Mark Hennessy
speaker
218 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 26 Jun
Mark Hennessy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Starmer had none of that.
He wasn't able to talk to his parliamentary party.
He wasn't able to talk to the British public at large and eventually got into a point where because of what is an incredibly toxic media culture in Britain, and I worked in Westminster for years.
uh where the the level of personality politics there is is vastly in excess of anything that any of us would have experienced in in leinster house even though we're not immune to uh the same sins and where every political leader has to have a nism attached to their name within three or six months of being able to take up office and the reality is we've only had two politicians in britain over the last 50 years who deserved an ism after their name and one of them was margaret thatcher and the other two
The other was Tony Blair.
And the rest of the people have, to a greater or lesser extent, been managers of a system rather than people who had a fundamental vision as how they wanted to change it.
Well, I mean, the odds are against, but, you know, as always, you wish people the best when they're taking up a new job.
The difficulties he's got, he was a cabinet minister during the Brown era and he was fine.
I mean, nobody would put a list of major blunders at his door equally if you were to go and say, well, what were the major achievements?
you'd be kind of shy of candidates there.
He is said to be somebody who struggles to make decisions, who likes to be popular, all of the kind of things that are serious handicaps.
They're big problems, Mark.
Yeah, they're problems, not advantages in the world of politics.
And he's the second person to occupy the number 10, or will be the second person to occupy number 10,
who comes from a mayoralty background and somebody who was seen as being very successful in Manchester.
But Boris Johnson was seen as being successful in London.
And look at how he performed.
The very skills that are valuable at a local level in terms of representing the place and all the rest of it are also matched with the fact that you have very few levers of control.
And so making a comparison between somebody's performance in a mayoralty, even in a city the size of Manchester and in charge of transport and in charge of a few other things, that's an awful long way from being in charge of everything or at least being responsible for everything in number 10.
Equally, you have a situation where
Showing 61–80 of 218 · page 4 of 11
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