YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Fletcher

lines on the record: 62
first: 2025-10-24
most recent: 2025-10-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“At the heart of it all, I think it comes down to whether you believe in humans or not. And I think that we have these two Darwinian instincts. One is to compete for resource, and we're seeing that all around us. That's why we end up going to war. And the other one, and it's just as powerful, it's why societies emerge and politics matters, is to collaborate and work together for coexistence. Now, that takes as much courage as going to fight. My guys who walk towards the sound of gunfire in order to try to stop it are as brave as the people firing at us and killing us right now, and I basically do believe in that humans are good. And this job, and I see a load of your inhumanity. I see a hell of a lot of humanity as well, and I have to cling on to that to get me through the bad days.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to write, write novels and so on. I can't write anymore. I just don't have the capacity to do that. But I think fundamentally, and maybe this is a product of being a my generation and that 1989 moment, the end of history, the sense that the world is moving in one direction, that was our ideology. That was almost our religion. And I think that religion has been absolutely shattered in recent years as the world has moved back, pulled apart again.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to dig deep quite a lot. And I think that the last two weeks have taken more out of me emotionally and physically, this trip, you know. 12 countries and two, I don't know how many countries. I don't know what day it is. I barely know what country I'm in. I've just come from Dublin, an amazing day in Dublin, which kind of revived me a bit seeing the president and so on there. I think I go deeper into music. I find I'm not able to read for him.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me just say, no, my job, I have the job I was born to do and everything I've learned over so many years is equipping me to do this job to the best of my abilities, which will still be a failure because still hundreds of millions of people will die every year. And there'll be things I get wrong and am getting wrong every single day, but nothing I can do in my life apart from being a husband and a father will matter as much as what I'm trying to do right now.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To help you write a book So I was away from Charlie when I was in number 10 for long, long periods at a time. And so I started to get these different world leaders to write their advice that I would give him when he was fourteen, and I gave it to him four years ago. And we got everyone from the Dalai Lama, Obama, Bush, Clinton took it away and wrote it out in draft before copying it in. George Bush took it away for six weeks, a kind of fairly slow reader, or I don't know. And they would each write a page of advice, Mandela, Tutu, you know, Pelle, David Beckham, Chris Hoy. Amazing, amazing leaders around the world. And when I wrote my book about the future of education, I distilled all that advice down to what my great-grandfather wrote in that book, which is just be kind, be curious, be brave. And that's what I want for my boys, is that they're kind, curious, and brave. If they're that, then saving the world will come naturally.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get it from mine as well. And one thing Charlie has said to me is how frustrated they all get that in almost every lesson on the curriculum, it basically comes back to climate change and saving the world. And they're told we've screwed up the world. But luckily you guys, you're going to fix it for us, which is, of course, a great message in many ways for our generation to pass on to them. But they also want to be kids and have a life and do normal things and not go straight out and save the world from the mess that they've inherited to use a political phrase.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Geopolitical age. So we've got to find a new way of doing this. I don't believe that people are any less kind or generous than they were in the past. I look at my kids and their friends. They have much more of a sense of activism and agency than I did when I was their age. So I think the mission of saving lives in human solidarity is still there. I think we've got to get much better at communicating that and we've got to get the mechanism right because people have lost confidence in the mechanism that I represent.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first kind of moment of political consciousness really was 1984, Ethiopia famine, Michael Burke standing in the field, and then geldoff and Bono and that sense, you know, I've talked about Live Aid already, that sense of the public coming behind something that was bigger than all of us. So I think you had a phase of aid then. And clearly, we're not going to go back to that model. If you're a Brit, then you remember the sort of late 90s, 2000s, the Blair Brown model, the big set piece summit. We went to many of them together, a minute to midnight, moment of jeopardy. Will you get the deal? Can you persuade the French to do 0.7? Can you persuade the Canadians to match this? We'd create all that. We'd set up the drama of that and then try to make sure that the public then was putting pressure on their own states. Now, again, that model is no longer going to work in this more transactional way.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many of those are cutting, not for ideological reasons, but because they're worried about Ukraine. And so they're redeploying money in that direction. But look, we've got to win that argument again.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's certainly a more diplomatic and more political job than I'd imagined when I took it. But actually the thing that I found has most helped me with this job is that actually my time in education and I wrote this global curriculum and I worked out talking to all these different people, educators, teachers around the world that the most important thing we can teach is empathy and emotional intelligence and the ability to recognize is like taking off a filter. We all have an Instagram filter and if you can recognize that the person on the other side of the table has a different filter to yours and understand why they have that view of the world whether it's Hamas person or someone from the Israeli cabinet or whether it's someone from the White House if you can try to understand how they frame the world and why then that's a diplomatic superpower and a human superpower and by the way that's another thing that AI won't replace for a long time.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the vice president nodded. Now, two weeks ago, that wouldn't have happened. I'm not saying that's the measure of everything we need to do, that we need to just impress the White House. But given how much they matter to so many of the conflicts that we need to see ended, given that without them, for sure this situation in the Middle East will slip backwards very, very quickly, and they have That conversation, a dialogue underway, is one of the most important things I can do. And so I'm really leaning into that.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's a long road, and we are it's like any peace process, you've got to rebuild trust, you've got to have confidence building measures, you've got to demonstrate you can deliver, I've got to demonstrate the efficiency and the change in the sector that is being demanded. I've got to do that while retaining our humanitarian principles and our neutrality. I think there's a way to do that. But I think there is a way back to rebuild that trust. Look, there was a striking moment in a press conference a couple of days ago.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“UN Secretary General's launched a big UN 80 reform process to make us more effective and efficient. Big problem here, Security Council is polarized. That makes it much harder. We don't have big carrots and sticks. We have to work with consent. But look, have we failed? Ask the tens of millions of people whose lives we save last year. Ask the people who will die because of climate change unless we can get a UN deal that we're working on. We can be so much better and we will be so much better. We must be. But you've got so many courageous, talented skillful people there who are busting a gut to make the world better.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, the least imperfect way of dealing with problems at this global level. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. And I've been in there a year now. I've launched this massive reform process across the whole humanitarian sector. We've got the humanitarian reset to define much more clearly what we do, to deliver much more effectively, to take out loads and loads of the layers and the bureaucracy and the duplication.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stephen Gerald was surprised because they'd seen a photo of me just in a shirt walking through Gaza City. And they said, well, did you go in with Israeli security or what security did you go in? And I said, I don't go in wearing the protective outfits or with close protection because we have community consent because we're trusted by the population. I can walk through Gaza. And of course it's dangerous, very, very dangerous. But because we've been there so long and because of the way we deliver because people know that we're neutral, no one else can do that.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny you should say that. I mean, I went to State Department a few months ago, and that's what they asked me. They read out some historical tweets, and they said, has Donald Trump proved you wrong now? And I said, look, if Donald Trump makes peace in the Middle East, if he makes peace in Sudan, if he helps us save 100 million lives next year, he will have proved us completely wrong, and I will walk down the center of Washington, happily eating my words in front of everyone. But I do think, you know, Donald Trump brought the voltage that high-level week. I'm working with his envoy on Sudan. I'm working with his envoy in Syria. I'm working with Steve Witcoff and Jared Kuchner on the Middle East. You know, diplomacy is alive again right now. Let me just tell you the story you wanted me to come back to on Gaza.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The escalator has stopped because the heel of the White House videographer got stuck in the fine two-to-comb mechanism at the top of it. So we're working from a pretty low trust base. And yet I would not have got in, I have to be honest about this, I would not have got into Gaza last week without the White House making it happen. And I've been in... Twice daily contact, at least with Jari Kushner, and so on, about how we work through this process.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And Dawn was coming out with a time difference. And it was before I started the job formally, but I checked my phone, President Trump elected. And that realization that my term in office would pretty much coincide with him. Fast forward, the General Assembly week, high-level week in September, I spent a whole evening on the phone to the White House explaining that this particular escalator has an E thirteen fault when someone's heel gets stuck in the fine tooth comb mechanism at the top. I don't know if this is too much detail for you and your listeners, Nick, but I had to learn that in order to basically stop a hand grenade going off in our relationship when we'd worked so hard to get the relationship into a better place.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, let's take the journey back a little bit. You know, my first day when I went to New York to see the SG, and I opened the curtains of my window.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've not had that conversation with them, honestly. It's a question you'd have to put to them. All I can tell you is that Tony was there all the way through that Sharma Shape meeting, working in the room behind the scenes in quite a low-key way trying to get stuff done. I just came from Dublin and saw the president, the Taoiseach. There's so much there from that Northern Isle experience, which is relevant. Jonathan was key behind the scenes and I think will be key in the next phase. Jonathan is the guy who literally wrote the book talking to terrorists. If anyone can help advise on how to set a path for Hamas to move, and it will take years, and it's something I'm talking a lot to the White House about, but to move in the direction they need to move in to make this possible, Jonathan understands that.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of modesty to it as well. I know that might surprise people based on the public persona and the time in office, but I saw him in Sharmoshek. He was quite happy to sit. He didn't need to be up on the stage, and I think probably more than anyone, if you had him on and you should get him on to ask him this question, he'd be the first person to say it shouldn't be the Brits running the show or the Americans running the show or anyone else. It should be the Palestinians running the show. And the faster that we get moderate technocratic Palestinian leadership back in, the better. All of us, including me and the UN, And I said, I've failed if we're still delivering humanitarian assistance in 2030.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does. I really do think he does. And I think that you're right, Brits more than anyone had to be very, very cautious of the historical echoes here. But I think Tony brings a genuine knowledge of the region now. He's been doing this for years and years and years. He's stuck at it even through the hard times. He brings that experience from Northern Ireland. And he actually brings”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the theatre, I mean, you would have loved that. You and I have been around these conferences for a few years together now. That was like nothing else. And if anyone tells you diplomacy is boring or dead, they should have been there that day. President Trump very kindly gave us six hours of cooped up diplomacy by being six hours behind the starting time, which meant that, I mean, for me, I got to work with the president of France, with the Palestinian Authority, with the Emir of Qatar, with the Prime Minister of Canada, a whole bunch of world leaders on what we should be doing next and really get this support I needed for this 60-day humanitarian plan.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, my greatest critic and my best friend. We are in free fall at the moment across the sector. We're making these brutal life and death decisions. And now in the period ahead, you're conscious of the scale of what we've got to do to turn this round. So I've set out this 60-day plan, which involves trying to feed, you know, get a million meals out a day, get thousands of tents in every week, rebuild the health sector, clear the roads of the bodies and the rubble. It's enormous what we've got ahead of us, but we've found in the last two weeks, I think a way of turning this round. Sharmoshik was an incredible moment.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and in fact, I used that phrase the other day, and my son said, Dad, you're not building the plane while you fly, you're building the plane while you crash it. And across the aid sector.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think I had to run everything I do through that prism. And at that point when I made that speech to the Security Council, I knew we had the aid on the border to stop that starvation. My aid was all there. It had all been cleared by Israel. All I needed was permission to bring it in. And Have to really weigh carefully every intervention I make, whether I go hard or soft, you know, the calibration of that, thinking, is this actually going to help me save lives? And I hope, and I should be held to account for it in years to come, I will be able to demonstrate that over this time that has been the defining, defining driver for the choices we've made.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You take it personally? I think we went to this clinic in Alouda in Gaza, one of those that has been most smashed up. And one of the doctors who was then killed in an attack had written on the wall, tell them that we did what we could.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Campaign for better relationships, including her father-in-law, and she played me the sound of him playing the piano next to the burnt out piano and the room from which he'd been dragged when he was taken hostage. I mean, there'll be few things more moving than that in my life.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was trying to find a way to cut through. And at that stage, Over a thousand people had been killed on October 7th, but tens of thousands had been killed since then. And I've been now twice to Niroz kibbutz. I was there last week, which is the kibbutz that was hardest hit. One in four people killed or taken hostage. And so I've sat with the families there. I've carried around with me a token that they gave me and said I will come back when your loved ones are back with you. I was able to go back and sit with them. You know, I mention that bread that came out of those bread factories. When I passed through Nero's before, a grandmother there, Rita, gave me a small token to give to a Palestinian grandmother. She said just find a Palestinian grandmother and tell them this was from me. And I found someone who'd seen her son bleed out on the road in front of her because of sniper fire. I gave it to her. And we had this sort of quite moving moment. When I came out of Gaza this time, someone gave me one of these packs of bread and I said, I'm going to give this to Rita in Niroz. And I took it to her. She called me later in the day. It was still warm.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I did weigh those words very, very carefully and it was after several months of really worrying about what would happen because we couldn't get the aid in. And so it was a tough statement and the backlash was massive and I knew the backlash would be massive.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most robust and publicly defensible ways to show that when we're delivering food or medicine or tents it's getting to civilians and that we've built into that process the safeguards at every point to get it through to civilians without that interference the trucks you talked about those trucks at Rafah that I watched going in I then watch them arrive at our World Food Program bread factory we call it that I just opened that day”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's remember hundreds of my colleagues from UNRWA in the last two years have been killed. Last year was the deadliest year to be a humanitarian worker because of the numbers of my UN colleagues who've been killed in this crisis and in a way I owe it to them to defend the neutrality of what we do. I don't want and this is a principle everywhere we work. I don't want Israel interfering in our convoys. I don't want Hamas interfering in our convoys. I don't want Israel getting any benefit from the life-saving work we do and I don't want Hamas getting any benefit from the life-saving work we do. I think the lesson here is we must find this morning I've been writing a memo on this.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just words, but I've always said in my conversations with Mary Israeli colleagues, if you can give me hard evidence of people involved in terrorism on October 7th, I will lead the prosecution personally. It would be absolutely intolerable for us to have staff involved in terrorism. I mean, it seems extraordinary. I'm even having to articulate those words.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And it was a big mistake. And I did 14 interviews in a week after that, clarifying that. We put out statements and so on. But the damage was already done. We'd had a report saying 14,000 kids would die in the next six months. And I in my head knew that we were being closed down in two days. I've been told that our operation would stop in two days. So I conflated the two and was saying, I was thinking we've got two days to save all these kids. And those two things came together in that statement. And as a result, that was the wrong thing to say. And I mean, I deeply regret it.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to go too far into the conversation, but I don't think that that will be repeated. I think at a human level, I was able to get across how hurtful that is. We have to separate the idea. It is not anti Semitic to be critical of Israel. We have to be able to hold Israel to the same standards and the same rules as everyone else. Not to do that would actually be anti-Semitic.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very, very tough to hear. And I've been accusing the Security Council of anti-Semitism, which absolutely outraged me. And I think of all the times in the job, that was when I've been most angry. And I fired off a very undiplomatic letter. And I was in Tel Aviv last week and saw one of the most senior Israelis and basically said, this is absolutely intolerable. And if you come after me with that again, I'm going to fight, fight, fight”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think in Tony's case, I think it's that ability to bring the lessons from other crises. And I'm seeing him do it now, bringing everything he learned from Northern Ireland and Jonathan Powell learned from Northern Ireland. And of course this is different. But seeing where the historical echoes are in the Middle East now and what experience we can bring from that to try to bring peace to Israel-Palestine.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did and actually, I also went to all my predecessors to get advice as well, to try and work out the things that I must avoid and the things that I must do. I think Gordon has always been very clear with me that you need to have two or three big chorus lines here because there's just so much work. And of course, one day I'll be on talking to you about DRC, the next about Haiti, the next about Sudan, the next about Gaza. But what are the signature lines, the chorus lines running through all of that work? David gave me great advice on communication, you know, and he was the master of the walking and talking video as foreign secretary, and I've been trying to emulate that as well.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is Absolutely. And actually, the reality when I see people out in the field doing diplomacy, they are fixers, and they're this combination. They're doing bits of media, they're doing management, they're trying to, and it's a lot of it is about that last three feet with three feet apart now, that you can't replicate on a Zoom call. Someone said once, we'll replace the foreign office with the fax, and I think we saw off the facts. Palmerson said when he saw the telephone, my God, this is the end of diplomacy. But it's that huge human connection. And I think that's why diplomacy will be the last profession to be automated.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely. I mean, I think that image of canopies and cocktails, I wrote in the naked diplomat how fed up I was with that Ferrer Rochet advert because actually a whole generation of people think that's what we do, ambassador with these chopped people, you're not a naked.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that was early on, wasn't it? I mean, I think it says a lot for David Cameron that he didn't just clear out all of us who'd been knocking around there under the previous administrations. And he was very curious, as was George Oswald. I remember the chief of staff at the White House. I was begging him for the ride. And they went off and it was Rama Manuel at the White and he came back to me and think, I think I've just saved your job, Fletcher. And to see them, obviously, any Prime Minister would be delighted to get that invitation to be on that helicopter.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'd said to Gordon, you know, just go easy on him. It's the first meeting. And he went in and I set them up to have a one-to-one. Herman Van Rompuy came out of that room absolutely quivering. And Gordon came out and I said, Gordon, and he said, well, I went very easy. I was really, you know, don't worry, I did what you said, Tom. So he could beat people up to get stuff done.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so Gordon was completely transactional like that. And that story was about Herman van Rompuy, who you'll remember was the European president at the time.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I didn't say that. Oh, you did? I'm sure I didn't compare him to the mafia. Well, in this sense. And if Gordon's listening right now, I never said that, Gordon. Yes,”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, Gordon Brown, have you sat, as I often did on those flights home when we'd be kind of back and forth arguing, kind of, you know, going over stuff, you sit with Gordon on those flights and he'd be straight on to the next thing and he'd be saying, to get the trade deal in two years time, I need to call Lula. And I'd be saying, Gordon, could we just get the press release out or can we just tidy up this issue over here? And he'd always be on to that next thing. But he also had this just raw belligerence. And I think as time passes, since his time in office, you can really see where what we thought at the time was sometimes an unhelpful anger that came into it. It was that frustration and impatience to get stuff done. And he got stuff done.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is that sense that you just keep picking yourself up and you retain that optimism to go back into those meetings and think that something that everyone thinks is impossible is actually possible. I mean, you see Tony doing it again on the Middle East right now, and I was with him in Sharmosheikh just a few days ago. Someone told me once that you need to be a great leader, you need to be able to set the vision like John Kennedy, engage people like Bobby Kennedy, and then see through the day-to-day changes, practical work like Teddy Kennedy on the Congress floor or the Senate floor. And I think the three prime ministers I worked with each could do two of those things really well, and then found the third one their biggest frustration. And in the end, their undoing. I'll leave you to work out. Yeah, well, totally better, I think, probably could do that.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Following them around the world. Every time you do one of your shows, I always get rolled out to do anecdotes about Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and so on. To make your program a bit more interesting and spicy. A bit of color. Well, this is your moment.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need to stay home. So, one thing I'd often said in the past, and you know them much better than I do, I'd often said about politicians, that you can never believe a politician who says, my family comes first. Because you know what these jobs are like. And the reality is that time and time again, you're not putting your family first. You know, a call came through to me about an hour ago from the White House when I was sat there seeing my boy, having not had a cup of tea with him for three weeks, and of course I took the call from the White House. And you know, that's a sacrifice that I'm making, but it's a sacrifice they're making as well.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was amazed that they were offering it to me in the first place because I'm not, you know, I sort of died in the wool humanitarian. I haven't spent 40 years getting cholera and jumping out of helicopters and so on. I'm a diplomat and a British diplomat with all the baggage that that brings. I mean, when I heard that the job might be coming up, I was excited at the prospect because it is a big, big job and a big, big challenge and I fancied a big challenge. But I was living a very happy life running in Oxford College really enjoying that work, seeing loads of my kids, I was doing pretty well. And this is... A massive change to how I live.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She made pretty clear. I mean, as a professional, but also as a spouse, it's not my family's responsibility to have to help me to process these feelings and the stories. I have to be able to walk in the door and know that I can be a parent and a husband and not bring all that in with me.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source