Chris Mason

speaker

4,846 appearances 48 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 8 Sep

Chris Mason’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 48 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 13.

Appearances

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Newscast · How Did Andy Burnham Do In His First PMQs? · 2 Sep 2026 podcast

I and look, I I don't think we should be that surprised by this in that, you know, the the tram tracks, if you like, of how any politician, any prime minister approaches the countdowns the various sort of um station stops of the political year. matched

It involves a bit of uh ducking and diving in terms of answering questions because the you know, the whole budget process is pretty complicated and there's all sorts of numbers. matched

Numbers disappearing into spreadsheets and all the rest of it, and then the various trade-offs. matched

And if you change your mind on X, you're gonna have to change your mind on Y, etc. matched

Um, I think the nature of parliamentary commons exchanges is that you know there is point scoring. matched

Now, you know, Andy Burnham's expressed this desire to sort of dial that down. matched

Look, in a partisan uh democracy where you have that kind matched

kind of, you know, two sides sitting opposite each other thing. matched

Yeah, y that that's part of it. matched

You're gonna you're gonna get an element of that. matched

And and it is almost a reflex that when you face a tricky question, and this applies in every political direction, when you face a tricky question, at least part of your response is gonna be probably jabbing back at what you see as a weakness of your uh opponents. matched

And then you get into this sort of sense that it's point screwing. matched

I think to a degree we'll only get a proper sense of the extent to which Andy matched

Burnham in sort of tone and style as a Prime Minister is substantially different from what went before over a period of time, beyond the obvious, which is that clearly he is a different character from Keir Starmer, and he is more comfortable on the public stage, and he does seem to relish the business of politics to a far greater degree than his predecessor did. matched

Now, plenty within the Labour Party welcome all of those things, the extent to which matched

That is uh perhaps necessary but who knows if it's sufficient is the is the coming question, isn't it? matched

Yeah, and what was interesting about it, it sounded I don't know, but it sounded like he was ad-libbing. matched

And that as soon as he'd said it, he thought, oh crikey. matched

I mean, that is simultaneously talking down to the um, you know, the relative I I I I must see who it is actually. matched

Who are the PPS defense actually? matched

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