Chris Gray
speaker
586 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Jun
Chris Gray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So firstly, someone was pointing out to me that the reality of what we see in these documents is those MPs who had not turned on disappearing messages in WhatsApp and those who had.
Because if you haven't, then it's quite likely then those emails, those texts, sorry, those WhatsApps are floating around in these documents.
If you turned on disappearing messages, then they're not.
In addition to that, there is material in here that you might expect to find that isn't there, principally because of the ongoing police investigation.
that Lord Mandelson is involved in.
He denies any wrongdoing.
And so, for instance, you'll recall on previous episodes of Newscast, we've kicked around all of the arguments around the vetting process that went on around Lord Mandelson's appointment and what questions were asked and what documents were kept and who said what to whom and who didn't say what to whom, etc., etc.,
When you look at this set of documents, as vast as they are, we don't really learn a great deal about all of that.
And our understanding is the reason for that is because of the ongoing police inquiry.
Yeah, and I can tell you that the view from Lord Mandelson is that the reason for that is that the legal advice he received is that nothing should be seen to cut across the police investigation line.
And therefore, that shouldn't be handed over.
The point that was also made to me is that the vast majority of his communications during the job were done on the work phone that he has since obviously lost because he's no longer doing the job.
But yeah, you know, what messages may have been on that device that we have not seen is an interesting question.
But we shouldn't be that surprised by all of that because the argument that was always made in the process, and you get a sense with the scale of this, that the industry that this has created within government at considerable expense, as Joe was mentioning, you know, trawling through all of this, compiling all of this, working out what can be legitimately redacted.
And one of the arguments that was always made was that on kind of national security and international relations lines, in other words, a polite way of putting, you know...
a relationship with Donald Trump needs to continue beyond the publication of these documents, that there would be some redactions going on.
It's rather easier, or rather harder, I should say, to illustrate visually the blanking out when there isn't page after page of black ink somehow, compared with asterisks.
Asterisks don't seem as definitive as black ink, even though the consequence is exactly the same, which is that we're not seeing what was really said on a lot of all of this stuff.
One other just additional point to quickly make on all of this.
Whenever I speak to folk who have worked either in the embassy in Washington or in the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Defence, they always come back to the point that the real meaning of the quote-unquote special relationship is not...
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