Starmer rocked by Epstein fallout as Labour turns bleak (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast Studio and it's Chris in the Studio and it's Alex in the Studio and it's Daniela in the Studio and it's interesting having you two sat opposite me because Daniela I feel you've been covering the fallout from the Epstein files for well like a decade or more now almost and it's come and gone in politics but it's now really smashed into British politics. It's interesting to have the two of you here and and you as well.

[00:00:22] Speaker 2: Yeah I was just about to say Alex is really boring, he sat next to me.

[00:00:25] Speaker 1: No, it's because they're in my eyes. They're the visual representation of the two worlds. I believe you, honestly. Right. Anyway, Alex, give me a way of working out how much trouble Keir Starmer is in, but without sounding like somebody going on social media who's saying, oh, he's going to have to resign by tomorrow lunchtime. Like, what's a good way of working out where he is?

[00:00:52] Speaker 2: All right, so let me just tell you one thing that happened today, which I think was a sign of just how seriously Keir Starmer and his team are taking this moment. They were due to do a big speech talking about pride and unity in local communities. And what happened, he had to rip up the top of that speech and totally rewrite it to address head on the questions that are swirling about his judgment and leadership. And that to me is a clear sign that aside from the million and one different perspectives you'll get either on social media or even talking to Labour MPs that within the Number 10 operation themselves they recognise that this is a real moment of vulnerability and they had to do something about it.

[00:01:27] Speaker 1: And then Chris, two things because you were at that speech in Hastings. One, what was it like in the room when he did the apology? What was his demeanour like? And then what was it like when journalist after journalist after journalist was just really being quite forensic about what he knew when?

[00:01:41] Speaker 3: So the first thing was the room was full. The room was not really big enough for the number of journalists who were there because, you know, they hadn't anticipated it would be as newsworthy as it clearly was. I thought Keir Starmer was awkward today. I thought he was uncomfortable. And I don't say that as a criticism. As a human being, if you've decided as a result of a sequence of events that we can unpack the extent to which this is his fault or not, if you're standing there in front of the cameras, as Alex says, at the start of what is meant to be a speech about something else, and you're apologising to the victims of the most horrific abuse because you have concluded that your own actions and the actions of others have contributed to something that you feel you need to apologise for. That's quite a thing, isn't it? And in the space of 15 seconds, I think he said sorry three times. You think of the number of times that we have conversations on Newscast about politicians where there is a demand that they apologise for something and for whatever reason they're choosing not to. And there he was doing just that. Now, he was making an argument in that speech, in contrast as he sees it to Lord Mandelson, about how he and, he said, most politicians of every political outlook approach their job with integrity and do it as he would see it in the right way. And he saw today through that prism.

[00:03:08] Speaker 1: And then Chris, the questions from journalists like yourself was all about the timeline of who knew what, when, and what does that reveal about Keir Starmer's judgement?

[00:03:16] Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is where politics is a rough old game, because a lot of this we asked six or seven months ago, back in September, when Lord Mandelson was sacked as ambassador. The curiosity with this news story through the Westminster prism of the last few days is that there's been all of these revelations relating to Lord Mandelson that rightly are subject to a huge amount of scrutiny. But actually we've now got to the place politically where the question is about the Prime Minister's judgment and the Prime Minister's judgment at the time in hiring Lord Mandelson. In other words, what could he have reasonably found out that was in the public domain at the time? What reasonably via a vetting process that they're now pretty critical of both publicly and privately, could that have turned up? Would it realistically have got even close to the kind of information we've got now? And then they are obviously being incredibly blunt about what they accuse Lord Mandelson of as they describe it lies. And we should say that, you know, Lord Mandelson's had plenty of opportunity to comment publicly and has chosen not to, but we understand that he's of the view that he answered the questions in front of the vetting process accurately and that he'll cooperate with the police.

[00:04:29] Speaker 1: We'll come back to the political implications in a second, but Daniela, there's been more claims over the last couple of days in the royal space, and a big story that the BBC has been covering that we've not done so much on newscasts because we've been looking at the politics, but that infamous photo of then Prince Andrew and Virginia Giffray more than 20 years ago, a photo that he said might not even be real. The emails released from the Epstein releases suggest that it is real.

[00:04:59] Speaker 4: Yeah, that photo, I think everyone will remember. And in my mind, it really does symbolise the start of the real public downfall of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. It's that one of him standing with Virginia Dufresne, who, of course, accused him of sexual abuse. There's Ghislaine Maxwell in the background. He appears to have his arm round Virginia Dufresne's waist. Now, in the Newsnight interview, he said he had no recollection, of course, of meeting Virginia Dufresne, no recollection of that photo, and seemed in his answers to cast doubt on whether it was genuine, perhaps it had been doctored, was the phrase he used. But in the latest drop of Epstein files, there's an email in there from 2015, from Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein. And in it, she seems to suggest that that photo is true. It was 2001. It was her home in London. And that that photo was definitely true. It was real. It wasn't doctored. It did happen. She was there.

[00:05:48] Speaker 1: And it appears to be from her email address.

[00:05:51] Speaker 4: It appears to be, you know, I mean, the problem, as ever, with all of these files is totally verifying and checking that all the addresses and they are correct but it comes from a Ghislaine Maxwell to an Epstein in the names that are in the to and the received bit at the top of the email.

[00:06:06] Speaker 1: And then there's another area where our worlds have crossed over which is we're used to doing the doorstep which is like shouting the question at the politician who's under fire and they sometimes answer sometimes they don't and their demeanour can tell you the whole story. Royal reporters tend to have not have done that in the past, but now they are.

[00:06:23] Speaker 4: Can I slightly defend the royal reporter here? I think sometimes we get a bit of a...

[00:06:28] Speaker 1: Actually I'm now remembering you had people saying to Prince William is your family racist after the Meghan event.

[00:06:33] Speaker 4: I mean that wasn't actually a royal correspondent who asked him in that moment, but you know the idea that we, you know I am a member of the royal pool, so you know I travel with them a lot, go around with them a lot, the idea that we don't question and don't ask and don't try and get guidance and find the right people. I think we get a bit of a rough... That's not what I was suggesting. No, I'm not saying you were. But there is an implication, I think, that somehow we are all raging monarchists and we don't ask anybody anything if it's difficult. I mean, that isn't the case. I mean, you know, we have seen today the King out and about, which is, I think it's probably a bit like the royal equivalent of you seeing Keir Starmer today. You know, he is, it's the first time we've seen him this week properly out and about in, you know, in any kind of public space. And, you know, he was shouted at and asked some questions by journalists in the kind of old-fashioned doorstep way, you know, if you've got any message from the victims, what did you know, those kind of questions. And, you know, okay, it rarely happens, but it does happen sometimes. And this is clearly the moments where people are going to ask and people want to see if he's going to say something. He's never going to reply in that moment. He just isn't. But I think it's important to ask. There were a few hecklers around as well, nothing particularly significant, actually. I think the police perhaps thinking that today in Essex on this engagement the King was on there might be a few more hecklers out there. There weren't. I think the thing to remember with it, talking to a few people today about it, is that the King is well aware of what is going on here. The idea just because they're not saying anything publicly, they're not across the kind of pain and the anguish and the difficulty that this is causing. He's not going to answer anything when he's being shouted at, but I think they don't also perhaps want to feel like they're hiding away either. they want to be out there and if that means exposing them to being shouted at, that's what happens. And the other thing just to remember briefly is he is used to being shouted at and perhaps people protesting. I stood a couple of years ago, I was standing next to him and someone threw an egg at him in York and landed literally off. He understands that's part of his sort of being out there in the public, it's important for him to be out there and be seen and he understands that.

[00:08:36] Speaker 1: And you gave me another amazing insight into how the royals or former Royals in particular communicate when we did Newscast on Monday and you were pointing out those pictures of Andrew, the paparazzi pictures of him out riding his horse and you were saying that's effectively him making a statement without saying anything.

[00:08:53] Speaker 4: Yeah, when I was speaking to you on Monday, I mean I didn't quite realise at that point how significant those photos were going to be. We had two photos basically on Monday which was him on horseback riding through Windsor Great Park and then that drive down the long walk in Windsor where he was sort of smiling and you know waving at people. I think those were the two photos that did it for him really in terms of Royal Lodge and I just don't think there was anybody in the royal household that could stomach it for a moment longer and that night he was moved up to Norfolk or was told he had to go. You know talking to a few people today about it they say that they can't, somebody said to me they couldn't quite understand whether that That was arrogance on his part, or whether he lives in such a bubble, he didn't actually really understand the gravity of what was happening on Monday. They couldn't give me an answer one way or the other, but it shows you how difficult the situation is to manage.

[00:09:45] Speaker 1: And then if we go back to the politics and we talk about today's episode of Newscast that is available now on BBC Sounds, I had a chat with Luke Sullivan, who used to be an advisor to Keir Starmer, also used to work in the Labour Whip's office, so knows all about how to supposedly get your MPs to do what you want them to do, which didn't quite work out this week with the current whips. And he was quite candid about the situation that Keir Starmer finds himself in and the pressures coming from the Labour backbenches. So have a listen to this.

[00:10:11] Speaker 5: I don't think you can understate how serious the situation and the peril is that the Prime Minister finds himself in. And I think, I think through the Q&A, although he didn't explicitly say it, I think you can get that sense from talking to people in number 10 ministers they get the stakes incredibly incredibly high and that's why you saw him you know fighting for his political premiership.

[00:10:40] Speaker 1: So quite dramatic description from Luke Sullivan there and you can hear the rest of what he was saying if you scan the QR code which is on your screen right now. Alex what is the mood like amongst Labour MPs?

[00:10:50] Speaker 2: Grim, pretty bleak, that's absolutely fair to say there's an awful lot of anger and I think that there is sometimes there can be a tendency in some quarters of the media, including ourselves, to get a bit sort of hyperbolic when you have Prime Ministers or people in power in a bad situation. I genuinely don't think that the reporting of this has been overstated. There is a really grim mood. It has, I think, more than I realised, kind of consolidated in the last 24 hours or so after the moment of Prime Minister's questions, and then all everything that followed with this whole wrangle in Parliament over how they were going to release the information surrounding the Mandelson appointment etc etc and then even through today with the Prime Minister saying what he did some people saying right thing to do to apologise to the victims but there are still lots and lots of questions here and here's the thing there is something really strange about politics and momentum can be the magic thing or it can be the absolute killer and I think what's happening here with Keir Starmer is that over a period of time, there have been a series of things which in and of themselves, MPs might have kind of shrugged off, got over, the government could have picked up and moved on from. But I think there's sort of been now a series of these things, which have left MPs with quite low resilience when they feel like something is going wrong from the centre. And this has been one of those things, along with all of the obvious questions about the people at the heart of this, the victims, and why that makes this such a salient, important issue. but it's sort of another thing that has just really made people feel bleak. Having said all of that, I am not suggesting that that means the Prime Minister is going to imminently be ousted, because there's a range of views in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Some are absolutely saying don't even think about that right now, as much as others are saying the time has come. And more importantly, there's no real plan, there's no real successor, and Keir Starmer right now is saying he's not going anywhere. So the next few weeks and months, I've got no idea, but in terms of just mood, I'd say it's pretty dismal.

[00:12:51] Speaker 3: And just to go from the macro, if you like, to the micro around the last couple of days at Westminster. So two things. One, a fair element of what the Prime Minister had to do today in the news conference in Hastings, over and above the profound nature of that apology, was effectively tacitly acknowledged. He made a bit of a mess of things yesterday at Prime Minister's questions. Now he wasn't helped by the fact that he was told very late by the police, please be careful about what you say because we don't want to jeopardise any potential future legal proceedings involving Lord Mandelson, so the script was rewritten very late, but he did tie himself in a bit of a knot around the whole question of what he knew and when, which I think heightened at least in the first instance that anxiety that was already pretty high amongst Labour MPs because of so many other things that have happened over the last couple of months. In addition to that, the lack of discipline that there currently is and the lack of grip that the centre have on this gargantuan parliamentary Labour Party of 400 plus MPs means that they were staring at a defeat in the face in the Commons yesterday, that this whole business of them having to effectively move on the whole mechanism around who's scrutinising which documents get published around the appointment of Lord Mandelson, etc, etc. the net consequence of which they are staring at a huge amount of information, some of which might be useful to their argument about Lord Mandelson, quite a lot of it might not be remotely helpful to them, or indeed to the UK's relationship with America, faces the prospect of being published. And speaking to people at the upper echelons of government, they have just got their head in their hands about that, that the consequence of what happened in the Commons over and above this is separate from the whole question of the Prime Minister's future, although the two could clearly overlap, is also really quite something.

[00:14:42] Speaker 1: And is that because the Conservative motion, which MPs were voting on on Wednesday, was written so widely, to not just be like official emails or the facts from Washington, it was actually the WhatsApps that people were sending around the conversations about this, they could be very revealing. And also the fact it's now in the hands of a parliamentary committee to decide what goes out there. To some degree.

[00:15:05] Speaker 3: to some degree. But yes, it is in answer to all of that. And obviously, there is a difference between what might be legitimately something that would be a national security concern to publish, or even where a collection of cross-party MPs who, yes, have their own partisan interests, but regularly look at what it is legitimate to be released with a serious head on and with the right kind of security clearance. There's clearly a big difference between stuff that is, as I say, a national security concern, and stuff that's just politically really, really damaging or embarrassing, or jeopardises the relationship between the US and the UK. And maybe the committee would have some, as the government might see it, have some savvy around that, around a national interest question, as well as a political interest for a current government question.

[00:15:55] Speaker 2: And they've already said the chair of the committee has made clear that he's not going to hold stuff back just because it might be embarrassing. You know, it's going to have to be quite a clear line about whether or not this might damage international relations or national security. But it's interesting, I was talking to somebody who is quite au fait with how these things work. And while the Conservative Party is, you know, Kemi Badenoch, they're clearly quite pleased with what they've achieved yesterday in the Commons. There are those who think that maybe if they'd done a sort of slightly more narrow approach, then And it also might have just sort of sped up the process of getting out, because the other question is how long will this now take? But there was an interesting note from the ISC, the Intelligence and Security Committee that came out on Thursday evening, that was basically saying, my reading of it was, look, we only are going to make a judgment on the material that might be deemed to be prejudicial to the national interest or to national security or diplomatic relations. We have an expectation the other stuff will be put out. just that kind of narrower field that we're going to make a judgment on but we don't know how the mechanism of that we know Downing Street are talking to the ISC, this committee, to try and work it all out and we're told they're going to come to the Commons and update us all about it before it happens but you know there's this sort of and what is interesting as well is as much as there is this potential jeopardy around the release of some of this material I thought it's so interesting that Keir Starmer both yesterday and today was making the argument that he wanted this material out there you know he was sort have even said, I share this frustration that we can't publish because the police have got in touch and said be careful with what you put out because we don't want it to interfere with our investigation. But they want it out there.

[00:17:30] Speaker 3: Some of it will prove the claim that they're currently making that Lord Mandelson, as they say, lied, lied and lied again.

[00:17:39] Speaker 1: But there's two different streams here though. There's the Downing Street stream which is Lord Mandelson told us lots of lies so this was never gonna come out no matter how hard we asked the question and then there's the other stream which you hear from lots of Labour backbenchers going yeah but hang on you were prepared to appoint him even when you knew a little bit of this and to them that's the problem and the two streams actually don't join up. One doesn't cancel out the other.

[00:18:02] Speaker 4: That's right, it's me just listening to you both as well that we're effectively at the heart of this we're dealing with the same story which is the Epstein fallout. I am dealing with a silence actually officially around this largely. You two are dealing with so much noise from all sorts of angles and all sorts of strands and it does make me wonder whether the silence from Buckingham Palace can hold and as you say how contrite and sorry Keir Starmer was today, do we need to hear that from the King maybe? I just wonder, we had those statements back in October, but I wonder whether in this moment as more stuff drops, as we see more, does there need to be some kind of other victim-centred, a sorry from the King? I just wonder whether just saying nothing and not stepping into the conversation at this point for the Royal Family beyond, I mean we had Prince Edward I know earlier in the week.

[00:18:52] Speaker 1: I was intrigued by the Prince Edward thing, and people have got very differing interpretations of what he said.

[00:18:56] Speaker 4: I've had loads of arguments in the newsroom about how that was pitched. And how would that have come about? Well he was planning to go to that government summit as it was called in Dubai and he was talking about education, you know, his Duke of Edinburgh award, all sorts of bits and pieces around that. I mean, my sense is he knew there was potential for a question to be asked, and he would have wanted his answer to be about victims. He is not a sort of savvy media performer, Prince Edward, so it's not a comfortable space for him. And I think that really showed at first when he answered the question and sort of initially said, I don't know anyone who's going to be interested in this. And you're thinking, I think they will be actually, whoever they are. And then he just switched into, you know, there are a lot of victims here. We need to think about them. It's really difficult. So, I mean, I think he perhaps knew it was coming but hadn't quite thought through exactly what he was going to say.

[00:19:46] Speaker 1: It felt like he'd kind of mucked up the soundbite because he was left with questions about who he was, was he actually feeling sorry for the royal family rather than the victims?

[00:19:52] Speaker 4: Exactly, was he talking about himself and the wider family or was it just the victims?

[00:19:56] Speaker 3: That's interesting, so it sounds like it was a bit more makeshift than I might have assumed.

[00:20:02] Speaker 4: Or he'd thought about the fact he might be asked something and knew he was going to have to say something but he didn't kind of come out right because he's not perhaps as accustomed in those spaces and under that pressure to say something. But I think generally people like to hear something from a member of the royal family and just hearing, you know, everything swirling in the politics, do we need to hear something from the royals?

[00:20:24] Speaker 3: It's so interesting if there's a dynamic there, because the last couple of days, in a way that I've not seen for ages, because Downing Street feel, I mean, aggrieved is an understatement, boiling with anger, they have been leaping on every possible moment to interject themselves into this in a way that sometimes you're trying to squeeze things out of whatever government department it might be or whatever. They've been desperate to get out there and make that case because they feel so angry about it. But that dynamic and how that might be then interpreted in the palace or whatever is fascinating.

[00:20:55] Speaker 4: And also the anger is there in the royal family, but their choice is silent.

[00:20:58] Speaker 1: And also there's another juxtaposition here, to use a very pretentious word, in that what did the King do a few days ago? He had a premiere for his documentary, which is on Amazon prime. So he's happy to go out and like sell that. But then that makes the silence on Epstein seem even more deafening.

[00:21:15] Speaker 4: Yeah.

[00:21:15] Speaker 1: Chris, can I put two names to you and then you can say whatever you want to say about them. Number one, it's like a party game. Like a New Year's party game, which when I played it everyone put Laura Koonsberg in for me for some reason. First name, Angela Rayner. And the reason I bring up her name is she was very high profile leading the charge from the Labour backbenches in that debate on Wednesday about releasing the vetting files to say actually the way the government wanted to do it was wrong, hinting that it was a bit of a cover up. Is that, how do we interpret that? Is that her back?

[00:21:53] Speaker 3: Yes, is the short answer to your question, with a caveat. It was politically significant, of course it is, when a recently departed Deputy Prime Minister with their own power base within the Labour movement, very, very well liked by lots of people within the Labour Party, courted by some of those who have ambitions to be Prime Minister, and then others will say, and she has them herself, and then others say, well, maybe she doesn't. You know, yesterday, that moment after Prime Minister's Questions, which was best personified, I think, with Angela Rayner's intervention, just felt like one of those moments where you can feel, it's not even dripping, you can feel, and it can be temporary, but a flooding away of power from the centre, because they had gone in Downing Street with a proposition, which is that these files would be examined by the Cabinet Secretary, the most senior civil servant and other kind of legal figures within the balance of government. And you had Angela Rayner and plenty of others basically saying, it doesn't wash, we're not willing to back it. And then, so that mattered and matters. The twist is Angela Rayner is still, she's still got to sort out various things with the tax authorities around the whole business that cost her a job in the first place. And that is a twist, were there to be a vacancy any time soon, unless we were to suddenly hear out of, you know, out of the blue, because that's how these things happen with the tax authorities, that, you know, there's a resolution or, or, or whatever. But yeah, that was a, that was a politically significant moment.

[00:23:31] Speaker 1: And Alex, you can do the second name, although this one's slightly harder, because it's not quite so public. Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff.

[00:23:39] Speaker 2: So Morgan McSweeney is the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff and right now he has become a bit of a lightning rod for a lot of the ire and anger within the Parliamentary Labour Party because it is sort of broadly accepted and Number 10 haven't challenged this notion that he was quite instrumental in the appointment of Peter Manderson as the US Ambassador because the two have a bit of a history and through the prism of the Labour Party have known each other for some time and worked together fairly closely in one capacity or another. So there is that he has become for some a bit of a symbol of what some but not all in the Labour Party would see some of the problems in Downing Street because he is a very instrumental figure. He's very close to Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer, I think even yesterday, said he sort of credits Morgan McSweeney with winning the election or helping him win the election. He's been around for a long time and Keir Starmer would be loath to depart from that and said yesterday he's got his full confidence. Downing Street reiterated that position today. But you have got some MPs publicly calling for Morgan McSweeney to go. You do get a bit of that in any of these situations. And there's no sign from Downing Street that that's going to be a move yet. But it's clearly one to watch. And I would also say, you know, things can change and I don't want to fall into the trap of sort of, you know, overstating where things are, because it is unpredictable in the way that we've said, because there's quite a lot we don't know about how things might play out. And people have been known to pull things back from difficult or perilous positions before, because that is always the nature of power and how quickly dynamics can shift. Entirely possible all of that can happen. But I think coming back to my first point, the problem for Morgan McSweeney and Keir Starmer is this isn't the first time that those two people and their judgment in any various situation has been openly and actively questioned within the Parliamentary Labour Party, which is why those two figures, obviously Keir Starmer, but also Morgan McSweeney, have become quite key.

[00:25:29] Speaker 3: And the human undercurrent under all of this, if you're a Labour MP, for lots of Labour MPs, irrespective of their pre-existing views about Keir Starmer or Morgan McSweeney or anyone else in the heart of government, is they're just really disappointed. They just can't quite believe that this fairly rare, if you look at the history books, moment where Labour actually win a general election and they've got a really, really solid majority, albeit on a small share of the vote for a winning party, There's just that deep sense of despondency from their perspective that this government of theirs, whether they're actually a member of the government or not, has in their view wildly underperformed. And they're desperate to see it succeed.

[00:26:11] Speaker 2: Even the ones that wish Keir Starmer well share that disappointment because they want it to be better.

[00:26:15] Speaker 3: All of them would love to see him be successful, would love to see Labour in a better position in the opinion polls. And a lot of this is an articulation of that frustration. As Alex was saying earlier, this is then the latest case study, on top of all the things we've talked about on Newscast for the last 18 months, that makes them think, oh, just maybe, you know, even though I've had Labour MPs who say to me, they don't bear him any ill will, the Prime Minister, they'd love to see him succeed. They recognise that he was central to them winning their seat. They will be the first to say that Morgan McSweeney, in the eyes of many, was the genius who turned the Labour Party around from a crushing defeat, the biggest since 1935, to winning a big majority. And yet, and yet, and yet.

[00:26:59] Speaker 1: And no one, no matter how great they are at politics, can go back in time and unhire Peter Mandelson from being the ambassador.

[00:27:06] Speaker 2: No, but you get the sense from Keir Starmer that he genuinely wishes that he could.

[00:27:09] Speaker 1: And that is all for this episode of Newscast. Thank you very much for watching. If you'd like to listen to our daily episodes, they're available, yes, every day on BBC Sounds. And if you scan the QR code on the screen right now. Where is it? It's around here somewhere. It will take you directly to us so you can listen to us whenever you want. Daniela, thank you. Thanks, Adam. Alex, thanks to you too. Pleasure as ever. And Chris, lovely to see you as well. Ta-ra.