Strong Message Here
Armando Iannucci hosts the programme that gives you a cast-iron guarantee to be laser-focused on decoding the baffling world of political language.
Each week he’ll be joined by a guest to crack open the political phrasebook and attempt to demystify the doublespeak. Why does everything now have to be 'turbo-charged’? What’s the difference between a 'pledge’ and a 'mission’? Why has my local MP been 'weaponised’ and should I be worried?
You’ll be treated to a crash course in the dark arts of political language from people on the inside who are both baffled and beguiled by it. They’ll walk you through the various verbal fiascos of the modern political lexicon so that by the end you’ll be oven-ready for an appearance on Newsnight.
Armando’s erstwhile partner in de-baffling political lexicon, Helen Lewis, is away working in the United States in the autumn and so her seat will be kept warm by a rotating cast of co-hosts.
Listen to Strong Message Here on Thursdays on Radio 4 at 9.45am, and an extended version is available on BBC Sounds.
Produced by Gwyn Rhys Davies. A BBC Studios Production for BBC Radio 4.
© BBC 2025 · more info
Artwork and data is from the podcast’s open RSS feed; we link directly to audio · Read our DMCA procedureThis podcast may use tracking and attribution, dynamic content insertion and is insecure
Stats: Statistics are produced by BBC to help Strong Message Here to understand how many downloads it is getting, or how many people are listening. Your device’s IP address and user agent is used to help calculate this figure. Here is more detail about podcast statistics.
Tracking and attribution: BBC or its partners may connect the fact you listened to this podcast to an action elsewhere on the internet. For example - it may spot a device that downloaded an episode of Strong Message Here later visited the website of an advertiser; or it may track that a device that listened to Strong Message Here also listened to a different show. This form of attribution is used to measure advertising effectiveness.
Dynamic content insertion: BBC may use limited data that they know about you - the device you’re using, the approximate location you’re in, or other data that can be derived from this, like the current weather forecast for your area - to change parts of the audio. Strong Message Here may do this for advertising or for other forms of content, like news stories.
Strong Message Here is able to use the above tools since its podcast host or measurement company offers this service. It doesn’t mean that this individual podcast uses them, or has access to this functionality. We use open data.
This uses an insecure connection. This podcast uses an HTTP, not HTTPS, address for its audio files. These are not encrypted, and may allow people who can see your internet traffic - like your internet service provider, employer or even your government - to know that you listen to this podcast.
Here’s more about insecure links and unique domains.
Listen and follow
Information for podcasters
- Podcast GUID:
44597055-f211-5002-9f20-1a4bf6f72375 - This podcast doesn’t have a trailer. Apple Podcasts has a specific episode type for a trailer, which also gets used by many other podcast apps: but there isn’t one correctly marked in the RSS feed from BBC.
- This podcast appears to be missing from Luminary and iHeartRadio. We list all the podcast directories to be in.
- See this podcast’s listener numbers, contact details and more at Rephonic
- Validate this podcast’s RSS feed with Livewire, Truefans or CastFeedValidator

