Three Old Hacks

The Three Old Hacks are back, raising a glass to celebrate the work done by journalistic colleagues in unveiling the various parties that took place at Downing St during lockdown. Sky TV, the Mirror and the Daily Telegraph all come in for special mentions, as does Liz Truss, but she gets a special mention for rather a different reason: as the Foreign Secretary who didn’t know Rostov was in Russia.

The Three Old Hacks, not so much setting the world to rights as lamenting Britain’s ignominious position in it.

Listen to former BBC News sports editor Mihir Bose, Economics editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley on the events of the past week.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

The Three Old Hacks discuss this week whether or not the prime minister has lost it. He appears to be “teetering on the edge of appearing out of control” they think. It’s hard to bluster your way through a speech when someone else has written it for you and you clearly haven’t read it, especially as you’re just got to the “and here’s what we’re going to do about it” bit.

There’s a distinct sound of knives being sharpened in the Tory party. “The moment he’s not a winner, he’s a goner” they say.

Listen to former BBC News sports editor Mihir Bose, Economics editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley on the events of the past week.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Writer and broadcaster Mihir Bose, Economics editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley, aka The Three Old Hacks, discuss the week's events, including reactions to the fatal attack on Sir David Amess at his constituency Surgery.

Should MPs get more protection and does this change the nature of their relationship with the public?

Newcastle United and their new Saudi owners come up for discussion, with Mihir taking the line that foreign ownership should not be allowed.

And they discuss the public's low opinion of the media.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Writer and broadcaster Mihir Bose, Economics editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley, aka The Three Old Hacks, discuss Afghanistan in their podcast this week.

“The great opinion makers and intellectuals have once again failed us” says Mihir.

“When the West intervened in Afghanistan two decades ago they were all for it and made no critical examination whatsoever.

“Now, apart from blaming Joe Biden… they have not really examined why the West has failed…”

“The West has squandered billions propping up corrupt Afghan politicians who can then build villas in the Middle East… The US diplomatic cables which have emerged from Afghanistan show how corrupt the regime was”.

“The fact is we have not done a regime change, we have not built anything there”.

The whole sorry adventure was, he says, just “a rehash of imperialism”.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

The Three Old Hacks are old enough to remember the 1964 Olympics, the last time Tokyo hosted the Games. There were fewer events and so the people who won medals stayed in the memory longer, like long jumper Lynn Davies, whose local council paid tribute to him in a way which was to become more irritating than celebratory.

Writer and broadcaster Mihir Bose, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley have known each other since they first started in journalism and have much to compare and contrast. They all agree that the BBC’s coverage of this year’s Games has become nationalistic in a way it never has been before and they regret the the narrow focus on sports in which British competitors are likely to win medals at the expense of ‘proper’ coverage of the whole event.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Mihir Bose, David Smith and Nigel Dudley – aka the Three Old Hacks – are old enough to remember 1966 and all that. It comes as no surprise to them therefore that politicians should be falling over themselves to haul themselves aboard the football bandwagon. Football and politics, bread and circuses…

Writer and broadcaster Mihir Bose, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley add their particular brand of wit and wisdom to the debate.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Mihir Bose, writer and broadcaster, writes primarily on sport. In the seventies he was always the only non-white reporter in the press box and often the only non-white spectator in the whole football ground, so he is well placed to comment on the current controversy over the booing of football players who take the knee at the beginning of matches in support of Black Lives Matter.

He shares with old friends David Smith, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times and political commentator Nigel Dudley, how he was abused by football hooligans on a train and decided he would drive everywhere for his own safety.

The Three Old Hacks discuss taking the knee and whether it’s now becoming an empty gesture, and the disastrous launch of GB News in this week’s Three Old Hacks podcast.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Incompetence and chaos at the heart of government is the theme of this week’s podcast from the Three Old Hacks.

Dominic Cummings’ seven hour session in front of a parliamentary committee, pouring bile on the heads of both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock, has given them plenty to talk about.

The Three Old Hacks, aka  writer and broadcaster Mihir Bose, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley have worked with both politicians in their long careers as journalists, and for them the Cummings testimony has the distinct ring of truth.

Meanwhile Nigel’s dog Alfie is getting jealous of all the attention Britain’s first dog Dilyn has been attracting.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Mihir Bose, former BBC Sports News Editor, sets the world to rights with journalist mates David Smith, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times, and political commentator Nigel Dudley.

The cost of decorating Boris Johnson’s Downing St flat and who is paying for it is exercising them this week (£200,000 and it looks ‘like an Ottoman brothel’ according to one wag).

Maybe people aren’t bothered about who paid for it, but will Carrie Symonds’ comment that she couldn’t live with Theresa May’s “John Lewis nightmare” lose them the votes of Middle England?

Also the scandal of the sub post office managers whose lives have been ruined by the disastrous failure of a computer system. After some have served time in prison and others have been vilified in their communities, for financial losses that were not their fault, the Three Old Hacks demand to know who is responsible.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

The Three Old Hacks discuss the one day wonder that was The Super League. It took from Sunday night till Tuesday morning for six top English football clubs to announce their membership and then withdraw, leaving the plan in tatters in the face of opposition from the British Government.

Mihir Bose, former BBC sports news editor at the BBC, David Smith, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times and Nigel Dudley, political commentator, examine the debacle, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new found interest in the game, in the middle of a local and regional election campaign, and decry the state of affairs where the dominance of global TV interests means the fans who actually turn up to the matches no longer matter.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

This week the Three Old Hacks discuss a year of the pandemic and how it is that the Government is still popular in the polls.

They talk about the fall out from the Meghan and Harry interview; sexual abuse in boarding schools and flags on government buildings – “ridiculous, insecure and pathetic”.

Join former BBC Sports News editor Mihir Bose, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley for this week’s podcast.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

With journalist mates, Economics editor of the Sunday Times, David Smith, and political commentator Nigel Dudley, Mihir Bose looks this week at how vaccination certificates might change our lives.

Coming from India, where the bureaucracy is legend, he wonders whether we are signing up for identity papers by the back door.

The Three Old Hacks look at the thorny issue of politicians doing favours for friends and whether the big social media companies will have to pay for news content, following the Australian government’s ruling that Facebook must pay.

Then they talk about cricket and the ill fated test match. Somehow, it always comes back to cricket.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Political leadership ain’t what it used to be. That’s the theme of this week’s Three Old Hacks,

We all think the summers were warmer (demonstrably not!) and life was rosier when we were young, but the Three Old Hacks put forward a pretty strong case that politicians in Britain are not of the same calibre as those who have gone before them.

Boris Johnson says we are facing the biggest challenge since the Second World War with the pandemic, but where is the Recovery Plan to get us out of the hole it has dumped us in? Where’s the Beveridge report and the Bretton Woods of the 2020s?

Sports journalist Mihir Bose, Economics editor of the Sunday Times David Smith and political commentator Nigel Dudley also miss the characters of their early days learning their craft together as professional journalists.

Remember George Brown, who served as Foreign Secretary in the Labour Government of the 1960s? And the exchange with the Bishop of Lima? ‘No I won’t dance with you. This is not a waltz but the Peruvian national anthem and you sir are drunk!’ or words to that effect.

Listen to this week’s podcast from the Three Old Hacks.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

This week they discuss the inauguration of President Biden. Being of a certain age themselves, they take heart from the empowerment of a 78 year old man. They are but spring chickens by comparison. 

Nonetheless their experience reaches down the years and they fish anecdotes and facts out of their collective memory to discuss the media and politics as it concerns America.

Biden's campaign was 'pitch perfect' says David and he is sure he is already thinking about the Mid-Terms, being a shrewd political operator with fifty years' experience. He knows he needs to court Trump supporters if he is to have any change of a meaningful and effective presidency.

His presidency has to be capable of being summed up in a short soundbite containing no more than two clear thoughts, says Nigel. "The country was broken and I fixed it" maybe.

Is it true either in the US or in Britain that one party always leaves the economy in a mess while the other always puts it back in good shape before being voted out of power? asks Mihir.

And what was the speech that Biden nicked from Neil Kinnock? Nigel sat through many a Labour Party Conference speech by "the Welsh windbag" and remembers being surprised to hear a purple passage being recycled by an American senator.

The power of political editors ... giving a byline to some young hopeful when you don't want your name on a story ... it's all in this week's podcast by the Three Old Hacks. 

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Five people died in the assault on the US Capitol. Trump has been banned from Twitter for inciting his supporters. The Democratic Party is moving to impeach him for a second time. The Three Old Hacks consider the implications of this extraordinary event and how it was covered, as it happened live on TV, by the media.

Adept at reporting in war zones across the globe, was the American media caught flat footed when it came to reporting a crisis in their own capital? Were the media complicit in enabling Trump to become the demagogue he’s become? How were the Capitol police so easily overwhelmed?

Mihir recalls being in the US Congress back in 2000 when Al Gore the defeated vice President presided over a smooth transition of power to his victorious rival George Bush. David and Nigel recall the times the House of Commons has been invaded and how the British police dealt with it.

Was it a protest or was it an attempted coup?

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

Mihir Bose describes having coffee with Nelson Mandela in his Soweto house, how the great man had to see cricket sitting behind a cage during apartheid and what real loss of freedom means. Far removed from the ridiculous talk of Britain having been enslaved by the EU. He argues the problem is that this country has never got over losing the empire and asks David Smith and Nigel Dudley whether they would have wanted Britain still to have an empire on which the sun never set.  Both Dudley and Smith say they feel no nostalgia for the empire. Dudley says he finds talk  by Brexiters of preserving British sovereignty nonsensical. Smith recalls being brought up on films where Kenneth Moore  singlehandedly destroyed the Nazis and why the story of Britain in Europe, such as what the EU did to preserve peace in Europe when communism collapsed,  was never properly told. One reason for this was Boris Johnson spinning  fantasy talks about  Europe when working as a journalist in Brussels and the three Old Hacks recall their own personal stories of Boris the journalist. The Three Old Hacks then walk down memory lane to talk about the days before computers when they could dictate copy to copy takers and how this lost world of journalism was not always as glorious as sometimes portrayed.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

A group of economists have taken issue with the BBC’s Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg’s attempt to explain the national budget deficit. She likened the country’s current financial state to that of a domestic household being in debt, which they say is not a good or helpful comparison. Instead of dropping her a quiet email, they’ve complained formally to the BBC’s Director General, thus ensuring that the row goes ballistic as it is whipped up by the BBC’s competitors in the press.

Nigel Dudley, political commentator and long term leader writer for several national papers, says it is “grotesquely malign” of them to do so, in fact “totally despicable”.

David Smith, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times, agrees that the analogy is not a good one, but he agrees with Nigel that the economists, who are all centre-left and believe the current level of budget deficit does not warrant a return to austerity measures, are using the BBC as a whipping boy to get their own agenda on the front pages.

Nigel and David Smith discuss this with Mihir Bose, former BBC Sports Editor. They also talk about the growing clamour by Scots for independence and how they define themselves (British? English? European?) Somewhere along the way they get on to Peter Sellers and whether the Welsh are responsible for the Indian accent.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

In their third podcast Mihir Bose, David Smith and Nigel Dudley discuss  American Presidential elections, the problems with scoops and how social media has changed the way journalists have to deal with abuse. Maybe they say the American Presidential elections prove that the old country can still teach their cousins  across the pond how to conduct elections properly without the loser shouting it is a fraud, editors can sometimes be very reluctant to publish scoops and the rise of social media has meant old green ink letters of abuse have been replaced with the more menacing online threats made worse by being anonymous.   

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

In the second episode of Three Old Hacks Mihir Bose, David Smith and Nigel Dudley discuss how professional sport is faring without a live audience - the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd - as the old joke goes. 'Better maybe' is their conclusion. More goals anyway.

They look at how well or otherwise journalists have covered the pandemic. Their great friend Hugh Pym, the BBC Health Editor, with whom they often played cricket, has just won the Prestigious Charles Wheeler Award for Broadcast Journalism. So which of their other colleagues have done the best job of bettering our understanding of the virus and all that it entails. 

They discuss the online press briefings at Number 10 which have replaced real live press conferences, and evaluate how that has changed journalism. Will it ever go back to the cut and thrust of a real press event with the press pack picking up on each other's questions, pressing politicians for answers? 

And as the stop-start trade talks with the EU continue, or not, they chew over the Brexit debate and to what extent journalists are culpable for the country having made a momentous decision based on convincing arguments made by journalists that they themselves did not believe. Somehow the Bosman ruling and the 'bisexuality of acting' (a concept expounded by theatre critic Michael Billingdon) get into the discussion.

Not sure we'd say they'd 'put the world to rights' exactly, but they give it a good go.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!

In their first episode Mihir Bose, David Smith and Nigel Dudley discuss how journalism has changed since they first became journalists in the 1980s and how the experience of the pandemic has affected all our lives. 

Will the British ever go back to hugging or are we done with it after months of not touching? Have the British lost their fabled sense of humour by not coming up with a nickname for the pandemic? Are we less equipped to deal with hardship than previous generations?

Join this podcast for the wit and wisdom of ‘three old hacks’.

Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we’d love to hear from you!