15/01/2017 The Papers

Coming up, song, dance and romance in La La Land. Could this be one of

the big Oscar winners? We will get Mark Kermode's verdict in the Film

Review. Hello and welcome to our look ahead

to what the papers will be With me are Rowena Mason,

deputy political editor for the Guardian, and Jim Waterson,

political editor of BuzzFeed. Tomorrow's front pages:

The Financial Times focuses on the Government's approach

to Brexit, ahead of the speech It says ministers are adopting

an increasingly pragmatic stance. The Daily Express says Mrs May's

vision will completely free Britain, once and for all,

from Brussels rule. The Metro highlights

the Chancellor's suggestion that Britain could become a tax haven

if it is denied access The Times says US President-elect

Donald Trump will offer Britain a trade deal within weeks of taking

office, to help make Brexit The Telegraph has the same story,

adding that Trump plans to invite Theresa May to the White House

as soon as he is sworn in. The Guardian reports on the warning

by the outgoing head of the CIA that Mr Trump must adopt

a more careful approach The Daily Mirror reports that

Jeremy Hunt will earn millions of pounds from the sale

of an education website he co-owns, although he can't take the money

at the moment as a serving Health And the Daily Mail has the story

of a Nigerian woman who flew So let us begin. Let's go to this

story in the Times. Quite an extraordinary story, an

extraordinary front page it makes. A couple of people doing interviews

and one familiar name, Michael Gove, who used to work for the Times at

the leading Brexiteer, and someone called Oliver Wright. It is a

remarkable interview, and you see Michael Gove quite obviously

blurring the boundaries between journalists, politicians and

campaigner. In the top line that the Times has picked out is that Donald

Trump has said that he wants to do a fair trade deal with the UK almost

as soon as he takes office, and that will help make Brexit a great thing.

That is a really, really interesting line for a domestic audience, but

possibly even more than that globally is this confirmation that

he will try to seek nuclear weapons reduction deal with Russia's

President Putin, in return for lifting US sanctions. That is a

really significant diplomatic development, if he manages to pull

that off. What we get here is such a spread of things. You mentioned two,

there are more in this piece. There are so many that you can't put them

all on the front page of the newspaper. There is the fact that he

wants his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to find peace in the Middle East. He

basically dismisses NATO as a spent force and wonders what its purpose

is, along with the purpose of the EU. In the space of one hour-long

conversation with Michael Gove he sets off several diplomatic problems

which will now take a very long time for people to decode. I do sometimes

wonder whether he is actually going to follow through on some of things

that he says. When you see him saying I feel this way, is there in

any thought behind it, is it calculated, or is it something that

has just come into his head at this particular moment in time? He is

pretty rude about Angela Merkel, saying she made a catastrophic

mistake when she let 1 million migrants into Germany, but he goes

on talking about her in warmer terms. Yes, slightly contradictory,

as we have come to expect from Mr Trump. He says that Angela Merkel

made a catastrophic mistake by leading refugees into Europe and he

goes on to make some predictions about how this could cause the

disintegration of the EU, and then he says he is going to start off by

trusting her, even though that might not last very long. A little sting

in the tail of that one. The same with Putin. He is saying he wants to

do this deal with him, and then saying he will trust him for now,

but potentially not forever. All the newspapers are going to scramble to

catch up with this, of course. And the Telegraph has to give the Times

the credit, but they point out the line about making Brexit a great

thing. A great thing for who is what I want to know. Some of the guys on

the US side I talked to recently said they are slightly less positive

about the deal Britain will get from the trade deal with the US. They

said everything will be on the table, things like pharma and

agriculture, which were big, big things went Ttip was going through,

ultimately scuppered by Mr Trump. They say Britain is going to really

struggle with this one but journalistically what is interesting

is that the Telegraph recognised that the Times front page is so good

that they basically have to run it in full. Newspapers hate doing that

unless they really have to. The other thing about the trade deal is

that Obama said we would be at the back of the queue, so for reporters

in newspapers like the Telegraph, this is a vindication of their point

of view, the point of view from the Leave campaign is that Brexit would

lead to trade deal and we would not miss out as a country. Very quickly,

it is such a bizarre situation we're in, 12 months ago Donald Trump was

not ahead in the polls on the primaries, he was still seen as joke

candidate, David Cameron was secure as Prime Minister and going around

Europe getting a renegotiated deal and the EU referendum was a long way

off. It is absolutely mad. We stick with Brexit, let's go to the Daily

Express but this is very much a domestic situation. Who starts us

off? Theresa May due to make a big statement on Tuesday, everybody

hoping for as I said before flashed on the bones of this thing. What has

the express got to say? The Daily Express are probably the most pro-

Brexit newspaper and its headline is thumbs up for Theresa May's Brexit

plans. That is a signal that Brexiteers are going to be very

pleased with what she has got to say, which we think is going to be

that she wants to... She wants a clean Brexit. In order to achieve

immigration controls she is willing to take us out of the single market,

and we think also out of the customs union. At the same time we still

want access to the single market. So we have also seen this weekend

Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, out there saying well, unless you give

us some access to the single market we would be prepared to potentially

change economic model. That is code for cutting taxes, something which

might frighten the rest of the EU. Encouraging them to come to the UK

rather than other parts of Europe, absolutely. Interesting. I think the

thing with the Express which intrigues me at the moment is that

at the moment Theresa May has all the pro- Brexit newspapers behind

them, the media on the whole are behind her, and she will keep that

as long as she can keep proving that she is getting a proper Brexit. The

moment the editors of the express and the Daily Mail start to see some

give or some compromise, you could see the tone change. There'll be a

lot of media influence in terms of what she is willing to compromise on

and how hard she is going push it. That phrase Brexit means Brexit, do

you think she will avoid that on Tuesday? I think she will need to

give us a little bit more, but I think single market membership is

probably for the chop. The Guardian, and it is your newspaper so you

should probably tell us about this. This goes back to Donald Trump but a

domestic thing for the Americans. This is the CIA getting involved.

What are they say? This is the departing director of the CIA, John

Brennan, who has issued a message to Donald Trump saying he should be

more circumspect when tweeting, often in the early hours of the

morning, his thoughts on anything and everything. Whether Donald Trump

will listen to this chap remains to be seen. I think it incredibly

unlikely. Intelligence agents are not exactly his favourite people. Is

the outgoing? I think he is still in the job at the moment. Donald Trump

in the Times interview in another section said he loves his Twitter

account because as soon as he tweets anything all of the TV stations and

the media rush to cover it. This headline reminds me of those

careless talk costs lives posters from World War Two. Doesn't cost Mr

Trump anything from his supporters. They go on loving him just the same.

No, his team don't necessarily know what he is going to send out, he

still has a mobile phone which he just stands out tweet, his random

thoughts, he wakes up and sends out stuff that changes diplomatic

positions and moves markets, no one in his team even has cited. Your

organisation, in the modern way of disseminating news, is nice and

small. A few words, you say it, it is irresistible. As a cynical

product, it is absolutely brilliant. Everyone wants to hear about it, it

is funny, rude, it gives you an emotional reaction, his tweets.

Every is talking about them, whether they are on his side or not --

everybody is talking about them. You can dominate the news cycle by

sending out 140 characters when he wakes up. Brennan is stepping down

so he can say things. He refers to Trump 's tweets about Nazi Germany.

The insults are pretty nasty, aren't they? Yes, and he was pretty upset

at the time about this controversial dossier that said various salacious

things about Donald Trump that were supposedly written by a former

British intelligence officer. And that caused a huge scandal last

week. So I think it would have been a very emotional reaction to the

things which were said about him in that dossier. Let's go on now to

something which isn't about Donald Trump or Brexit, not directly,

anyway. The Daily Mail, health tourism which is a subject they go

for a big way. What is this particular story about? It is all

about... Through Freedom of Information requests they have

looked for the costs of maternity care for mothers who have flown into

Britain or in some way ended up in Britain, despite being foreign

nationals, and then gone back home having not paid their bills because,

you know, they are not entitled to NHS care and yet they have left the

hospitals with bills. The thing that intrigues me with this is that it is

quite hard to argue on an individual case about the details on it, and it

is also very hard to know, in isolation it is hard to justify.

There are often circumstances... This is about one particular case of

the ?350,000 bill, the person is not named. We don't have a context

all-white has happened although the Daily Mail is certainly putting a

context with previous cases where mothers have seemingly flown in to

take advantage of superior healthcare in some respect. And as

the paper says inside it, this all comes as... Journalists love to link

these things up, we do have the story today about cancer operations

being postponed. So it has managed to be blended in with the state of

health service, the crisis in the health service. The NHS is under

what are saying is unprecedented pressure at the moment and it is a

little bit strange to me that the Mail is highlighting this particular

problem so much when there are a lot of other things causing greater

pressure on the NHS. As identified by doctors, cuts to social care, the

ageing population, to name but two. They do go on inside, it has to be

said, to go through a lot of the other issues as well. What is quite

clever, I think, to give the Daily Mail bit of credit, what it could

pay for, ?350,000. A good example of journalist digging in.

Journalistically, you can imagine people talking about this down at

the pub. It is a really good talking story, so there is an element of

that. It is more influential than talking about billions of pounds in

cuts to social care. Very quickly, I can't resist this. I don't know if

either of you are dog lovers, but there is a story on the Daily

Telegraph, the Queen's new role as a helpful dog walker. I'm not sure

whether it is a Telegraph scoop or whether they have managed to confirm

somebody else's world exclusive, but what is saying is that Her Majesty

has spent last two years quietly acting as a dog walker for her

former gamekeeper. His late wife was known as the keeper of the corgis,

and presumably she died and so the Queen has got into the dog walking

business. Another little nugget in here is that she is considering

taking on two more dogs, having said that the current ones would be her

last. What a thing to do when you are 90 years old. In a world of

chaos, Brexit, Donald Trump, the Queen is walking some dogs. It is

reassuring. It is, I like it anyway.