Chris Mason

Yeah, and that if you are embarking on something that is clearly difficult, reopening, I mean, again, you can run this in any sort of parallel in our own lives, really, about anything, it doesn't have to be money.

If you reopen something that the person on the other side of the conversation thinks is agreed...

then the starting point is probably going to be one of at least mild irritation from the person on the other side of the table.

And that which therefore potentially, you know, just to stretch that thought might put an upper limit on what you can be able to squeeze out of those of those conversations.

So in that sense, you can see how.

Two things can be right, and this is the value in hearing, as we did from John Healy yesterday, and then you hear from the Prime Minister.

He's clearly had a pretty difficult and pretty spiky set of conversations with loads of his cabinet ministers about them handing money back that they thought had been negotiated to be theirs or in their department.

And also money that was for investment.

It wasn't just money to pay the day-to-day bills in their department.

It was money that they were thinking they had to invest to buy good stuff.

Totally.

And so often government ministers will make an argument that the way you can transform the country, the way that you can be a transformative government is the money that you spend on longer term projects that then bring social or economic value for potentially decades ahead.

as opposed to the day-to-day, which of course is important, which is paying the wages of a teacher or whatever.

So there's an opportunity cost to taking away that capital spending.

And sure, cabinet ministers have made that argument to him.

But the argument I'm hearing from them is that they've gone through this pretty difficult process, pretty chewy process.

cabinet ministers.

We've heard, because it's been reported, that one or two of them pushed back quite vociferously.

And he's got a certain amount of money out of it.

He's talked about the whole question of cutting money from international aid.