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
because of that sense that it gets to an essential truth that you were willing to articulate privately that you'd have said rather more diplomatically publicly, even if, broadly speaking, it's getting at something that they can argue is consistent with what they believe.
I just think this is interesting kind of
reflection on kind of modern communications in the mid 2020s the whole disappearing messages question and the argument that you can have that you were setting out as darren jones had made around you know the the legitimacy or otherwise of turning on disappearing messages
versus the extent to which in reality now a lot of WhatsApp exchanges are a written down substitute for snatched verbal contemporaneous conversation with all of the caveats that you would attach to a chat in a corridor with a colleague if the equivalent was happening, which might be a bit snatched, a bit off the top of your head, a bit blunt, but intended to be utterly ephemeral.
And, of course, the reality of messages that aren't disappearing is that they're not ephemeral, that they sit there in all sorts of contexts.
And we see this playing out in public life all the time.
There's a story today, isn't there, involving the Southampton manager and the whole business of Spygate and all of that and WhatsApp messages, where something that in a previous era, because of the instantaneous nature of it, not even email's comparable, is it?
Because they tend to be a bit more sort of you send it and then you get a reply, you know, two days later or whatever.
Never, in my experience.
Yeah.
You know, yeah, what is, you know, that question around the legitimacy of the rise of disappearing messages.
One for newscasters to ponder.
Which is exactly what he so often has said.
Maybe to that extent, a sort of instant message, whether WhatsApp or iMessage or no doubt others are available too, are actually kind of, in their own way, revealing of character.
When you hear some of Lord Mandelson's contributions, you get a sense of...
authentic Lord Manson.
And maybe in those iMessages from the Prime Minister, as you say, you're getting an element of that, an element of him being fastidious, but also, as his critics might see it, very cautious.
But I guess the counter argument would be if you're Lord Mandelson is that you've been hired because you are political to your fingertips.
You've been hired because you're going into a particular circumstance in Washington with the return of Donald Trump and all the rest of it.
And that he's seeking privately to, you know...
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