Joel Budd

speaker

65 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 19 May

Joel Budd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Intelligence from The Economist · Spread too thin: Africa’s next Ebola outbreak · 19 May 2026 podcast

in a convening role, trying to get everybody

to get on one page and agree what kind of master plan they want for the entire metropolis.

And he controls a lot of money.

So he's sort of like a manager and a conduit and his charm has served him quite well in that role.

Greater Manchester was functioning pretty well before Andy Burnham arrived, but I think it's to his great credit that he hasn't messed it up.

Yes, and that is the way he has been in internal Manchester politics for the most part.

But Andy Burno has another side to him, which tends to come out when he's dealing with Britain's central government, and that is that he can be pretty confrontational and pretty good at mobilizing the media.

And he's shown that several times, but the time he really showed it was during the worst of the covet pandemic.

He went on television repeatedly arguing that if central government was going to shut Manchester down,

and impose very strict lockdown conditions on the metropolis.

Central government needed to provide Manchester with more money, otherwise businesses were going to collapse.

Central government did not agree and did not supply Greater Manchester with as much money as Andy Burnham thought it deserved, and he really revolted.

And the people of Greater Manchester loved him for it.

It really boosted his profile.

The truth is nobody knows.

There's no real preparation for being Prime Minister.

Keir Starmer, after all, looked like an extremely competent, decent person, and he's been pretty underwhelming.

I think Andy Burnham has some quite clear advantages over Keir Starmer.

He has the great knack of just repeating himself.

So he repeats things like: Greater Manchester needs a London-style transport system.

Showing 21–40 of 65 · page 2 of 4