Chris Mason

speaker

5,320 appearances 50 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3d ago

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 — 50 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 13.

Appearances

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Newscast · Keir Starmer Resigns (Again) · 1 Sep 2026 podcast

time frame, even if that time frame extends beyond their own tenure, because a lot of, you know, processes and decisions and ideas take take time to implement. matched

So we're going to get that come uh the uh the autumn tilt towards the uh winter. matched

And you know, and as and as we build up around these various moments, we'll get a proper sense of the kind of cut of the Burnham government's jib, I think. matched

Totally. matched

And and not only classic ingredients, but in many senses, a rerun of of of uh conversations that were not wildly different two years previously, just after Keir Starmer had started as uh Prime Minister. matched

I remember conversations with senior figures in Rishi Sunak's government towards the and the build-up to the general election in twenty twenty four, where one of the arguments made for them going matched

Going six months earlier than they needed to was that they feared the whole prisons thing was gonna blow up on their watch just before a general election, and you know, better to fight that election and lose it and leave it for the others to to sort out bluntly wasn't was an element of an argument privately that you heard from some. matched

And in came Keir Starmer, and I think I'm trying to remember the exact the exact anecdote that he told, but it was worse to the effect of, you know, he was briefed on how many prisons. matched

spaces there were in the northwest of England and you know the whiteboard said fifty or whatever and he said oh does that mean five hundred or five thousand or fifty you know whatever they said no no it means fifty and crikey right it's that tight so you know and that contributed I think to the sense within the government at the time two years ago that they thought in their view being honest about the scale of the challenges was wise but you know that was then labelled as glue matched

Me and do me and and all that kind of stuff. matched

And many acknowledged afterwards it was probably not the right tone to strike. matched

Andy Burnham's going for a much, much more positive tone, but in many senses inheriting a lot of the same problems. matched

And we've seen, as you say, with the early release thing, the iterative, the iterations of various positions that he and Alex Norris, the new Justice Secretary, the new Lord Chancellor have occupied over the summer as they've tried to thrash around, well, how do you do this? matched

You only have a finite amount of prison space. matched

Adding to it is takes time and if you add to it quickly you can't do much quickly 'cause you're sort of converting laundries into cells and then where do you wash the clothes, etcetera, etcetera? matched

Um if you decide politically there's certain people you can't let out matched

Well, how do you do that in a legal way if there's a bit of a, you know, public campaign running about particular individuals? matched

Well you can't just react to that. matched

You've got to react to that in a legally sound way. matched

So it was recast about those. matched

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