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

“Yeah, I listen to a lot of music. The moments with the family are utterly indispensable, but I've also started therapy. I thought it was important that we signal to the sector where you've got a load of people. It's like the journalists or spies or military people. Everyone is burnt out. Everyone's charging around. And there's a sort of badge of honor like, you know, I hadn't slept for three days. And I thought it was important to send a message to the sector that I was going to look after my own mental health and I hope that they would too. And it's about having the toolkit for when I need it then.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they say, Will this project continue? And I know it probably won't. And I know that I might be sitting with people who, because of these cuts, will die.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. But to be honest, we're making those choices all the time. There are 307 million people in the world right now who need our help. We're already prioritizing 190 million. And because of the massive cuts that I faced this year, having to take a third out of the sector, now I've had to choose the one hundred fourteen million lives that we were prioritised to try and save next year. Because of the massive Yeah. So already we're making literally life and death choices. And I go to projects in Afghanistan and Haiti, for example, in the last few weeks, and in the DRC, and there's an expectation I arrive in my suit, on my jacket, my UN stuff, and people think that because this guy has come, we're going to be okay.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing it. So I didn't put the clip out of me punching the air because it was a very authentic reaction. I felt like we'd scored a goal, you know, at Wembley. This was in our world. I've been working for months to get those trucks moving and been told no, no, no, we've been allowed to let in a dribble of trucks, you know, nothing like enough. And then suddenly to see them moving through and read the logos and know that that's the food. Those are the tents. That's the medicine. Those are the million nappies when in that day. Sounds mundane, but imagine, you know, as a parent what that means to people. And so yeah, I felt incredibly inspired and encouraged by that moment seeing those trucks move.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World kind of comes together and recognizes that something must be done. The combination of those three things Always the way I process my grief and my despair as I come out of these crises, and I always weep. I sob for twenty, the last 20 minutes of that film.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just welled up. Absolutely. And there's a lovely moment actually where I can't finish my sentence, and the Palestinian chef that I'm with just says, you're welcome. It's okay. And I just kind of walk off and pretend to look at something like sort of Prince Philip looking at something in the corner, you know, to try and get through it. I always sob on the way out of these crises. I can normally hold it together. And I have this routine now. The reason Bohemian Rhapsody is still shown on every plane is because the algorithm recognizes that I always put it on. And you know, there's the last 20 minutes of that film. And I think it's because it brings together family. You've got Freddy with his family. Then you've got that sense of someone going out there against the odds as he is on stage. And then that moment when”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here, absolutely. On every trip, and you're conscious of the theatre of this, in my dream, I've got cameras on me the whole time and I'm walking through and I'm not wearing the close protection kit and so on. So there is a role you're playing. I think on this trip maybe two or three times I wasn't able to carry on Two of those were when I suddenly thought about something quite mundane at home. You know, I was doing a video on a big feeding site where we're now doing a million meals a day coming out of there. And I wanted to do a clip talking about my mum's work at a homeless centre in Folkestone, in Kent. And just making that connection to my other life, I couldn't finish that video and we didn't put that video out in that way because I couldn't get through it. Or maybe I'll get a text message.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was. I mean, at times you feel overwhelmed by the job ahead of you. You feel utterly inspired by the people you meet and their sense of dignity and agency and desire, the ability to carry on, just surviving day by day.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So full of anger that we hadn't stopped this and was just looking around thinking, you know, all the clich ⁇ s, these are such resilient people and they've been through challenges. But there is hope emerging from the rubble. I just couldn't bring myself to do that. I have to find the words and I'm conscious, you know, you guys literally can't get in to Gaza as the international media. I'm conscious that we must bear witness. We must testify to what we see because the international media is not there.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did, and I felt really angry actually at that point, and I think it's important to retain that sense of rage in this job. You can't become immune to what you're seeing around you. And I was about to do some media. And I was thinking the classic approach is you tell two or three stories. I've just done And you try to find a way to make those stories resonate with a mother or a father who might be listening in, to try to bring across the gravity of what you're experiencing. Or you do numbers. And these are big numbers, the numbers who have died, the numbers who are starving, the numbers we need to reach and so on. And I just felt, I just couldn't bring myself to do that again because I was.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, and there's no substitute for being there and feeling it, smelling it, death on this scale has a sound and a smell which is impossible to describe. You've been in these war zones, BBC correspondents know this well. But it's that sense of despair and hopelessness. You drive into girls I said after I'd been in there in the beginning of the year in January, February, that I asked why the dog's so fat? And someone said it's because they're eating the corpses. And I drove up the Saladin Road that the day before we'd cleared up to Gaza City that now our convoys are moving on and they cleared it of dead bodies. And just this sense that you're in the first car to drive along a road that the day before has been covered in corpses. Miles and miles have just twisted rubble and concrete.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you so much for having me on, Nick. But just to be clear, this isn't the toughest job in the world. The toughest job in the world is being a father in Gaza right now and trying to put food on the table or a mother I met in Kandoos a couple of months ago who lost her child because she'd had a cycle three hours to the nearest clinic. Or the women I met in Haiti last month. Victims of terrible gang, sexual violence who can't go back to their communities and are taking preemptively contraception in preparation for the next attack. Compared to that, my job's pretty easy.”
2025-10-24 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Gaza, Trump and me: UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source