Paul Harrison

speaker

168 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Paul Harrison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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Today in Focus · Burnham begins: what awaits the new PM? · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

Like lots of old buildings, the rooms aren't the same size.

There are stairs that sometimes seem to go

nowhere in particular.

And in some cases, it's very grand.

So there are these amazing rooms upstairs, the state rooms, the ones that people will have seen on television when you see foreign leaders go and introduce themselves.

But that is nowhere like the desk space that most of the people occupy.

We were six to a room in the bit of the Downing Street press office that I worked in.

So yeah, there is a bit of a facade inside that very grand black door.

Bits of them are quite spacious, actually.

There's sort of some kind of double-height ceilings, and they look a bit grand in portions, but also, effectively, they're smashed into the middle of the building, so they don't start on the ground floor or finish right at the top.

They're kind of a flat that's inserted halfway up, both above number 10 and above number 11, and obviously...

prime ministers and chancellors, depending on how big their families are, might have chosen to swap those two places around.

Everybody is given a small, certainly by the standard of other countries, allowance to redecorate and paint, put up wallpaper, whatever.

So they may be a bit different now since they were in Theresa's day.

There's a strange psychological component of the whole thing, which is that imagine you have a really busy job.

You're the chief executive of a big firm, which effectively the PM is.

And then we say, well, you can live here for free, but it does mean that you are at our absolute beck and call all the time because you live just above the cabinet room.

So you're in this strange situation where...

You can't ever really escape the duty of the job, which would probably be true if you were living somewhere else.

But you also can't really escape the stress.

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