Chris Mason

In the end, it didn't happen.

And you did a much shorter trip because it is only a 10-minute walk from our office at Westminster to Number 10 Downing Street.

Yeah, so I got a call late last night offering an interview with the Prime Minister.

I'd been asking for quite a while, given a splash of news about it.

And they invited me in and it's a privilege of this job that I get to interview the prime minister and the senior politicians pretty frequently.

But what was different about this one was that the prime minister was really keen that he had space to develop an argument.

So often when we do these interviews, you know, we'll be often on a trip with the prime minister and the political editors.

So Beth Rigby at Sky and so on.

Robert Peston at ITV and Andy Bell at 5 News, etc.

We've all got like six minutes each or whatever, because otherwise the prime minister would be doing these interviews for hours and end when he's trying to represent the UK on the international stage.

And the pressure of time basically compels lots of interruptions, even if you're not interrupting for a, you know, to pick him up on something, because you're just aware that the clock's ticking down.

And with this one, I didn't have that pressure.

I mean, clearly, I'm not still in Downing Street now, so I didn't go on forever and over and over.

But

So he was really keen to be able to develop his argument.

And I think partly because I think he feels more comfortable when he can do that.

And then partly he had a lot to say because he had a lot to push back on, given all the stuff about defence and indeed about his leadership.

And you can hear the difference between a six-minute kind of round-robin interview and a 22-minute-ish more podcast-y style interview in the previous episode of Newscast, which is in your feeds now, which is Chris's unedited conversation with Keir Starmer.

And what you'll hear now is me and Chris talking about what we learned from that interview in this episode of Newscast.

Newscast.