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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
the ongoing relationship between an existing prime minister or president.
It's the depth of the security and defence relationship.
In other words, right into all of that space, whether it concurrently is about the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia or about defence spending or about intelligence.
There's a vast amount of traffic that goes back the whole time on those issues, which I think most reasonable observers would ignore.
acknowledge it's probably in the UK's best interest does get redacted even when you have Parliament demanding that as much as is conceivable should see the light of day.
Even though there's definitely politics that we can unpick and there's a longevity to the politics around the particular quote that I think Joe has at his fingertips that Pat McFadden tapped out in a message to Peter Mandelson.
There's also a consistency, if you like, to what we hear from Pat McFadden in that he later goes on to become the work and pension secretary with an attempt to try and deliver...
the very thing the government failed to deliver in its first year, which was significant reform of the benefit system.
And he's gone in to do that job because of a sense that Labour MPs needed persuading of the merits of what he argues for and they were not convinced about.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself here because I guess you should read the key quote.
Yeah, I mean, effectively, he can argue, and I think with some legitimacy, that what he was articulating privately is broadly consistent with what he said publicly and the argument that he's been trying to make to Labour MPs.
However, politically, because politics can be pretty cruel around these sort of things, it has...
There's a slight comparison.
I think this comparison that I'm about to offer is arguably a little bit overdone, but I'll make it anyway.
There's a slight comparison, I think, with that Liam Byrne remark from way back in 2010 of that note that he sent that he thought was going to be read by Philip Hammond.
The famous, there's no money left.
Exactly.
There's no money left, which was meant as a private gag because he assumed, I think I'm right in remembering that he thought he could guess who was likely to be his successor after the 2010 election.
And then because of the coalition, it wasn't the same person, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, there's a slight sort of, it's one of those lines that opponents can forever quote back at you.
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