Henry Zeffman
speaker
1,893 appearances
15 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 13 Sep
Henry Zeffman’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 — 15 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
It talks about this as a way to deal with jobs, as do others.
But we, at least as we understand it, are to understand Annie Burnham's approach to this as being about measures to alleviate the cost of living, of which there will be others on Monday and others over the course of next week.
So I think prepare for the spectacle of Labour politicians who have spent the past year, two years, saying there's no point drilling more in the North Sea because it is not going to affect the price of your household energy bills.
within days saying to people like you two, actually, we need to drill more in the North Sea because it is going to ease the cost of living pressures.
And that is just one of some of those mind-bending moments we're going to get.
And I think you are going to be reading that quote on BH back to representatives of the Labour government before long.
And that was one of the arguments being made by perhaps in relative terms, the more right wing chunk of Andy Burnham's early support coalition to other MPs from the Labour right, which was you may not love everything Andy's saying, but get on board because if...
Darren Jones, as it latterly was, or Al Carnes, takes this to a contest, Andy is only going to end up inexorably being forced in a direction that you're going to like even less.
That was an argument that was being made around the corridors of Westminster in those early few days where it was pretty certain that Andy Burnham was going to win this uncontested, but there was still a sort of slither of possibility that there might be a contest.
That would be a very big
And what that difference, which I've absolutely experienced as well, I think attests to is Andy Burnham's true circle over the past few weeks has been tiny, minuscule.
And I think it has caused something very impressive on one level, which is that this has been perhaps the least leaky transition or incoming government, if you want to include teams that have moved from opposition into government,
for a good decade, I think, if not longer.
And that is very impressive in a sort of media but also parliamentary management sense of keeping things tight.
On the other hand, it may well be that
a few weeks or months into this government, people will come to say, if you'd let a few people into the transition, a few more people into the transition, you wouldn't have messed up that policy issue or more people might have been brought into that controversial decision that you made or whatever it may be.
Yeah, do you think that's a thing, Laura?
I remember speaking to someone who bears the scars of a previous Whitehall reorganisation and they sort of identified almost a paradox where they said, the amount of time and effort and energy and internal politics that ends up being expended on a departmental merger or the creation of a new department shows that Whitehall needs profound change.
But also, because Whitehall is like that, makes it almost not worth doing in the first place.
And so you can see why incoming prime ministers, especially those who've been around Whitehall in different forms for a quarter of a century, as Andy Burnham has, might want to grasp that nettle.
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