Question Time 22nd May 2025
The Panel:
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Labour)
Kieran Mullan (Conservative)
Zanny Minton Beddoes (Editor of The Economist)
Hashi Mohamed (Barrister and journalist)
Inaya Folarin Iman (Journalist)
Venue: Dulwich
Last time Question Time was hosted from Dulwich I assumed the school hall involved to be that of Dulwich College, both the alma mater of Nigel Farage and the public school to which Puffin’s favourite and public school-hating leftie lawyer Chami Chakrabarti sends her son.
However, having not read the article, a Puffin pointed out in the unread comments that the show was coming from another Dulwich private school, James Allen’s Girls’ School.
Determined to be more circumspect this time, I consulted the internet to discover that, for some reason, an estate agency called Greater London Properties had run a piece on tonight’s programme. However, not only is half of its website in French, but they insist this 22nd of May 2025 to be a Wednesday, whereas it’s a Thursday. What strange, garbled times we live in.
No matter the day of the week, this edition of Question Time is double-barrelled. The Thomas-Symonds and Minton-Beddoes feature, as do the Foralin-Iman’s. Speaking of the need to be circumspect, in a previous edition of QT I referred to Foralin-Iman, a London bubble journalist, as Foralin-Oman, a sultanate in the south-east corner of the Arab peninsula. Apologies.
As for the strange and garbled, last week QT Review’s accompanying unlistened-to podcast caught the eye (the ear?) below the line. Commenters noted a friendly ‘old uncle’ delivery as if Bernard Cribbens or Geoffrey Wheeler putting the children to sleep over Lizzy Dripping or Moominpapa on Jackonory. Although QT Review HQ prints out every compliment and hangs them on the wall for the encouragement of the staff, I must say it’s not quite the tone of delivery we had in mind.
Perhaps, rather, David Frost at his establishment-shaking best, monologing to an impressed nation on That Was The Week That Was (after the plebs had only tuned in to look up Milicent Martin’s skirt)? Not to worry, many thanks, and a more satisfying consequence of a sweaty Thursday night’s toil than having the house firebombed the next day by disgruntled Ukrainian rent boys *sniggers*
Incidentally, Millicent Martin is still on the go and in her 91st year.
***
Nick Thomas-Symonds is not his real name, and he’s not really double-barrelled, Thomas being his mother’s maiden name. Mr T. Symonds studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford (where he also tutored) and was called to the Bar in 2004, after which he became a Chancery and commercial barrister.
Elected a Labour MP in 2015, Nick represents Torfaen and is the rather grandly titled Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office (Minister for the Constitution and European Union Relations).
Dr Keiran Mullan is the MP for Bexhill and Battle, having been parachuted in from Crewe and Nantwich for the 2024 General Election. Along with the rest of the Conservative Party, Dr Mullan is horribly compromised by party donors, in his case the interesting Yerolemou family. These are the people who own the Tory Party. The sorry tale can be read here in a previous edition of QT Review.
As well as providing the butler in Murder on the Orient Express, one might think the Beddoes family have provided an editor for The Economist. However, Zanny Minton Beddoes really, really, really isn’t her real name.
In a plot that would confound even Agatha Christie and a train full of hardened conspiracists stuck in a snowdrift on the unpopular side of the Jovian Alps, ‘Zanny’ somehow manages to derive her nom de media bubble guerre out of Susan Jean Elizabeth Mallaby.
Old Etonian husband Sebastian Mallaby, an ambassador’s son, sheared Zanny of the Beddoes surname at the altar – her father being Major S. W. Minton Beddoes, Lord of the Manor of Minton Hill.
Originally one of the Shropshire Minton Beddoes, Susan Jean Elizabeth was educated privately at Moreton Hall School and at the University of Oxford, where, surprise, surprise, she graduated in PPE at St Hilda’s College.
As the Tory Party is horribly compromised by its donors, so The Economist and editor Zanny are in hoc to owners. Major shareholders include the Agnelli family, the Cadburys, the Rothschilds and the Schroders. Another sorry tale of compromise and deceit which can be read here.
Hashi Mohamed is a London-based barrister, author, broadcaster, and public speaker who claims to be a refugee. The slightest research shows the claim to be wafer-thin, revealing the family in the old country to be well-connected and prosperous, and former pupils of the country’s best private schools.
Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, at nine years of age Hashi sought refuge in the UK. Kenya being such a gruesome place worth escaping from that, as soon as he turned 18 and became a British citizen, he returned!
A fuller QT Review biography of Hashi is available here.
After completing a degree in Law and French at the University of Hertfordshire, Hashi went on to study at the University of Oxford and then pitched camp at the BBC before returning to law in 2011.
One of the Garden of England Folarin-Imans, Inaya was educated at boarding school and then at Tonbridge Grammar School, before attending Leeds University to study Arabic and International Relations.
Of Nigerian single-parent household heritage, since university she hasn’t done much apart from make herself comfortable in a media bubble in London. Her credits include The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, The Times, Spiked, and numerous contributions to the BBC.
Selfless Ms Folarin-Iman’s public service includes being a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery despite being only 28, and a director of various philanthropic organisations which, upon further investigation, appear to be one-woman bands founded by herself.
Readers will be thrilled to hear that her Equiano Project — a debate, discussion and ideas forum that facilitates conversations about and promotes the values of freedom, common humanity and universalism — is now a registered charity.
According to documents placed with the Charity Commission, Equiano took £12,280 in donations in 2023, which attracted £2,500 in Gift Aid. Subsequently, £6,171 was invested wisely in ‘charitable activities’.
Those charitable activities included:
- Sending Equiano Project director Inaya Folarin Iman to speak at a town hall-style debate in Doha, Qatar, to investigate ‘the evolution of Western perceptions and the potential for redemption of Orientalist art and its role in shaping cultural understanding.’
- Sending Equiano Project director Inaya Folarin Iman to Warsaw, Poland, to speak at a ‘Culture Tensions’ panel on decolonising the arts.
Oh.
Puffins will be pleased to read that there is a surplus of £7,609 to be used ‘in furtherance of our charitable objectives.’ Good news for promoting the value of booking.com!
***
Question one, has the government’s Brexit reset given more than it’s gained? A real win for Britain, began Nick. Interestingly, it was Nick who sealed the recent deal with the EU. He said grocery bills and energy costs will go down – as inflation rises. He quoted high street brand names as agreeing with him.
Kieran accused the government of being desperate for a headline. This is not a success for fishermen, who he quoted rather than M&S or Morrisons. Zanny thought it neither a surrender nor the best ‘transformative’ deal ever. She declared it sensible. It was sensible to join the energy market. No, it isn’t, we have our own energy, why pay EU speculative prices when we can sell our own energy to ourselves at close to cost price? Silly tart.
An audience member mentioned that fish exports will be damaged as the Europeans can come here and fish our stocks for themselves. The London audience was unimpressed by the plight of the fishing industry. A lady in the audience put fishing’s contribution to GDP at 0.0%.
This week’s girl war saw Inaya in short-sleeved crimson. Both La Bruce and Zanny were in Air Force grey jackets above navy blue tops. Unimpressive, this week’s award is held over. Inaya found a failure in imagination, which should involve dealing with our own deep-seated challenges rather than what’s happening in Germany or France.
Mohamed thought of the agreement as damage limitation. He talked nonsense about a previous frictionless trade. Hold on a minute, Mohamed, services weren’t even included in the so-called European free market we left after Brexit. Could you watch the iPlayer in France? No, you couldn’t.
Mohamed said he’d ‘benefited’ from the Erasmus scheme. Do we believe him? No. As a parent of an Erasmus student, it was a bureaucratic nightmare. He told another fib — young people no longer benefit from Erasmus. Not so, Erasmus has been replaced by a Turing scheme.
The uninformed Remainer London crowd clapped like seals. The panellists talked over each other, as they have done for the last nine years — yes, nine years — since we voted to leave. On a show of hands, there were few Brexiteers in the audience. A very odd chap in dark glasses and earphones spoke.
Question two. A covered lady wondered why prisoners are being let out early. Among a list that included letting them out after a third of their sentence and not sending them to jail in the first place, La Bruce lingered over chemical castration.
Kieran had been a volunteer policeman and thought victims and their families should have an influence on sentencing. Mohamed didn’t like the idea of this debate being driven by the offences committed by criminals.
Apparently, such a thing would be ‘irrational’. He saw the whole criminal justice system as being rotten and blamed this on the Tories, to tumultuous applause from the London Remainer audience.
He disagreed with Labour too. The answer is to wave a big magic wand and heal a broken system. The recent review is a sticking plaster, and we’ll be back again addressing the same issues next year. Why not just pack them in, El Salvador style? Or speed it all up by bringing back corporal punishment?
A loon in the audience blamed ‘issues in society’ for crime. Lucy Connolly got a mention. Tweets get a longer sentence than child abuse. Mohamed told the audience member responsible that he was wrong and needed to ‘educate himself’. Oooo, listen to her!
Inaya thought thirty-one months was too long a sentence for Lucy Connolly, and her difficult home circumstances meant she’d be better off helping here than being in jail. Zanny said that going to jail teaches one how to become a criminal and was in favour of abolishing shorter sentences.
La Bruce wanted to talk some more about chemical castration. Nick said this already happens voluntarily, and there is a case to make it mandatory. Both Nick and Mohamed played upon their position as barristers despite neither of them being involved in anything related to criminal practice.
A tinged audience member asked question three, which was about Mr Starmer’s possible U-turn on winter fuel payments — or Winter Farage Payments, as perhaps they should be called if reinstated.
Inaya agreed with everybody else that this was a Starmer panic caused by Reform UK doing well in the local elections. Zanny added it a political car crash, which didn’t save a lot of money anyway. She said the triple lock on annual Old Age Pension increases needed to go.
Somebody with blue specs and a droopy moustache spoke from the audience. He was a school business manager, unable to pay the teacher’s pay rises out of a school budget which isn’t increasing. An American spoke. She wanted to encourage an ageing population to downsize their properties. The panellists?
The audience moaned about a lack of opportunities rather than encouraging people to make the most of the opportunities that there are. Mohamed called the triple lock an intergenerational injustice. He took issue with planned planning reforms, which he thought were positive but likely to be rolled back after the local election results. He referenced the terrible evil of people who live in large houses. Like, you know, the panellists.
An audience member saw a lack of governmental strategic vision, with Mr Starmer as an administrator, a placeholder. He couldn’t be more wrong. The strategic vision is mass uncontrolled immigration at any cost, net zero at any cost, the EU at any cost, high taxation at any cost, and a bloated public sector at any cost. The problem being nobody in the London media political Remainer bubble will acknowledge the fact that it just doesn’t work.
© Always Worth Saying 2025
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