Hello and welcome to Coffee Airshots. Now, today I'm joined by the Spectators Director of Research,

John O'Neill and his erstwhile deputy, Sam McPhail. And we're here to talk about the Spectator Data Hub, which at various

points in our Spectator lifetimes, all three of us have worked on together. John, for those

who don't know, what is the Spectator Data Hub? Well, the Spectator Data Hub is a collection of a lot

of the graphs that we put out,

that inform pieces that go in the magazine or that we use to illustrate pieces when people

use numbers to make points, and sometimes there's a bit more that we can add to those.

And we put them all in one place online, so you've got some way to go and look at them.

And where, let's get the plug in early. How do we find the data? And go to data.d. Spectator.com.uk. Or I'm sure you won't have missed the banner on Spectator.com.com. UK either. And Sam, you've worked here a few years. How you were here, I believe, at the birth of the data hub. How did it come about? How did it grow? Give us a bit

of the sort of journey behind it. Well, I think it was started just before COVID. We were probably

putting together several graphs, data sets, all very exciting things about economy, migration,

health statistics at the time. But it really kicked off at the start of the pandemic, about economy, migration, health statistics at the time. But it really kicked off at the start

of the pandemic, about February, March. And really, it's kind of almost the government set,

if you remember, set up their own dashboard. Yeah. Tracking cases, tracking hospitalizations.

But ours was better. Ours was better, yeah. Was it? Probably. Yeah, I reckon so.

Well, look, the thing about the Spectator Data Hub is it allowed people to question the government narrative, right?

And that's, I think it's fair to say.

That is the ongoing theme behind it is it's not us editorialising and saying, you must think this or you should not think this.

It's saying, here's the data that might otherwise be a bit hard to find. No, we try not to editorialize with the data, but there's a lot that just people are

interested in, but they might never see. So we're trying to find some of the more interesting things

and just show them to people. And on that thing, like John, where do you get inspiration, you know, when you're adding a new graph to the data hub?

Where do you get the idea to say, right, this piece of data would be really interesting?

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