Q&A: Should we abolish the monarchy?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is it time to rethink the British monarchy? Why has “Your Party” been such a spectacular flop? Is Starmer the biggest obstacle to a Labour second term? And what IS the Overton window?
This Friday, Jon, Lewis and Emily answer your questions.
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.2 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:11.7 | So if you were expecting a special question and answer edition of the newsagents last Friday, |
| 0:16.5 | we of course let you down because there was that minor bit of breaking news concerning Prince Andrew, |
| 0:22.3 | sorry, Andrew, Mountbatten, Windsor. |
| 0:25.5 | But we're bringing it to this Friday instead. |
| 0:28.2 | And we're going to start with a question from David Beecham. |
| 0:31.5 | Is there anything in the rumour of Trump building a palatial bunker under the ballroom, obviously still under construction. |
| 0:40.4 | I absolutely love Trump and his ballroom fixation. And this for me goes back to nearly 15 years ago, |
| 0:48.1 | the first time I ever met Trump. And he showed me his ballroom in the Waldorf Hotel, New York, and he told me it was the biggest ballroom in New York. And my producer and I looked each other, and we kind of went, hmm, I don't think it is, actually. I think he's, I think he's got his square footage wrong. I think he's got his whatever cubic meterage wrong on this. And we kind of went, well, are we going to call him out? |
| 1:13.1 | And then we're like, no, of course or not. It's a ballroom. Who cares about a ballroom? |
| 1:16.8 | As it turns out, Trump does. He cares a lot about his ballroom. So is the East Wing ballroom |
| 1:24.7 | a cover for his sort of prepper escape route? No, I don't know. I haven't |
| 1:31.2 | heard that one. I think for Trump, the ballroom is the thing. Well, it's not just the ballroom, |
| 1:36.7 | though. If you look at the Oval Office, every time I see a picture of the Oval Office, and when |
| 1:41.6 | I was there, you used to get called in quite regularly to a pool spray when a Prime minister or a president was in town and they'd be sitting in the two chairs by the by the fireplace and you know, you'd stand there with your boom mics and all the rest of it and try and get an answer. The Oval Office is being transformed. It's gone guilt. There is gold paint everywhere now in the Oval Office. Trump is changing the White House and you can |
| 2:01.7 | imagine what this ballroom is going to be like. And the other thing he did at the weekend, |
| 2:06.5 | I don't know whether you saw this there, that he posted pictures of one of the bathrooms |
| 2:11.5 | that had been redecorated. There is the Lincoln bathroom in the White House, which was kind of, I think it was built in the 1940, so it wasn't from Lincoln's time, but Trump decided it was out of kilter because it was too Art Deco. And so he says, I have installed a bathroom now that is much more in keeping with what it would have been like in Lincoln's time and you look at it, you think, no, it's not. It just looks like a kind of, you know, four-season's hotel bathroom. It's got white and black marble that's very speckled and very classy. But the idea that this is somehow a restoration to Abraham Lincoln's time is just preposterous. So we don't know about the bunker? |
| 2:51.3 | We don't know about the bunker. I mean, goodness knows what he's doing. |
| 2:54.6 | He loves the idea of demolition. |
| 2:56.4 | And apparently with the White House, you don't need to get permission to demolish things. |
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