Badenoch skewers Starmer over Mandelson’s Epstein link
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kemi Badenoch has just skewered Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions on the topic of Peter Mandelson’s association with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Badenoch learned from her mistakes last week and devoted all six of her questions to trying to get Mandelson fired as British Ambassador to Washington. She pointed out that the victims of Epstein had ‘called for Lord Mandelson to be sacked’, and then asked whether Starmer had been aware ‘of this intimate relationship when he appointed Lord Mandelson to be our ambassador in Washington’.
It was potentially her most convincing performance yet and she managed to pull together diffuse threads of world and domestic affairs into a focussed attack on the Prime Minister and his US ambassador’s credibility. Will Starmer be forced to act?
Oscar Edmondson speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
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Transcript
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| 0:45.7 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Oskirts-Gredminton and I'm joined today by Isabel Hardman and James Heel. Now, we've just had |
| 0:50.9 | Prime Minister's questions and Kemi Badernock has skewered Kierstama |
| 0:54.7 | on the topic of Peter Madelston's association with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. |
| 1:00.6 | Let's hear a clip now. |
| 1:01.9 | And I have confidence in the ambassador in the role that he is doing. |
| 1:05.4 | Kemi Baderle. |
| 1:06.6 | Mr. Speaker, I think it is embarrassing that the Prime Minister is still saying that he has confidence in a man who was brokering deals with convicted child sex offenders while sitting in government. |
| 1:18.0 | That is a disgrace. The Prime Minister cannot answer any questions. That is not the behaviour of someone who has full confidence. |
| 1:25.4 | The ambassador should be in the White House talking about how we respond to an incursion into NATO airspace. Instead, he is giving interviews about himself to the son. This is a man who already had to be removed from cabinet twice, and now we learned that he was brokering billion-pound deals with Jeffrey Epstein while business secretary. I didn't get a proper answer. He's talking |
| 1:44.9 | about process. This is not about process. This is about judgment. James, I know you spoke a little |
| 1:49.8 | bit about this with Patrick on yesterday's podcast, but could you just bring listeners up to speed |
| 1:53.7 | firstly with what Peter Manolston stands accused of any sort of developments we've had since yesterday? |
| 1:59.6 | Yep. So there have been two big developments, one of which is the release of a rather |
| 2:03.2 | embarrassing birthday card that was given to Jeffrey Epsi in 2003 in which there was a really |
| 2:08.9 | gushing and quite bizarre message attributed to Peter Mandelson. |
| 2:13.7 | And so now he's facing questions about some of the writing that was in that. |
| 2:17.1 | Then he's done an |
| 2:17.7 | interview with Harry Cole, briefly of this parish some 10, 12 years ago, and now in America, |
... |
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