James Cook

speaker

1,779 appearances 16 recordings 3 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 19 Sep

James Cook’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 — 15 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 6.

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Newscast · Keir Starmer v The Civil Service · 22 Apr 2026 podcast

their, if you like, political masters, rather than, as Downing Street would see it, the opposite from Sir Ollie Robbins.

So Cat Little, who was in the Cabinet Office, in the thick of the whole process of the churn through of loads of documents in government before they go, before Parliament's now published via, in some instances, the Intelligence and Security Committee to work out what can see the light of day without breaching...

uh sort of international security concerns so cat little will be quite something on thursday and then yeah morgan mcsweeney will be quite something too next week and catherine what do you think of this cat little appearance what do you think we might learn i mean am i wrong and i'm you know literally 400 miles from london at the moment i was a lot further than that earlier today because i was in aberdeen at one point today but from this sort of removed position i

Is there something in the notion that there is a battle going on here between the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office?

And is that what we're going to see play out a bit more when Cat Little appears?

Yeah, and just a reminder, and lots of newscasters will know this, when you mentioned the humble address there, that was this parliamentary mechanism by which the Conservatives forced out a lot of this information, to put it very, very simply.

Now, look, more generally, Catherine, how would you assess the relationship between this government and the civil service?

And that punching a bruise thought, I think, is fascinating.

Just as I was listening to the conversation there, I was rewinding in my mind, and then I must admit, just checking online.

Well, two things.

Firstly, you might recall under the previous government, the whole business of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the then Conservative minister, and the post-it notes on the computers of various civil servants around the whole question of working from home and the kind of post-COVID era of working

People perhaps working from home more than some people wanted to see happen.

And then in the relatively early months of this government, I was recalling it because I was in the audience for the speech, the prime minister giving a speech where he talked about too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.

I knew it involved the word decline and bath, but I couldn't remember the other bits.

So I wanted to look it up.

And Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA union of senior civil servants, who was outspoken on Newsnight on Tuesday night, talking about a chill in the civil service after the sacking of Sir Ollie Robbins.

talking then about those remarks at the time, this is in December 2024, being astonishing and really damaging and civil servants feeling a sense of betrayal.

Now, the Prime Minister said the other day on Monday, he made a point of throwing praise in the direction of plenty of civil servants talking about their vital public service and hard work on behalf of the country and the government.

But it's quite a thing, isn't it?

That ongoing...

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