The increasingly complex calculus in being the British Prime Minister
The Two Matts
The New World
4.2 • 577 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Matts tackle a number of intersecting topics: can the Peter Mandelson affair damage Keir Starmer more than it already has? What did his stance on Iran do for Labour in the polls? How is Westminster geared for an election where four - maybe five - parties are nip and tuck? And does Shabana Mahmood’s banning of a pro-Palestine march signal a split at the top of government? Enjoy!
Produced by Matt Withers
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I never liked this idea that it was just the advisors, it was Morgan McSweeney, you know, |
| 0:07.0 | no, ministers decide, advisors, advise. That's a really good rule of thumb. |
| 0:11.0 | If you're the prime minister and there's an issue at the heart of government |
| 0:17.0 | where you can't get the women in your cabinet to go out and back for you. |
| 0:22.9 | That's a big problem. |
| 0:26.6 | An underreported subject, I think, but one that I'm sure we'll be coming back to a lot, |
| 0:31.3 | is that there are 700,000 refugees and counting from this conflict. |
| 0:36.9 | And this is early days. |
| 0:40.4 | Hello and happy Thursday. |
| 0:42.3 | Happy Thursday, one and all. |
| 0:43.6 | Hope you're all having a great week so far. |
| 0:45.6 | Obviously, it's been the busyness continues. |
| 0:49.1 | We've got a couple of topics to talk about, haven't we, Matt? |
| 0:51.3 | We do. |
| 0:51.7 | We've got quite a big dance card today. |
| 0:54.2 | So we'll see what we get through. |
| 0:55.9 | I guess we should kick off with Peter Mandelson, chapter 654. |
| 1:02.4 | Yes. So the report came out yesterday, didn't it? |
| 1:05.5 | Well, the first 147-page tranche, and there was plenty in there. I mean, there's a lot more to come and I suppose it's being held back in order to allow the police to continue their investigation into what happened with him, Epstein and so on. But there's enough in that initial tranche. And incidentallyally before we sort of start to talk about it |
| 1:28.6 | an excellent piece by our political editor James Ball on the new world site for people to go and |
| 1:34.2 | look at about that. I was going to quote from that in a minute actually. Excellent, excellent. There's a |
| 1:38.1 | couple of good points in that I think. No, James is really, really, really good piece. So, I mean, |
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