Peter Walker

speaker

987 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 Sep

Peter Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

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

quite a kind of loyalist to Keir Starmer in that he was in Starmer's cabinet all the way through.

But the fact that he resigned gives him a kind of plausible deniability from a Starmer project.

You know, and he would say he was standing on principle.

It sometimes offers you this kind of second chance.

I mean, to an extent, the defence job is very figures based because you spend a huge amount of your time looking at all these multi-billion pound, multi-year projects and wondering where the hell the money has gone.

Because, you know, defence procurement projects very, very often overrun and spend a lot more than they said.

So that's quite good training.

I don't think he's brought him as a kind of hostage necessarily.

I think he's brought him in just to try and reassure the markets.

We always talk about the markets as if it's this kind of amorphous thing.

But there is a worry, certainly amongst team Burnham, that we have this history lesson of what happened under Liz Truss.

You know, if they get spooked, if the herd gets spooked, then they do.

And that can be incredibly difficult to get back.

Ed Miliband would probably have been Burnham's first choice.

It was almost certainly the first choice of lots of people around him.

But there was just this thing, it's this reflex problem that lots of people in Labour have, which is they worry about what the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail front pages are going to be.

And those in themselves are not necessarily influential, but they can influence other people.

I think it's something which obviously I think Miliband wanted Chancellor, but it's one of the other great offices of state.

And it's an interesting one.

You get to fly around the world.

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