The Telegraph. Commander Tommy, who will blink first? China. China.
China. Or America, the world's biggest economies go head to head on tariffs. And the global economy is looking on. Little bit worried.
Tune its fingernails is recession on the way. China says it will fight to the end in its tariff war with America. What on earth does that be? The nine-fogels of Donald Trump says not to panicking.
So we won't hear on the daily team. Instead, we're going to be joined by China Hawk, former leader of the opposition and daily tea favourite, Ian Duncan Smith, on how we should respond to a tariff battle between our closest ally and the country that supplies so much of the stuff we use every day. And your favourite's Camilla, Megan and Harry are back in the news. The former, sharing the secrets of her motherhood success.
How does she do it, Camilla? And the latter demanding better security when he visits the UK. And he's in court to try and force the home officers and... Humbling stuff.
Welcome to the daily team with me, Camilla, Tom and me. And me, Kamala. Camilla, before we start with this huge trade war between the two mightiest economies on earth... The GTO is your calling them.
Absolutely the GTO. Let's have a bit of good news first. Can you play the daily tea trumpet? We have been shortlisted in the publisher podcast Awards for 2025.
We haven't. What have we been nominated for? Yes, let me run all of you through the fabulous shortlist. The Daily Tea has been shortlisted for Best News, Podcast and Best Launch.
The Daily Tea investigates for our work on Jan Marslek, the biggest spy in the world. Listen to that. Haven't already. Hady Dixon, that's available on our feed.
Our sister podcast, Bed of Lies, on the Northern Island Troubles. Congratulations to Cara McGougan, who's done a huge amount of journalism on that brilliant series. Great. And finally, podcast hero, what category to win?
Wow. Louise Wells. Sadly, not the two of us coming up. Very sadly.
It's Louise Wells' head of audio. Only bit of advice I would give to Louise. It's actually around honeymoon at the moment. God love her.
Her picture looks a little bit like she's just been arrested for a serious crime. So, apart from that, she's all in that. When are these awards? I think they're June the 11th.
We shall report back. We could be an award-losing winner. We lost many awards in the past. We lost many awards in the past.
Let's hope we can win one of those. We live in hope. Right. Let's start talking about China.
I've got to stop calling it that, but I can't. It's like one of those things now, isn't it? You have to. So, we've got China now accusing the US of economic bullying over their latest trade threat, and they have refused to withdraw their 34% counter-tariff against Trump.
I will take your tariff and I will raise it and enforce it against you. That seems to be the card game being played out on the world stage. The American president has gone stunts up during a press conference yesterday with Benjamin Netanyahu. Our country is being ripped off.
China's doing the best job of it, frankly. We have an opportunity to reset the table on trade. We lose billions of dollars. We lose close to two trillion dollars a year on trade.
We lose a trillion dollars a year to China. Why would we do that? Number one, why would we do that? And then you have to say, is it sustainable?
Then you hear about all of the people that say, well, deficits, we have a deficit with the country. The country has a big surplus with us, like China's a massive surplus, that they take and they spend on their military. Well, we don't want that. I don't want them to take 500, 600 billion dollars a year and spend it on their military.
And I shouldn't have to spend money. We shouldn't have to spend it either. Then when Biden came in, he had no idea. I'll tell you what that man had no idea what was happening.
China went wild, and the money they make is ridiculous, okay? It's just not going to happen. And hopefully we'll get along with China. If we do, that's greater than we know that's okay too.
So what the president has suggested there, that could leave Chinese imports facing a staggering 104% border tax. So that everything that goes into America would be doubled in price if it came from China, which could obviously cause an inflation shock in America. Now, not just China, that America is and the president is keeping his focus on. The European Union yesterday offered a zero for zero tariff deal.
So said, we'll drop all our tariffs for you and you can drop all your tariffs for us. This was President Trump's pretty brisk response to that at the same press conference. European Union, I mean, as badly as they've treated us, they've brought their car tariffs maybe to nothing. But it's not only tariffs, it's non-monetary tariffs.
It's tariffs where they put things on that make it impossible for you to sell a car. It's not a money thing. It's the standards and the tests. They drop a bowling ball on the top of your car from 20 feet up in the air.
And if there's a little dent, they say, no, I'm sorry, your car doesn't qualify. When the same car from Germany would dent likewise, unless you can have an army tank, it's going to dent. So they come up with rules and regulations that are just designed for one reason, that you can't set your product in those countries. And we're not going to let that happen.
So they don't take our agricultural product. They don't take anything practically. And yet they send millions of cars in a year, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, BMWs. They're sending millions and millions of cars into the US.
But we don't have a car that's been sold to the European Union. And it's not going to be that way. It's got to be fair and reciprocal. It's got to be fair.
It's not fair. That's interesting, isn't it? When we were discussing with Tim Stanley yesterday, is this all part of an negotiation? The art of the deal?
Clearly not. No. Doesn't sound it for the moment. He is saying that this is the new world order that he needs to put in place.
Peter Navarro is the senior counsel to the president. He also had a very similar role in President Trump's first presidency. And Peter Navarro is one of the hardest China hawks in the United States. He goes way back.
He actually directed a film in 2012 called Death by China, which was all about how the growth of China as a world economic player risked overthrowing the Western power structures that had existed for most of the 20th century. A decade before that, he complained, specifically that China was allowed to join the world trade organization, which is the organization which polices global trade. Then, of course, Trump blamed China for COVID. A lot of what happened through COVID, which he then connected to his inability to win the 2020 election.
So this feeling that is extant in America about China's risk to the way we all operate has been true in the United States for many, many years. It's not a new thing that Trump has suddenly bounded into. It's something that he's held dear for many, many years. And that is why probably the idea that this is simply a negotiating tactic is at this stage not holding water.
You forget about the pandemic, don't you? And the debate between whether it was a zoonotic disease that had escaped by accident from a wet market or whether it was a Wuhan lab, can we now know? Because so Richard Dilloff, the former head of MI6, had said that it was a lab leak from Wuhan. And he wasn't listening to it at the time.
And anyone that suggested that was effectively cancelled and told they were weird conspiracy theorists. If you go back 60 years, so in 1960, the USA provided 69% of all funding for research and development, which is one of the most important economic drivers of growth. The rest of the world provided 31% of which China was almost nothing at that stage. 2020, those numbers almost completely reversed.
Now the US provides 31% of research and development funding in the world. The rest of the world provides 69% and the vast majority of that comes from China. China now outspends the USA on research and development. And America has moved from a position over the past 50, 60, 70 years of economic domination, which is why this debate is so serious to a position of although it is still by far the largest economy, the power of China to invest in countries abroad and to be the reason that they can still grow.
It's now so powerful that this battle is cannot be called for either side. If President Xi Jinping does double down and keeps the fight going, are we going to end up with a world which is US influenced and then a huge tariff barrier and then China influenced and where does Europe and the UK go in that situation? Also, is it a genius you can put back in the bottle? Let's speak to our resident China Hawk.
We've got the right man to discuss it in the deity studio, Suryan Duncan Smith, former Tory leader, the MP for Chiefhood and Woodford Green, and someone sanctioned by China. Yes. Proudly so. Early on.
Very early on. An early hawk. So we've got quite a lot of breaking news right now, Suryan, because there's also the news we found Chinese soldiers on the front line fighting for Russia in Ukraine. We obviously got the backdrop of this major tariff war playing out in front of us.
What's your reaction? Well, first of all, to the Chinese soldiers. I know we knew this, but I don't think we ever had footage of them. Well, what do we know?
We know for a fact, I just came back about four weeks ago from Ukraine having been there a number of times. And we go onto the front line because we have a charity that was helping feed people on the front line. So we in Hakeib and all these other areas. So what did they tell me?
They told me that China brokered the arrangement between Russia and North Korea. North Korea effectively supplies Russia with huge amounts of munitions. Now, there's a question mark as whether or not these were all produced in North Korea, but aren't somehow produced in China and ship via North Korea for re-vaging. But they're running at about 5 million, 1, 5, 2 rounds, I think it is.
And those have gone to them already in the last sort of three months. So one of the reasons why Russia is stabilizing and doing better in certain areas is they're just out fire the Ukrainians, because we've never produced that many rounds for them. We know that China almost certainly was producing small arms for Russia over a year ago. So it's very difficult to track the difference between the two.
We know that North Korea has put soldiers in the field, thousands of them, to support Russia, actually, funnily enough, in the area around Kursk. So they were the main groups that were facing the Ukrainians. Ukrainians say they're better troops than the Russians. But what happens is the Russians now, we are, as I've already told, burn the faces off and the hands of the North Koreans when they die, because they don't want them recognised as North Koreans.
And all is North Korea for that matter. North Korea does not want wounded soldiers going back to North Korea. So if somebody is very badly wounded, what they end up doing is they have sort of kill squads going around, getting rid of them. So but the Russians do all this because they don't want you to believe that they're North Koreans.
They carry out this nonsense of saying they're from Eastern Russia, but they're North Koreans instead of fighting. So this is the nature of what happens. So if China has troops there, then they will not want to admit this absolutely not. But they are vested in the success of Russia, because if Russia succeeds in Ukraine, then Taiwan is an open door for them.
And the two are connected. I always say the road to Taiwan runs through Ukraine, because it proves that the West simply won't cope with any of this and splits and breaks up, which is what's happening over Ukraine today. So all of that is what we know. Are there Chinese troops?
I would be not at all surprised if you found Chinese troops there, whether they'll go down as volunteers or not, but you know, anything to help Russia is what China is about at the moment. They want this war finished, but finished in favour of Russia. Sariyan, we're going to talk about tariffs in a second, but actually I want to ask you a question which flows from that. Shouldn't actually we be discussing sanctions on China, not actually whether we should be lowering tariffs for China?
I've argued for ages that China should be in the bracket of threatened sanctions and sanctions in due course. The problem is that we've avoided them. And the reason why Russia is still going is because China arranges to buy all their oil and gas, and India is buying their oil and gas, refining it separately, but in the raw material they're buying it. So we know that that is what's going on.
So for China, there's a huge input straight away. And secondly, they are supportive of them in the Chinese fiscal system, financial system that's meant to replace the Western system. And they've already been allowed into that for China, who's built their own because they're worried about, you know, getting locked out, etc., or getting dealt with or sanctioned. So all of that is going on.
They are very close. He went to China first before he invaded to tell them that he was going to. China probably hung in hard a bit about the timing, but said, yes, if you do, we'll back you, which is what they've done. They've made sure that the Security Council never votes against Russia, and they block anything that's likely to damage Russia's capability in all of that.
And in the meantime, they trash every single WTO rule in global trade. So when Trump goes on about countries that are really trash, it's China that's trash in the biggest, because they've used the central bank to fund bids from companies, Huawei and others have got big because they've been able to underbid every single commercial company in the world, which is why there's hardly any telecoms companies existing in that scale of things. That's why you've got them doing it on to do every imaginable thing you can think of. So they trash the WTO.
They also use slave labor in their products, which again, it's not just against the WTO rules, it's actually a human rights abuse and a war crime. But they use that in Xinjiang, as the public silicon is used and made in Xinjiang under slave labor. There's millions of a weaker now in slave labor, the women, by the way, being forcibly sterilized, raped, brutalized. The little boys and girls are being taken away to re-education camps to become Han Chinese.
I mean, the last time you heard all this stuff was in the 1940s, when you discover the concentration camps and the death camps. This is what's going on in China at the moment. Everyone turns a blind eye to them, first of all, because they're far away from us. And secondly, because we've been so guilty about building up the Chinese economy through cheap trade.
And at some point, we've got to stop letting businesses run our lives on this and actually go back to the idea that what is good for the UK and for other Western nations is that freedom prevails and that democracy exists and human rights exist without them. We are nothing. We are just pawns in the hands of powerful dictatorships. So again, are you saying that you're in favor of Trump's tariffs on China?
What's your overall view of what the US president has been doing? I think if we take a pace back, everyone's been railing, and I'm not a great supporter of Trump's and general terms. But the point I do take from this, and I have been one or two articles written about it. I think there were only connoisseur that was saying, has he happened on the problem?
And the problem is there. So what he's dealing with is the fact that open countries that practice free trade have actually basically lost most of their ability to manufacture or do things. Some will say it's because of the price and the costs. Others will say it's because of what the artificial cheapness of goods that are produced in places like China.
So China has been the worst offender in all of this, which is why we've been devastated by the fact that China has taken pretty much every bit of industry. They're now about to take our last bit of the steel industry from us, and how stupid was it to allow them in the first place. They said they want more money, but that money never goes into the upgrading. Of the furnaces, it goes back to China.
They want to move, by the way, the company over to China. And they want us to take slab steel, which is their manufacture steel, which by the way is nothing like the high quality steel that the UK produces, which is Virgin Steel, which is used for aircraft, tanks, etc. Oh, aren't we about to try and get more of those? Yes.
Well, we don't have a steel industry if you don't do something about it. So all of this stuff is never, we've never looked at this strategically. We said the free market's the free market. I had arguments with my colleagues about this.
I said the free market won't change anything. So no, no, no, it'll make them, China will eventually become democratic and divided by rules because the free market acts as too important. I said, no, they'll trash the free market. And you'll say nothing about it because you're desperate for their trade.
Which colleagues are you talking about? David Cameron and George? It wouldn't be a million miles away from the chance of the time. But that was their argument.
My argument was name me the one thing that underpins democracy and a free market. It's all about voting. No, it's not. The number one rule that underpins our ability to trade with each other properly and in within rules and to have a democracy is a thing called the right to own property.
That is an English common law provision that came in in the 11th century under the Bishop of Chartre, who's an Englishman by the way. It's right at the heart of what makes English common law tick because if you do not have the right to own your property, then you are basically in Hock to a government, any government. That means they can tell you to do what they want to. Your right to own property is critical to a practice of the free market because if you own your property, you cannot have governments take it away from you without proper due process and public votes.
That's what we have here and we take it for granted. They have it in the United States and they have it now in the continent of Europe in most of the democratic states. And that is the background to have your scorpus and everything else. Now this is what a free market looks like.
None of that exists in China but they're in the free market. Why? Because we want cheap goods and we don't care how they make them. We don't want to ask questions about it.
Well, I think it's time we really ask questions about it. Sir Ian, do you imagine then in a more positive scenario in the future that there would be two great trading empires, one led by America, one would be led by China because it is such a huge global investor and that there should be a very strong tariff wall between the two. Is that how the future you believe should look? And if it does look like that, which way should the UK lean?
I can probably predict the answer to that. Well, I take a pace back before exactly answering that question because you've got to define really what this looks like. The truth is we've already put up with the trashing of the free market. It's been going on for well over a decade and a half.
We've been party to that, we've excused it, we've allowed it, we've said it's impossible to change. All the other countries too, America's been in that. We are almost one of the worst practitioners now because at least America is asking questions. So this tariff stuff comes off the back of other stuff that even Biden was doing.
For example, in America, they've now introduced a rule which overturns the burden of proof. They say to companies importing from places like China, we assume that you have slave labor in your product. You must prove that you do not have slave labor in your product and they test it using companies called Oratane and others that use forensics science. They then sanction those companies if they're found to be lying about this by a change.
That has led to supply change change in China, strange enough, where they're having now to find ways to not to badge themselves with slave labor. We've done none of that. We refuse to do any of that. So first of all, try and change what you've got in front of you by the power of your own market, which we can do.
There's no reason why you would accept that this would come down to an absolute division between the two. Don't put up with what China do. Make sure that when they do it, you blackball them for it, that you don't allow them to happen. That's where the west, the free market should come together to say, we're not going to go buying goods and companies will not be allowed to buy goods from China where they are abusing the rules and where they use inappropriate force labor or the rest of it.
That is unacceptable and we will now say no to them. Either they change or they'll get no change from us and that's the reality. Now, we could do that tomorrow. Taris are his way, I think, of trying to say to China, that's what you're up to and that's why you're sending goods to us at low prices, which we can't compete with.
Well, the answer is, now we have to price your goods at what the real price is. And if we do that, we may not need tariffs. So whilst I think he's identified an issue and a problem with the free market, it's not functional anymore, the idea that you can have a country the size of China trashing the rules around it and the WTO and then claiming the reason they don't have to pay the WTO is because they're a developing country. I mean, what in hell's name do we think that's all about?
It's about undermining the free market, stop it. Completely take your point and we have the Lords Amendment to the Great British Energy Bill where conservatives yourself included to try to challenge Ed Miliband to say exactly that point. You must guarantee that any of the goods that you want to bring in from China to make your solar panels, to make your electric vehicles, to make your wind farms must not involve slave labour and labour wouldn't support it. So ironically, you have a situation where a Labour government is supporting actual modern-day slavery in China.
Well, just to say what Labour say to that, I mean, let's take your point because they say that in the procurement law already is provisions for being anti-slave labour. That's what they say. So just without that. I mean, let's do that.
I mean, very quickly. Very quickly. Because there's a bigger point here to make. But go on on that.
Very quickly. That is complete rubbish. I know they said it, but we know for a fact that the procurement law cannot be invoked unless you've already had a case successfully mounted under the modern-day slavery act, Article 54, I think, which says there should be no slavery. However, there is no provision in Article 54 to proceed against anybody.
It has no teeth. So that means the procurement act cannot be used, which means therefore it's all hypothetical nonsense. What this would have done, and we supported it, and by the way, a lot of Labour MPs did not vote that day, because they couldn't bear the idea of voting for slave labour on our product lines. And we have said this is voting for slave labour, unique for a country like the UK that is the inventor of human rights, that invented the free market, that we should allow ourselves simply per price.
And let's be honest about it. Why? Because there's no way that Millaban is going to introduce his net zero programme if he has to buy well-made products that do not have slave labour, because they'll be too expensive. That's the reason.
Money, money, money. Okay, so on that point then, we need to re-industrialise pretty quickly, immediately, and at scale and pace. And can we do that? The West has to do that now.
And we should have been doing it three years ago. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I was one of those arguing that this is not the end of everything. It's the beginning of the reality post the Cold War. It's the new totalitarian state hierarchies that are now running us.
And my question is you either decide you don't mind, or you decide you're not going to do it. If you're not going to do it, the West has got to step up and decide that it can no longer just rush to China in places for artificially cheap goods. And by the way, with all computer-aided design and manufacture, it's not the same as it was 30 years ago. You can do a lot of this stuff with the right investment that doesn't require incredibly cheap human labour.
And not Chinese investment, by the way. So my point is, and what do we now worry about the threat? So we worry about the threat of Russia. China's a bigger threat than Russia is.
So what we have is a strategic requirement to increase our defence spending. What the hell are they going to spend it on? Europe and the UK and America need to up their game on this. And that means strategic procurement of industry that comes back to the UK.
We still remain the single largest investor in the United States, and the United States is the largest investor in the UK. What does that tell you? It tells you that when people want to invest, they want to go to places where they think the rule of law is right. People are coming out of China right now.
I've talked about God knows how many small and medium businesses say they can't bear it in China any longer because they steal your IPs, they trash what you do, you get arrested, your companies get moved to somewhere else. They do it all the time. But bit by bit by bit, we need to move some of that away. I see that Apple has moved their production of these iPhones to India, because they were tired of what was going on and they don't want to be so located in one country.
So there's lots that you can do. I think we're concluding then, so Ian, that Trump must absolutely not blink and that we must go into this with matchsticks in our eyes. Well, I would say that the UK has a peculiar position, not just because Brexit gives it the right to therefore talk separately about trade, but I think genuinely we are capable of getting a trade arrangement with the US. And the trick for the UK is that whatever else argues about who's in power and let's forget for a second it's Trump or Biden or whatever, the one role the UK plays, which is critical for global stability, I really genuinely believe that, I'm not egging up at all the UK, but the role that we play is to hold on to the United States and make sure that they do their decision making alongside us.
It may seem like a peculiar ask, but it's the one time I know the thing about the world is it's a safer place when the UK and the US are together than when they're divided apart and you can go back through modern history and see whenever the US is alone without the UK, things don't go right for us. It's important we stay with them and make sure Europe doesn't break from that time. And that's the number one most important thing we do over the next two to three years, otherwise they will have won in the totalitarian states and we'll be running thereafter. Sariin Duncan Smith, thank you very much indeed for sharing your wisdom and experience today on the daily team.
Thank you. Coming up next, why is Prince Harry back in the UK and in court once again, we're going to bring you all the latest on his court case against the home office and let's have a discussion because we must come all about Megan's new podcast. So the Duke of Sussex is back in London today, another 10,000 mile return trip from his beautiful home in California. This time to attend a high court appeal over his right to taxpayer funded security.
It's going to be a two day hearing and it really is the last role of the dice in his effort to win police protection for himself and his family whenever they return to the UK. The Duke has argued that without guaranteed state backed security, he feels unable to bring his wife or his children back to Britain. It's been a lengthy legal row and it's been a key factor in the risk with his father. The Duke has made it clear he believes the king should intervene to help broker a suitable arrangement.
But Buckingham Palace has made it pretty clear via sources that the king cannot have a role like that. This is a decision for the home office and for the Metropolitan Police. Deputy Royal Editor Victoria Ward has been in court today to watch everything unfold and she sent us this note about what had happened. The Duke of Sussex arrived at the World Courts of Justice shortly after 930 this morning, about an hour before his crucial appeal here in the Jew to begin.
We can't underestimate how much this means to Prince Harry and his decision to fly 5000 miles to attend the hearing really underlies the value he places personally on its outcome. The Jews last in the UK last September and has not attended any of the previous hearings in this particular case. So Harry's rolled into the court at 10.25am, he looked relaxed, he smiled knotted at the public seating in the press benches at the back of the court, he took his seat next to his solicitor Jenny Afria. The entire case centres on the decision by the home office committee known as RABIC to remove Sussexes right automatic police protection when they've left the UK and instead create what is described as a bespoke approach that takes each visit on its merits.
This means that Harry now has to give 30 days notice every time he wants to return to the UK. He launched an application for judicial review in September 2021 but after two years of legal wrangling at significant cost to both Harry and the taxpayer he lost the case last February. The appeal was opened by Harry's barrister, Shaheed Ratima who made several key points. She argued that this so-called bespoke approach meant that Harry was singled out for different unjustified and inferior treatment.
Central to the appeal is the argument that when they made their decision, RABIC didn't follow the terms of its own policy and failed to take a risk assessment beforehand. Now for their part the home office acknowledged in written submissions that the Duke disagrees vehemently with its position. But his barrister, so James E.D., said that while he was entitled to hold and express those views they were in fact legally irrelevant, adding that bear disagreement doesn't amount to a ground of appeal. I find this whole case kind of ironic.
On one hand Prince Harry is often accused of the king as father of meddling too much in his life and now wants him to meddle in a case between him and the home office which would be deemed pseudo-political and completely impossible for a reigning monarch to get involved with. Second of all this idea that Harry is being treated an inferior way to other VIPs but the point is he is now of inferior status to what he once was. He's no longer a working member of the royal family. He's been stripped of all his royal and military titles.
He's no more important in this country than any other visiting VIP. If Tom Cruise or Kim Kardashian comes over are they expecting to have home office taxpayer-funded metropolitan police bodyguards? It would be completely insane. Even Sir E.
Khan the mayor got into trouble when it was suggested that he had tried to organise Met Police Security for Taylor Swift when she was coming here for a concert. So if it's controversial for the mayor and Taylor Swift the idea that the king should intervene on behalf of someone who was once an official member of the royal family clearly is far too controversial. It's madness really and why is he at a greater threat than others arguably? Okay because he was in the British army and he did fight in Afghanistan.
Fair enough but he was the one who put in spare his autobiography this boasted about killing 25 Taliban which many military figures said was an idiotic thing to do and put a target on his own back. Why should we then have to foot the bill for that kind of stupidity? If he comes over and he's participating in a major royal event or any royal event he's going to be enveloped into the royal security scene anyway. That's what traditionally happens when people come from overseas.
He's basically asking for a degree of state-funded security when he's here in a private capacity with his wife and children but yet he's quite happy to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars over in America to protect them all. Why is it any more dangerous for them to be here than in America or any of the places they go on tour? I can't really fathom that argument either. Also when it comes to kind of looking after the IPs I remember having this discussion with the former home secretary Priti Patel who's a pretty recognizable figure let's be honest she doesn't have anybody guards.
She could be at threat given she's a woman of colour and there could be really big problems that might stem from her previous workers home secretary as well. MPs have actually been killed in constituencies like Joe Cox and David Amos. So if you're a politician a high profile politician that used to hold a job countering terror effectively as in home office and then you're not protected going about your daily business on the tube and yet Prince Harry thinks he deserves an extra layer of protection to that. I don't think that quite computes.
I think they have moved into that parallel odd universe of the mega rich and who can appear to the public as the mega entitled. Fortunately though of course for Prince Harry, Megan Markle is battling on being a female founder trying to build her own business which is obviously an important part of their wealth for the future. I must admit when I'm slightly struggling to keep up with Megan Markle and her podcast there was the original archetype. Yes that was with famous women and Spotify and then it was dropped really.
She did some things with Serena Williams and other kind of famous friends but it kind of died without trace. Okay and then she has now come back with confessions of a female founder. It's all about to quote the blurb, girl talk and billion-dollar business. So it's women who've been incredibly successful in their own careers and the first episode of this podcast series was released today.
The interview is with Witsney Wolf Hurd who's the co-founder of Bumble and also a close friend of Megan Markle's and Whitney Wolf Hurd and as a working mother committer I'm wondering if this is the type of experience you had said of Megan Markle shortly after the birth of Archie where she suffered she has revealed post-partum pre-eclampsia which can be very very serious but starts with relatively mild symptoms like high blood pressure etc but not to be underestimated in its effects on new mothers. But Whitney Wolf Hurd says of Megan her friend, how is this woman putting on heels and going on debuting a child in this beautiful outfit in front of the entire world? How indeed committer? Is she doing that?
I've never heard of this idea of debuting your child. It's like the use of the word curate to describe somebody collecting things. She's curating. Wills do debut children.
I'm off the mirror. I have to stand there. I stood three times outside the Lindo Wing at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington to see Kate present her children to the world. I do appreciate that it does take quite a lot.
Sorry I'm showing my awkwardness by not knowing what this thing is. That's good. As a follow all-all editor I'm glad you came to know. It's real showing off the baby because Diana did it.
Fergie did it. They all do it. You know here's the baby. They wear a lovely dress.
They're giving a huge amount of credit because they're giving birth and most of us just want to be in leisure wear. I mean I came back from giving birth and I started dustbusting pretty quickly. I didn't stay in overnight for any of them. Had them fired them out.
Come back at home. Back on duty. I'm launching a multi-billion business on the side. To be fair I wasn't making Jamp.
I'm not sure Megan is either. She's selling Jamp. She's selling it for 21 quid. A pot.
If people want to buy it I think they should feel their boots. Let me just give you. Should we just have a little listen to the podcast? Let's just listen to the tone of it.
I don't leave the house to go to an office. My office is here. So oftentimes Lily still knaps. She gets picked up early and she knaps and she only has to have to in preschool.
If she wakes up and she wants to find me she knows where to find me. Even if my door is closed to the office she'll be sitting there on my lap during one of these meetings with a grid of all the executives and here we are and I think that could have something to do with it. But also I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't want to miss those moments.
I don't want to miss pick up if I don't have to. I don't want to miss drop off and I don't either. And I think what I do love the most about having young kids in this chapter while I'm building is the perspective that it brings because you're building something while your child's going through potty training. So Megan there telling us how much perspective she has as a multi-millionaire mother who works from home who presumably has a retinue of staff to help.
I'm not sure whether the shift workers or indeed the office workers of the UK can quite identify with her ability to have her baby on her lap as she's holding high level meeting. I can bring my kids into the newsroom, Kamal, when they were toddlers and babies. I'm not sure that would have gone down particularly well with the editor and fellow staff but there you have it. This is a great one as well from Whitney Wolf-Hurd.
This is what Working Motherhood is all about but also you need to have some sympathy with this woman's inner turmoil because it hasn't been easy making that 400 million dollars that she's now worth. Listen to this. At my on paper richest I was my inward poorest. Do you see what she says there?
She's saying even though I am as rich as creases sometimes I've been unhappy and I think that both her and Megan will really be bringing comfort to people who want to be reassured that these two women speaking in their Montecito mansions understand what it's like to be a fully fledged working woman. So we can learn from this podcast. I'm at my eternal happiest and my external poorest. So I'm the opposite to the wonderful Whitney Wolf-Hurd.
One thing I will say for Megan Markle, she has to run a business and she knows her market. In a funny kind of way we could even say she's a bit like Donald Trump. So she does things that for people who aren't connected to the way she wants to operate, people like us find it sort of shocking and ridiculous but we also know that there is a huge demand for this ultra luxurious inspirational content that you can sort of listen to in honeyed tones. You almost know it's ridiculous but you go and buy the jam anyway.
So whatever we think of it, Megan Markle knows her niche. She knows her audience and in America and in particularly the liberal states like California, it's probably goes down super super well, north of New York in upstate New York and New England and places like that. You can imagine the types of people that connect with her will be nodding along. I was thinking it's like I was going to call it the white companyization of life that people buy into an instant like the glam.
It's like house porn but maybe it's actually a white lotusization. It's slightly ridiculous but it's dripping with wealth. We look at it and think what's going on there? What lives are you leading?
What I object to and by the way I think Megan should be filling her boots. If she wants to be the next Martha Stewart, knock yourself out love, I cannot possibly have said while she was in the royal family, oh I'm not sure you should be monetizing the crown and then criticise her for doing it once she's no longer a working royal. Go off, make money whatever. My objection is to this idea that she is in any way like any normal working mother or that there is anything relatable about her, her jam and her meetings with her baby on her lap.
It's just total at nut and nonsense. It was for the same reason that I looked at her and Megan as they were complaining about their very difficult multi-millionaire lifestyle. Like literally guys read the room. What are you talking about?
I wonder whether their shares and investments and pensions has to bring this full circle have suffered. What if she's getting some of her jam making equipment from China? Could this affect the Megan Empire? Do you see what we've done here?
Come at that. We have linked two stories that are totally unconnected and we are put together in one podcast and that is why the Daily Tea is now shortlisted for a number of awards. We'll be back with more of this magic tomorrow at 5pm. EQ Bank is here to help you make bank.
Let that sink in. It's a bank built to make you money. Not just take your money. Sound unrealistic?
Don't just take it from me. Take it from the over 600,000 other Canadians earning high interest and paying no fees on everyday banking. Like not right now I can't just wrangle over half a million people like that. That'd be unrealistic.
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