years and that was the night I thought, yep, I can do this.

But two days later, my producer put a statement from the MOD on my screen and I didn't read it before I read it out, which I would normally do.

And I got to the point where it said Lee Rigby had a son.

And I just went.

I mean, I didn't cry, but I couldn't speak.

You know what that feeling's like?

And it was.

Well, it can't have been more than seven seconds.

Cause if the studio is silent for seven seconds, the emergency tape kicks in.

But it felt like 30 seconds.

And I remember then at the end of the hour, I apologized for doing that, because I can remember saying, I'm not here to emote, I'm here to bring you the news.

And again, my screen went berserk with people saying, please don't apologize.

We were doing the same.

And I think, particularly when you've been on the radio as long as I have, people know what you're like, they know what your character is and they can hear it in your voice.

And I've stopped being embarrassed by it.

You said that during that, the call in show, that you felt like you could do this, like this is that time.

And then there was potentially that moment where it sort of knocked you back across your career in this business.

Have there been ups and downs?

Have there been moments where you've.

Was there a specific moment where you thought, I've got this?

And then maybe moments that have made you question yourself a bit more.

I think everybody, even if they won't admit it, everybody suffers from imposter syndrome to an extent.

I got into radio very late.

I was 48 when I joined LBC.

I'd wanted to be a radio presenter for a very long time.

And there was something that just.

I just knew I could be good at it if only somebody would give me a chance.

But I'd given up on it.

What I hadn't really.

And it's stupid when I think about it now.

I should have been knocking on people's doors all the time.

Cause I was doing a lot of radio as a pundit but nobody ever really gave me a chance as a presenter.

Apart From I did 20 shows on 5 Live when I was deputizing for somebody.

And I just assumed that because I knew I'd done well.

I thought, well, if the 5 live don't offer me something, somebody else will come knocking.

Well, I'm an idiot.

I should have been knocking on other people's doors.

I used to do a lot on LBC around that time.

But I didn't ever suggest that they should give me a chance as a presenter.

And actually I've spoken to the different controllers of LBC and five Lives since then and they've all said, oh, I so wish we had done that.

And within three years I'd won Radio Presenter of the Year and I won it again three years after that.

So that was.

And that's when you have validation from your peers.

And I always remember Nick Ferrari was at this, I think it was the second one.

And we were all on the same table at this award ceremony.

And I remember walking back to the table and he sort of shook my hand, gave me a big bear hug and he said, you're on your way now.

Which was good of him.

I think he'd won it the previous year or he won it the next year or something like that.

And I've, I would say the Lee Rigby moment was the moment because there's a difference between doing a program where you're covering breaking news and just a sort of routine phone in on a routine news day.

And I knew I could do all the phone in stuff.

I hadn't realized I'd be so good at doing all the emotional ones.

But there's always, particularly when you're doing the evening show, there's always a lot of breaking news and I've covered terror attacks live.

And you do have to operate on instinct quite a lot in those situations.

But again, you're walking a tightrope because what you can't do is speculate too much on why what's happened has happened.

Yeah, if there's a terror attack.

The knee jerk reaction is, oh, it's a Muslim related thing or Islamist related thing.

But I remember there was something happened in Oxford Street.

Olly Merz was involved in it in some bizarre way.

And there was just something in my mind, a sixth sense of saying, I don't think this is what we're being told it is.

And the management who, they don't get involved too much in normal shows, but if there's a big rolling news story, they will sort of send missives down.

And one of the missives was, keep rolling on this.

And it started around 5 o' clock and when it got to 6 o' clock, I, I was thinking, no, this is not what they think it is.

And I just took a decision, didn't consult anybody and I just said to the producer, we're not doing this anymore, let's do.

And of course it was basically a car exhaust had sort of backfired and everyone thought it was a gun.

Polly Moser tweeted something or something and.

It just wasn't so.

And also because I don't have layers of bureaucracy, I can get news out there quicker than the BBC can.

It's risky.

And I used to use Twitter a lot more than I do to inform me of what's happening during the program.

I only got caught out once.

It was during COVID actually were right in the early days.

Daniel Radcliffe.

There's a Daily Mail tweet saying Daniel Radcliffe has got Covid.

And I read that out.

It turned out to be a fake Daily Mail account.

Right.

That's the only time that I've ever been caught out like that.

I think I'll settle for that because that's not bad.

There've been a few others where I saw a tweet from AFP saying that the White House was surrounded, there'd been shots and Barack Obama was hurt.

Wow.

And I looked everywhere else, couldn't see anything else.

So I didn't read it out.

And of course a few minutes later it was said that it was a hack.

So you're flying by the seat of your pants quite a lot and you are totally reliant on your producers to keep you informed, to guide you, to warn you, and to come up with people to interview.

We then found out it was a Malaysian Airlines plane.

But There was literally nothing else.

And the presenter now at the time was deputizing and just went completely to pieces.

And I had to go down and take over, knowing no more than anybody else.

And the art in those situations is you need to keep people listening, but you can't just repeat, well, a plane's gone down over Ukraine.

How terrible.

So you've got to rely on your producers to come up with some guests on aviation security experts or Ukrainian ambassador or whoever it is, just to keep it going until you do have some concrete information.

I mean, it's a terrible, terrible thing to say, but I love it when there's a terrorist attack because that's when I feel I come into my own.

Is it like you're being tested at what you're trained for?

Yes.

The adrenaline flows.

You kind of think, well, this is what I'm put on this earth to do.

And when you've done four or five of them, when you've done like eight hour general election night programs, I get a real kick out of that.

And I know people will say we shouldn't ever say that you enjoy terror.

I don't enjoy in the conventional use of that word, but I know that I can deliver what the audience needs during that time.

And because when you switch on LBC and there's a big story, you know we're going to cover it.

And we're about the only station that you do know that.

Whereas if you were on 5 listening to 5 live, Wimbledon might be on or cricket or football commentary.

And I feel really sorry for partly for the listeners in those situations because if you've paid a lot of money for sports rights, it's quite a big decision to come away from it, to do something that might turn out not to be the big story that you think it is, we don't have that problem.

We do news and that's kind of it.

And we give the public a say.

And there's no other station that does that literally almost 24 hours a day.

Yeah.

To relate to what you're saying there about you enjoy doing that when you're tested as a firefighter.

That's.

I totally understand that slightly.

What from outside people would say is a warped perception.

Yes.

We enjoy going to fires because I like a fire.

The bigger the better.

It's what they've trained for.

Right.

And it's a supplementary personnel like they, they've trained to go to war.

And yeah, whilst we don't want people to die, but if there's a fire and it goes well, like we do get a bit excited and it's, it's good for morale.

It's what we've trained for for the last however long.

So I think it's really important point to make in terms of your position on a show like lbc, you get to speak to obviously people who call in everyday people and also the people at the top as well, people making the decisions of politicians.

What are the things that you think you've heard from the people who call in that the politicians most need to know?

Well, the conventional wisdom is that politicians are out of touch with real people, which I always argue against because most of them do constituency surgeries either every week or every fortnight.

They meet all forms of human life in those surgeries.

They get huge amounts of correspondence nowadays, more by email than letters.

I actually think they are quite in touch with what people are thinking.

But there are times when I have a call or a succession of calls from people in a similar position and they don't know where to turn next.

And I'll give you two examples of that.

When the Conservatives introduced the so called bedroom tax, I mean, something that I can make a theoretical case for, but when you hear from three 55 year old men in a row telling you all about how it's affected their lives and they all break down in tears, you kind of think there's something going wrong there.

Now, because of what I do and because of my background in politics, I can pick up the phone and to a capital minister, they'll normally take the call and they might not take it immediately, but I'll speak to them eventually.

And I said, well, do you realize what's happening here?

Because this may be a great policy in theory, but in practice it's not working.

And I'll give you a concrete example of a woman who phoned in during COVID who told me that she was one of the WASPy women and she just turned 67 and she got a letter from the pensions people saying, well, unfortunately you have turned 67, but we've got such a backlog because of COVID that we can't give you your pension for another six months.

Months, wow.

And on the same day she has a letter from the dwp, so the same department but a different part of it, saying, obviously your universal credit finishes on your 67th birthday.

She said, well, I've got six months where I will have no income.

What am I supposed to live on?

And I immediately thought to myself, well, if she's in that position, I suspect there are other people who are in that position.

So I rang up.

I think it was Therese Coffey, who was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions at the time, And I told her this.

She said, right, I'm going to look into it.

So she got her Permanent secretary, the lead civil servant in the department, to look into it.

She rang me up a few days later and she said there were 35,000.

Because I'd said to her, you might have a real political problem on this if you don't sort of work it out.

35,000 People were in this position.

Wow.

And it was sorted.

And my friend said the next week she got some money.

Now, I got quite a kick out of that in some ways, but it shouldn't really be left to a radio presenter to alert a government minister to the fact that this is happening.

The civil servants should have been well over across that.

So I can.

A lot of my friends who are in Parliament, who are backbench MPs, they think I have much more influence and power than they do, which I may have some influence on the margins from time to time, but I can't change anything.

I can't introduce a bill to change the law on something.

I think sometimes politicians underestimate their own ability to change things.

What do you mean by that?

Well, Lynne Featherstone, who used to be a Liberal Democrat mp, she's now in the House of Lords.

She introduced the Equal Marriage act as a Home Office minister.

And the reason she did that was when the coalition government came into power, all of the junior ministers, they got them together and they were spoken to by Michael Hasseltine, who had obviously been around a long time, and his advice to them was, you're only going to be a minister in your department for a maximum of two years.

You'll either get promoted or you'll be dumped.

So when you leave this room and you're on your way back to your ministerial office in your car, have a think about one thing that you'd like to change while you're a minister.

And she did that and she came up with Equal Marriage.

So she got Theresa May, the Home Secretary, on side, she got David Cameron, the Prime Minister, on side, and three years later it came in.

And when she dies and her obituary is written, that will be the main thing that people remember her for.

Every MP needs to think when on the day, almost like the night they're elected.

Okay, what do I really want to do?

I can do the job, I can make speeches, I can do constituency things.

But what's the one thing that I'd really like to change in the law, because if you can't think of one, you shouldn't even be running for Parliament.

Do you think politicians are going into those roles with something in mind or are they just doing it as the next stage of their career, do you think?

Well, I think generally politicians go into politics for the right reasons.

Yes.

There are some bad apples, just as I'm sure in your profession as a firefighter.

You know, people who you really think shouldn't be firefighters, and I can certainly think of a few people that shouldn't be radio presenters.

There are bad apples in every sector of society, but the politicians tend to get it in the neck because their misdeeds are very, very public.

So I think, yeah, they're in it generally for the right reasons.

Yeah.

Saying about the things that the politicians need to know from your experiences with people who call in, what would you say?

The opposite of that.

So what do the general public need to know about a politician's life that might make them understand them slightly better?

Well, I do think we get the politicians we deserve.

And I think at the moment, and I always.

I try not to sound like an old git, but.

Because people often say, oh, well, the quality of politicians isn't the same as it was when Margaret Thatcher was in power, is it?

So you have to allow for that a little bit.

But I think it's a very lazy person who thinks, well, they're all the same.

They're not all the same.

Yeah.

I think we have, in some ways a much more representative group of politicians now than we ever have.

They don't all have silver spoons in their mouths, they don't all come from rich backgrounds.

But I actually kind of want our politicians to be a bit elitist in the sense that I want people, clever people running the country.

Yeah.

I don't particularly want.

Well, whatever I say now, it's going to sound really dismissive of a particular group of people.

But you want the best running.

I want the best people running the country.

And there are too many people at the top of politics now who I don't think are in what we would all probably agree would be the elite.

That doesn't mean to say they have to have gone to private school or Oxbridge or anything like that.

There are plenty of examples of people in politics who have come in with.

I mean, Angela Rayner is a good example of this, where people have always underestimated her because of the way she speaks, which I note.

She's actually moderated that quite a bit lately, really.

She's a very, very clever woman.

She's one of the few people in this current Cabinet who know how to pull the levers of power.

And if you're a Cabinet minister and you've got all the senior civil servants in your department against something that you want to do, it's very difficult to actually get them to do it.

She knows how to do that and there are one or two others that do.

But there are too many Cabinet ministers who just accept everything that's put in their red box, ministerial box at night.

There's one.

I won't name this person, but there's one Cabinet minister who is famed for diligently doing her red box when she gets home.

She hands it back to her civil servants the next morning and she's read every paper, hasn't asked a single question, just approved everything.

What's the point of being a Cabinet minister if you just do that?

Because you've got to have your.

It's like I said before, you have to have your own agenda and if you haven't, don't do the job, or the Prime Minister shouldn't appoint you to do the job.

So is that red box just stuff that's come in throughout the sort of.

Yeah.

Each Cabinet minister.

Well, they have a succession of them.

I mean, depending on the department.

I mean, there are some where the workload is a lot lighter.

But if you are, for example, a Work and Pensions minister, your private office of civil servants, they'll be getting papers coming in, research papers, recommendations for policy changes, letters from MPs that need to be replied to.

So they put them in this.

It's literally like a red briefcase.

It's the thing that the Chancellor holds up when they do the budget and they take them home with them each evening and they're expected to give them back to their civil servants early the next morning.

I see.

And they can have more than one of them.

Well, think about it.

You've got this red box which is, say, 6 inches high.

You get five of those.

That's quite something to wade through.

And Margaret Thatcher was famed for literally reading every single piece of paper.

And you can see these in her archives, the notes that she would make on them and sort of the comments.

This is absolute rubbish.

Do this again.

Or.

I mean, because she obviously could be quite trenchant but it's a big part of the job if you don't go through your red box.

And the civil servants are very clever.

They'll.

Anything that they.

They don't really want you to do, they'll put at the bottom.

Right.

In the hope or expectation that you'll never actually get to it.

So a lot of ministers just turn them upside down and work from the bottom upwards.

Yeah, yeah.

Some serious homework there.

Yeah.

From all the years of speaking to people from all different backgrounds, how has it shaped your view of humanity?

Has it changed your perspective at all?

There are days when you do this job where you walk out of the studio at the end of the three hours and think what a great people the British people are, and then the next day you walk out of the studio having lost complete faith in humanity.

And I'd say that happens more often nowadays than it did 10 years ago.

Yeah.

Again, an example, you do a program on what's happening in Israel and Gaza, you try your best.

I mean, I am paid to be opinionated, but on some subjects, you try to be balanced and then you just end up offending both sides.

And the absolute extremists on both sides then harangue you on text, WhatsApp, Twitter, other forms of social media, to the extent that it does start to affect you.

And I remember one night, I can't remember what had happened.

There'd been some awful atrocity somewhere and I was being accused of being in favor of child genocide and all that sort of thing.

And I was on the train home and I just realized a tear was running down my face.

I'm thinking, this is not healthy.

So it's the only subject that I do now where I switch off the messages.

Right.

And I don't read them out.

And I generally, if somebody's sending a critical message in, I will read it out.

I'm not there.

I'm not desperate for people to agree with me.

In fact, quite the reverse.

I prefer it when people don't.

But there are ways of disagreeing and not ways of disagreeing.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I remember when Nigel Farage used to be a presenter on lbc, he used to do the show before me.

I always refer to him as my fluffer.

I didn't actually know what it was until Emily Maitlis told me.

And he absolutely hated the calls that would come in saying, oh, Nigel, you're my hero.

You've done so much for this country.

And he just didn't like that.

He wanted someone to phone in so he could Have a good old stushie with them, and he would generally charm the pants off.

And they would.

This person would phone in, determined to have a real row.

And then by the end of it, they parted as friends.

And he was a brilliant broadcaster, or still is in many ways, and I think you can learn a lot from that.

So I.

That.

It's just that particular subject is one that just brings out the worst in people.

But I generally.

I mean, most of the time, it's an odd thing to do to ring up a radio station.

If you think about it, Americans are always really comfortable in front of a microphone.

We're much more reserved.

So you always have to take that into account, where if you have a succession of.

Basically, and I don't really like using the term nutters, phone in, you kind of have to think, well, this format will attract people like that.

I mean, the task of the assistant producer who answers the phone is to weed them out as much as possible.

And you want to weed out the extremists.

And although, I mean, I'm a great believer in free speech, if someone abuses that right when they phone in, they don't get a second chance.

It's the method they use.

Like how you disagree.

Yeah, you.

You're still polite.

You can disagree on a topic, you can still be polite.

I mean, I. I can be extremely rude to put somebody, if they give me the excuse to, but.

And I don't do it very often.

I mean, there are some radio presenters who specialize in being shock jocks.

Well, I. I don't like to be thought of in that category.

Um, but if I do lose my temper with a caller, which does happen, the rest of the audience, I want to think, oh, what's got into him?

Why is he reacting like that?

He's normally sort of very placid and nice, and yet he's been really rude to this person.

I don't know.

There have been times when I've been.

I mean, we all have bad days, we can all be in a bad mood.

And I'm sure sometimes I've done it in the wrong way.

But if I get somebody coming on the radio trying to be an apologist for Vladimir Putin, I'm sorry, I'm going to look and have it.

Do you think we've become more divided, like you said, over the years?

It seems to have been maybe more from each.

Well, I wrote a dream.

I wrote a book seven years ago called why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Shout, let's Listen more.

I might as well, have saved myself the trouble because it has got worse and it is largely the Internet and social media that has made it worse.

But that was about the only way you could make your views heard.

The Internet came along, Facebook came along and was great because all blogs came along and Mrs. Meggins could start a blog.

She might only have 100 readers, but she was able to sort of put her opinion out there.

I mean, that's in a way how I started.

But then with things like Facebook, which Facebook enables people of a similar disposition to interact with other people who are interested in what they're.

If you're interested in knitting, there are Facebook groups for people who love knitting.

But if you're the only racist in your village, or you think you are, it's very easy to find out that actually you're not.

And before long you've got your village racist group set up.

And we all know where that sort of thing leads.

So there are upsides, but boy, are there downsides.

And this is one of the things I find most difficult.

Well, where do you draw the line?

And I mean, I do have a list of people who I will not have on my show.

And then you say, well, how can you believe in free speech?

Well, somebody has to earn a right to have a platform they can rant on as much as they like on their own social media platforms.

But unless you've been appointed to a position or been elected to a position, you have no right to appear on my show.

So, I mean, Anjam Chowdhury is a good example here.

Sort of Islamist rabble rouser.

And the media used to almost, well, they would invite him on programs almost as a routine guest.

And I always thought, well, is this really right?

I mean, he seems to me to be quite a dangerous individual.

He was a professional lawyer and he knew just how to stay the right side of the line.

And I remember interviewing him once, can't remember what about.

And I had him on for 10 or 15 minutes.

In fact, I'm not sure.

He may have phoned in rather than being a guest, I don't know.

But anyway, I gave as good as I got.

But I thought to myself, this guy, I can understand why people are taking him by him.

He's very persuasive, he uses logic, but in a very perverse way.

And Although I didn't think he got the better of me.

I just thought, no, he's not going to get the chance again.

Tommy Robinson is another one where he would actually phone into my program pretending to be somebody else.

Really?

Yeah.

And he's got the gift of the gab in a similar way.

I'm not saying he's as dangerous as Anjaham Choudhary, but.

And in the end, I thought, no, he's not been.

He purports to represent a whole group of people, but he's not been elected to any position.

Whereas Nick Griffin, who was in my early days leader of the British National Party, he was a member of the European Parliament.

I remember the first general election night show I did being told in my ear, nick Griffin, two minutes, I think, oh, my God.

But he had earned a right to be heard because he had been elected.

But it's always a dilemma because you don't want to gratuitous.

You don't want to have a long list of people who are banned.

I mean, there's probably maybe 15 people on this list.

And I mean, somebody.

Somebody calls me a racist.

Well, they're not coming on my show.

Sorry.

Yeah, that's understandable.

Is that courtesy to and fro is there?

You obviously wrote that book, which you're saying potentially was a waste of time now, but is there anything from that that you think can still work?

Is there a way to get it back?

Well, the way to get it back is for each of us as individuals to behave better.

And look, I'll admit, I think I was part of the problem.

Possibly still am to an extent.

Not.

I mean, somebody said once, ian Dall is so nice on his radio show, but on Twitter, he's an absolute beast.

And they were right.

And I did try to moderate my behavior.

But you see, the thing is, if on Twitter, I still call it that.

If somebody calls you a twat, your instant reaction is to reply immediately and call them a fucking twat.

And then it escalates from there.

The secret is to grab victory from the jewels of defeat.

And I always quote an example where I saw, Sorry, he hadn't even ated me.

And he said, ian Dale is so far up Boris Johnson's aisles, you can't see his shoes.

I mean, quite amusing in some ways.

But I thought, well, hang on a minute, mate.

I can think of like 10 examples where I've slagged off Boris Johnson in the last two weeks.

So I did reply very matter of factly and say, well, you're wrong.

These are the occasions when I've criticized him.

Anyway, this guy then DMed me and said, I'm really sorry, I shouldn't have said that.

I can see that I was wrong.

And we've actually ended up as meeting up and becoming quite good friends.

Now, you can't do that with everybody that has a go at you on social media, but if you play it right, you can actually defuse a situation.

And the trouble is, so few of us ever really try to do that.

Yeah.

And particularly if somebody hasn't put their real name on their handle and it's just somebody who's got 25 followers, well, you automatically think, well, they're a Russian bot then.

And often they probably are.

Yeah.

How's social media and the Internet changed how you do radio over the years?

Have you seen a change?

Obviously, arguments and that divisiveness is what gets attention on these platforms.

Has that changed how you view doing.

LIAL B C It's changed.

I would say in the last a few years, it's changed beyond all recognition, really.

When I started, we had one member of staff doing the website, social media, everything.

We now have about 20 of them and they are obviously all esteemed, valued colleagues.

But I remember when they were first expanding all that side, they'd just installed cameras in the studio.

We weren't streaming live, but everything was being filmed so they could put out a clip.

And somebody phoned down to my producer from this team and said, we just got to the end of the hour and I can't remember what the subject was for the next hour.

Said, oh, can Ian start off with a rant on this?

So the producer says this in my ear and I just exploded.

And look, I can do a rant, but I kind of have to feel it.

I have to really believe if I'm going to rant about something, it has to come from within.

And I don't like this genre of radio where you have to be angry about everything.

So I just said, no, I'm not doing it now.

Since then, it's developed to the extent that, I mean, you've just walked past my studio there, which is in effect a television studio.

Everything is now filmed.

My program, since the beginning of this year, we stream it live in vision for three hours.

We used to just do crosscrust in the middle hour.

So that does change the dynamic because before, if something went wrong in the studio, I could sort of throw up my hands and sort of like.

And mouth to the producer something, or if the producer said something Funny in my ear or I give them the finger.

Well, you can't do that when you're on camera.

And so far we've been doing it now for what, eight, nine months?

So far I haven't fallen off the tightrope.

I'm sure I will at some point.

Although listeners love it when something goes wrong, or viewers, I should say.

But it does reduces the intimacy a little bit, particularly when you're doing emotional phone ins.

I mean, the first studio that we had in Leicester Square and it's no bigger than where we are now recording this, it was effectively, it looked like a broom cupboard, it was very dusty, but it was quite intimate.

And I always used to broadcast with all the lights off but just one desk lamp, which is great.

If you're doing a sort of intimate subject, you can't do that in these studios.

It just doesn't work.

Right.

Yeah, same with podcasts as well.

Like, is it a podcast was originally just audio, right?

Yeah.

And it's now video.

Is that still a podcast or is that a video show?

You see, and I don't get the.

These podcasts that are just video, I just think, well, they're not podcasts.

I mean, my podcasts, we generally don't film.

We occasionally do, but there is pressure to visualize everything.

Now, I get it doesn't mean.

So I have to like it.

Yeah.

But I mean, I just understand why and I mean the fact that YouTube, I mean, we never used to do hardly anything on YouTube, but YouTube has become now effectively as big as a TV channel.

And so, I mean, I do monitor how many people are watching us on the live stream, then the next day how many have caught up afterwards.

And the number of people now watching the program on YouTube, which of course they can watch on their televisions.

I mean, even now most people don't realize you can.

If you've got smart TV, you can.

What, YouTube is your new TV channel?

Yeah.

It's slightly fiddly sometimes to search for everything, but I mean, we now have like tens of thousands watching online rather than maybe a few hundred, which you would have done a few years ago.

Do you feel a different pressure with that?

Yes, to an extent.

Because I've never really wanted to be a TV presenter and if I had wanted to, I'd have probably made an effort to be one.

And I don't particularly like watching myself on screen.

And the fact that I'm 64 and even though I don't think I wholly look 64, despite the fact that I haven't Got any hair?

I. I don't know.

I think older people on television, whether you're female or male, in fact I would say possibly even more male nowadays it doesn't really work.

Everything's about youth and what the job that I do.

We have got one or two younger presenters, Henry Riley and Ben Kentish.

But if you are in your 20s, you haven't got the life experience to bring to it.

And it's very, I mean there are obviously phone ins I do where I haven't got anything where I've experienced it, but a lot of the time I do.

But if you're 28, the chances are that might happen once a week or twice a week.

So I think it's much more difficult to do it as a younger person.

That's an interesting point.

And so the older you get, the more life experience you have.

And I've always thought the day that I realize I will have to give up is the day that my voice goes.

Because I've never thought I have a particularly brilliant voice for radio.

I think I actually have a voice for, for late night radio because it's so soporific.

And when I was doing the drive time program they brought in a voice coach to make me be more Pacey because obviously on a breakfast or a drive time show people listen for less doing those shows because I was generally commuting.

So the average time that you listen at those times of the day is 20 minutes.

So you've got to keep it Pacey to keep people interested in listening.

And I don't have a Pacey voice and I never have had but one of our executive producer, Louise Burch, she would come in and as the red light went on at the beginning of the program she would scream behind the glass into the microphone.

So it came out in my ear, big bollocks.

And of course that sort of sent by adrenaline flowing, I suppose.

And I would be sort of instead of saying coming up after the news we'll be talking about blah blah, blah, you say and coming up after the news we'll be talking about it.

You just add an extra bit to your voice.

But again I go back to say you've got to keep it real.

How did we get onto that?

I can't even remember what you're.

That's the beautiful thing about podcast.

I think we were talking about the video and the radio, the, the visual and non visual aspect of it.

I just wanted to turn the conversation slightly towards like your own personal life as well.

Obviously you've been on the radio for many years.

And being vulnerable, being open about things, is something that, as you've said, like, helps in what you do.

Big moment for you.

Obviously, when you were 40, you came out to your family.

How many years before that were you?

Did you sort of know that in yourself when you hadn't come out officially?

I knew that I was different from the age of, I don't know, seven or eight.

I didn't know I was gay, but I just thought I wasn't the same as all the other boys in my class.

It's difficult to sort of define how.

And it wasn't, I suppose, until I was in my early teenage years that I sort of computed it all properly.

I grew up in a fairly conservative with a small C village in northeast Essex, and it's up from Walden.

And I mean, it would have been unthinkable to have acknowledged publicly what I was.

And I remember at the freshest fair in my.

Was it my final year or.

I don't know.

I mean, I was quite well known at the university because I started a conservative society at a very left wing university in Norwich.

And I walked past the gay society stand and a guy that I knew, Nick Crook, just shouted like, come on, Ian, sign up as a member.

And I just thought, I'm not gay, and sort of walked on.

And I remember sort of really thinking about that and thinking, well, at some point in my life, I'm not going to go through my entire life sort of hidden in the closet.

But at that point, I hadn't ever, like, done anything sexually, not with a man anyway.

And I had a succession of girlfriends and I did have genuine feelings for them, which I suppose some people say, well, you can't have been totally gay then.

And I never, I think if you have a spectrum of naught to 100 and naught is 100% straight and 100 is 100% gay, most people are somewhere on that spectrum.

Most people will be near one end of the spectrum.

And I would say now, I mean, my partner, I would say, is 100% gay, whereas I would say I'm probably 90, 95% in that I can still find a woman attractive.

I wouldn't want to do anything sexually with a woman, but I did.

But I would always stop before, well, how can I.

Well, I didn't want penetrative sex, let's just be as blunt as that.

And then when I eventually did do something with another bloke, I mean, I was 28, so quite a late starter.

I never went back.

It was like in my autobiography, which came out in July, called have I Said Too Much?

The answer, yes.

I was originally going to have two chapters, one on my sort of straight relationships and then one on the sort of when I became sexually active with men.

And the first of those chapters was going to end with the sentence, and then I discovered cocktail, but I put it all into one chapter, but that sentence is still there, but not quite.

So prominently, that's 28 to.

Coming out of 40 is still quite a long time, isn't it, to be?

Well, I only really came out to my parents and some friends because I decided I wanted to be a Conservative mp.

And I thought, well, I'm not gonna have this hanging over me.

I'm gonna be open about it, so no one can blackmail me or anything.

So when I got through to the second round of the Chipping Barnett constituency selection, I thought, well, I've got to tell them.

I remember driving up the M11 thinking, oh, my God, how am I going to do this?

And it wasn't a pleasant experience.

I sat them down and my dad was always good in a family crisis, but my mum.

I mean, they both met my partner John, who I'm still with, and that was going really well with him.

And my mum kept saying, but I know he's your friend.

And I said, yeah, but he's like a bit more than a friend.

And eventually the penny dropped and I'll never forget the empty look in her eyes.

And it was never really talked about again and again.

My younger sister, I hadn't told.

I told my older sister about five years before.

She had been having a difficult time and we were having sort of a heart to heart.

And I said, well, you think you've got problems.

But I hadn't told the younger one.

And then I made this idiotic mistake of telling the younger one that I'd already told the older one, which she was quite offended by, understandably.

And neither of them wanted to tell me to tell my parents, because most of my friends in London who all knew, they said, oh, your parents will know.

And I said, well, you don't know my parents and they won't know.

And they didn't know.

I just said to one of my sisters, I said, well, do you want them to read it in the Daily Telegraph or something, because it will be a story.

But yeah, it wasn't easy.

And part of the reason, and I have been quite explicit in the book about what I call my slutty years.

I've gone into possibly too much detail, partly because I want today's younger generations to understand what it was like being gay in the 70s and 80s and 90s.

And people will accept it in a way, and there'll always be people who won't.

But generally it will be accepted in a way that it never would have been in my younger days.

That's been quite a difficult thing to deal with, that reaction.

How was the reaction more broadly than just the Family?

Did it go out publicly at that same time?

Well, only in the sense that there were newspaper articles, because I was the first Conservative candidate to have been selected in a constituency having told the selection committee that I was gay.

There were other gay candidates, there were other gay MPs, but they'd all talked about it retrospectively.

So if you're the first to do anything, inevitably you're going to attract press interest.

And I remember being described in the observer by the Observer's political correspondent at that time, Gabby Hinsliffe, as the openly gay Conservative candidate.

And I just rang her up and I said, you'd never say someone was openly straight, would you?

And you're working for a left wing newspaper.

Think about that.

And there was a couple of diary stories.

So one of them described me as overtly gay.

Now, okay, this is the first time you've met me, but if you walked out of here thinking that, oh, yeah, he's definitely overtly gay.

I mean, I, I'm a, I'm a man who happens to be gay rather than the other way around.

But people want you to conform to a stereotype.

Yeah.

There's a lot of identity based conversation that we have and we tend to label people before we've even heard a person speak.

Yeah.

And it's the same if, if somebody has never met me and they say, oh, Ian Dale's a Conservative, I mean, immediately you're pigeonholed as well.

You must believe this, that or the other.

Not really understanding that.

Nobody believes everything that the political party that they support says.

I mean, even Margaret Thatcher in her own government regarded herself as the opposition within her own government.

She probably only agreed with 80% of what her government was doing.

And I think the adult thing is to think, well, you vote for a political party because you have more in common with it than the others.

And that may change over time.

Yeah, but, yeah, yeah, there's a lot.

Of pressure to be fully one side.

And that's the divisive thing we were talking about.

You've got to be.

If you agree with this part of this, you have to agree with everything else.

There's no way to be somewhere central where you pick.

I agree with that part, but maybe more this than that, that aspect.

And it's maybe becoming a lost art.

I don't know if that's.

Well, it's all about nuance, isn't it?

Yeah.

Nuance is a word that's almost not used anymore because it's disappeared in our.

Public discourse and context as well.

Like context of the conversation.

That's why a podcast is such an amazing thing because you get the whole thing.

Whereas you see a social media clip of that same podcast and it can really take something out of context to get that out.

Absolutely.

And I.

In the early days of when we were doing a lot on social media, there were a couple of occasions where they would put a headline over a 90 second clip which said the exact opposite of what I was saying in the clip, which was incredibly frustrating.

It's only going to get worse, I'm afraid.

Yeah.

How do you deal with the, the comments you've mentioned a couple of times, like if someone calls you a twat, maybe you, you raise them.

But I'm sure you get a lot.

As a public facing person, you get a lot of comments that are definitely crossing a line of being personal.

How do you deal with that?

Do you just ignore them?

I know some people don't even look at them or.

Well, it's quite difficult to ignore them because, I mean, you can't just say, well, I haven't seen them because they're on your feed.

I don't think that I get it as bad as many people do.

I mean, I can honestly say I've never had anyone be homophobic to my face.

I don't think in my working life I've ever been discriminated against because of my sexuality.

Although having said that, I think I probably would be an MP if I hadn't been gay.

But.

Really?

Yeah, because, well, that's a, that could be a very long conversation.

I, I react to it too much.

I don't particularly let it affect me psychologically.

I think most of us who in the public eye?

If you regard yourself as generally a nice person, you can't understand why somebody thinks the opposite.

But what you've got to understand is that you'll never persuade them that you're a nice person, whatever the reason is that they've come to the conclusion that you're not.

They're not going to be persuaded.

You can give them all the evidence you like and you might as well whistle in the wind.

So you just have to regard it as one of the houses of life.

Yeah.

You mentioned your recent book.

Have I said too much?

What made you write that book and what did you learn about yourself, perhaps as you went back through some of those moments?

I never intended to write an autobiography.

I don't think I'm well known enough to really write a best selling autobiography.

But over the years quite a few people have suggested that I should on the basis that I've done some interesting things, I've met some interesting people and some funny incidents.

I've had some successes, many failures.

And then somebody said to me, why don't you just write a couple of chapters and if you enjoy it then write some more.

So that's what I did.

And I did quite enjoy the experience.

Some chapters were more challenging to write than others when I wanted to be as honest as I could.

But I'm not going to pretend that everything in the book is the gospel truth of exactly what happened in every detail.

I mean, the famous Chapter 6, which Anne Whittakers endorsed, the book on the back.

So it's a funny, warm book, but please avoid chapter six.

I mean, there were different iterations of that chapter and I have taken out sort of some of the more salacious things, but there's plenty still in there.

I mean, I did go through a little bit of a dilemma as to how direct to be in that.

And I mean the childhood and school chapters, which not often, I don't read them in autobiographies, I think, well, why am I interested in what you did at school?

So I didn't write long chapters of those and I basically had what I think was a perfect childhood.

I've got no childhood traumas that I can sort of bring to it.

I got a bit arcy on a podcast with Julia Samuels, who's a psychotherapist and psychotherapist of the Royal Family, no less.

And so I was rather pleased to be asked to do this podcast, but she would not have it that I had a perfect childhood.

And I thought, well, I was there.

I know what my childhood was like.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And she said, but no one does.

I said, well, maybe not the people you talk to, and particularly the royal family, but I did.

And I mean, about a third of the book is all about sort of radio and lbc.

I mean, that was in a way, slightly challenging because I'm still on LBC and I wanted to do the book while I still had a bit of public profile.

But you don't want to write something that's gonna cause trouble with your relationship with the people that pay you.

So I decided that I would run all of that through one of my bosses.

And I think there was only one thing that they asked me to sort of slightly change.

And it wasn't very serious either.

So you just have to be honest about things.

I'm not sure I can honestly tell you that I learned anything more about myself.

And I really wouldn't change a word of that.

And I think because I didn't come from a money background, I didn't go to private school, I didn't go to Oxbridge.

I've always had that sort of imposter syndrome and a bit of a reluctance to acknowledge success and more to concentrate on things that I've got wrong or failed at.

And I think by the end of it, I suppose I did come to the conclusion, well, actually, you have had quite an interesting life.

You've met people that most people would never get to meet.

You've run various businesses, none of which made any money, but none of which failed.

And doing what I've been doing for the last 16, 17 years, I just kind of know it's what I was put on this earth to do.

And I wonder what percentage of people, when they get to my age could actually, genuinely say the same thing.

And I don't regard most of what I do as work.

And again, most people, I mean, I get to do something okay.

It's the same basic format every day.

But I didn't know this morning what I was going to end up talking about on the program tonight.

And yet sort of a huge majority of people, they kind of know what they're going to be doing day to day and look to five o' clock as to when they can go home.

Well, I genuinely, I've only ever had one job where that's happened and I quit after three months because I was just bored out of my mind.

And I mean, I know that when I leave lbc, and let's face it, I'm nearer to the end of, nearer to leaving than I am to when I joined.

I won't stay in the media, partly because I'd be too old, but I can't imagine working for any other radio station that would allow me to do what I do here.

That's a really good place to be.

Yeah, I think so.

And I think most people, when they.

I mean, I'm 64 now, you kind of want to be in a place where you're happy when you're that age that you don't.

I mean, I'm not rich, but I don't have to worry about where the next penny's coming from.

I've got a nice home life, I drive a nice car.

If I want to go on holiday, I do.

So I can't go out and literally buy anything I want when I want.

That's my definition of being rich.

I mean, other people will have their own definitions, but, yeah, I'm quite content.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's a. I think.

A lot of people get stuck in being scared of maybe making a change.

And you said you were in a job you didn't like for three months.

A lot of people would just probably stay there because it's a bit of security.

Well, I, I hadn't got no job to go to.

I was a. I was a political lobbyist and I. I'd actually been really successful as a political lobbyist trying, trying to get the Thatcher government to get rid of a piece of legislation which gave Dockers enhanced employment rights.

And I, I remember saying at the time that if I achieved nothing else in my life, I can look back and think, well, I did a good thing there because it enabled different ports around the country to expand and create more jobs.

And I could have basically had any job in PR lobbying that I wanted at that point, but I chose the wrong one.

And so I left and I thought, well, I don't know what to do now.

So I just wrote a letter to the editor of Lloyd's List, which I had something to do with when I was working on the ports thing, and he said, oh, well, come and, come and join us for a couple of weeks and see if you like it.

And I ended up being their insurance reporter.

And I thought, oh, that's quite an art.

To write about something authoritatively with no one realizing you're a complete fraud.

So it's basically that's when I learned the art of bullshitting.

I think that's a nice place to end.

The way I like to end my episodes is to ask my guest to leave a question for the listener.

So I like to listen to podcasts, go away and have conversations about what I've listened to.

If you could leave a listener now with a question to go away with and start a conversation with someone, what question would you give them?

Do you contribute positively or negatively to our public discourse?

Nice.

Very fitting for everything we discussed.

Yeah.

Ian, thank you so much for your time today.

I really appreciate your conversation.

If people want to find you online,.

I'm on all different social media, Iandale, but it's I A I N D A L E. I've got a website, iandale.com.

My primary means of communication is still Twitter, but I also try to do Instagram.

I am on TikTok, but I don't.

No, no, let's say with me, I'm on it, but not really.

And Facebook I tend to use more for friends.

I remember I reached the limit of Facebook followers and so I then decided to delete people that I didn't know.

Oh, my God.

Oh, you think you're too grand for us?

No, no, I just want to use Facebook for friends.

I didn't realize there was a limit.

Well, I didn't know whether there still is, but at one point it was 5,000.

And I thought, well, and I'm on LinkedIn.

I don't do an awful lot on it, but yeah, you have to be on all of these things nowadays, supposedly.

Yeah, yeah, I'll link it all below.

So if anyone wants to go.

And just to mention my two podcasts, where Politics Meets History, which I do with Tessa Dunlop twice a week.

And also I have an interview podcast similar to your own, Ian Dale, All Talk.

And I have a range of people on that, often politicians, but people from the media, historians, people who got books out.

Also sometimes interview people that no one's ever heard of and they tend to be the ones that people listen to most.

Yeah, amazing.

Well, again, I'll link those below.

So anyone who wants to listen to those can just scroll down and click on them.

But for me, to the listener, if you have enjoyed today's episode, please do share it with someone who think would find some value from it.

If you haven't already, please do follow or subscribe to the show as it really helps the show grow.

But other than that, thank you for listening.

Stay curious, and I will see you in the next one.