Interview: Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen
Newscast
BBC
4.3 • 6.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today we speak to Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor for Tees Valley who was given a life peerage by Boris Johnson.
Adam speaks to Ben about his role as mayor, how he got into politics and how he managed to defeat national trends to hold his position in the 2024 local elections.
Ben explains why he thinks the party should have gone shorter with their leadership campaign and his relationship with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
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Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by Jack Maclaren with Gemma Roper and Sam McLaren. The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:04.7 | Hello, welcome to part two of newscasts weekend, Bender. |
| 0:10.3 | If you don't get the gag, let me explain. |
| 0:12.5 | Laura and Paddy are off this weekend, |
| 0:15.2 | so I'm filling in, and we've decided to experiment with a bit of a new format, |
| 0:19.6 | where each episode is me sitting down and having a fairly long chat with one other person |
| 0:26.1 | about an interesting aspect of their life. And by pure coincidence, both episodes feature a man called Ben, so he thought why not make the virtue of it and call it the |
| 0:36.1 | newscast weekend bender so here is part two of the bender today's Ben is Ben |
| 0:41.6 | Houchon Lord Houchin, who is the Conservative Mayor of Tees Valley in the |
| 0:47.2 | northeast of England. |
| 0:48.8 | He is 37 years old and he won his first election as Mayor of Tees Valley in 2017 and as such he became a |
| 0:57.6 | poster boy for a new kind of conservatism, one that was picked up and run with by Boris Johnson and one which some people |
| 1:04.3 | think maybe could get the Conservatives back into government sooner rather than |
| 1:08.4 | later so here is my conversation with Ben Houchon Mr Mayor. |
| 1:13.2 | Newscast. |
| 1:14.2 | Newscast from the BBC. |
| 1:17.0 | Hello Mr Mayor. |
| 1:22.0 | Hello, Mr Mayor. Hello, thanks for coming on. Well thanks for coming on or actually should I call you |
| 1:25.2 | Lord Howchen? How'd you feel about being a lord? Ben is just fine. You might as well use |
| 1:29.6 | my name, but it's not something to be honest I've spent much time on really giving the mayoral role but so yeah it still sounds a bit funny |
| 1:35.8 | now and all the mayoralties in the UK have sort of different combinations of powers what's kind of the simple way of explaining |
| 1:43.8 | just how much power you've got and what levers you can pull? |
... |
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