00:00I have spent, I'm happy to say, relatively little time in a Cobra meeting, Helen.
00:05But perhaps you'd like to tell us one that you're allowed to talk about.
00:09Yeah, so you tend to be in them when there's an emergency.
00:12So that doesn't have to be a, you know, it doesn't have to be war or terrorism.
00:17It can be that there's, you know, some, we had Cobra meetings after the Grenfell Tower fire.
00:22We've had Cobra meetings when there's a really, you know, serious flooding situation.
00:27So anything that the prime minister kind of needs to manage in the moment, that's the place where all those
00:32meetings are had.
00:33And it's a quite, you know, it's a quite stressful and intimidating environment to be in.
00:38I remember the first Cobra meeting I went to was a very, very long time ago.
00:42So it was just after the 7-7 terrorist attacks.
00:46And at that time...
00:48And you worked at the Department of Culture then, didn't you?
00:50Yeah, so Tessa Jowell had personally looked after the victims of terrorism in the early 2000s.
00:58And so although she was Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport,
01:02but it was in a kind of personal role as a cabinet minister rather than the department.
01:07Unfortunately, so when I first went to that meeting, so you're sitting around the table and everybody has their...
01:11Because it's a security thing, people don't have their name cards like, you know, Helen McNamara.
01:15It would just say the department.
01:17So it would be like home office or MI5 or whatever.
01:19So just the kind of department.
01:21And I can remember sitting in this meeting and this guy from the intelligence agencies,
01:25like looking across the room at my little table room that said DCMS.
01:29A look on his face of total, total bewilderance.
01:33I bet she's got a lot to say.
01:35Have we called for the clowns?
01:37Is someone doing an interpretive dance of this already?
01:39It was a...
01:40But certainly in the one up to Olympic, the Olympics, you must have been talking about that a lot.
01:43Oh, yeah, of course.
01:44Yeah, of course.
01:45And that was, yeah, that was a bit more explainable, perhaps.
01:48But it's a different dynamic, that room.
01:51Not just kind of because of the matters that you're dealing with,
01:54the kind of action, the stay things most of the time, or planning for very serious things.
01:57But also because the cast list is different.
02:00The chairs are different.
02:01There's a lot of clocks.
02:02The lighting's different.
02:03Lighting's very different.
02:04It's like Dr Evil's lair in there.
02:05Yeah, and it used to be one of those times when you'd go down,
02:07and sometimes I'd be chairing official meetings down there sometimes,
02:10before a big ministerial meeting.
02:12And you'd walk into the room and you'd look up at the screen where all the kind of clocks were,
02:16and you'd think, crikey, I don't really want to know why that time zone has suddenly appeared on the Cobra
02:22display.
02:23That's not, you know, we'll pretend I never saw that.
02:26We'll just go back to, you know, the time zones that are in the UK.
02:29Okay, thank you.
Comments