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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Noah Hoffman, the Spectator's new political correspondent, and I'm delighted to be joined today by our political editor, Tim Shipman. Well, the delight is mine. Welcome, Noah. Welcome to The Spectator. And everybody out there is going to get to know you very well. We're delighted to have you. And yeah, what time to join. What's a time to join?

So we've just been watching Morgan McSweeney at the Furnofer one of the first select committee.

What did you think? So look, I think he came across very poised in commands of the points that he

wanted to put across to the public, which was effectively, look, I made a mistake, I stuffed this up, but I was

well-meaning. And in the moment, I thought I was doing the right thing. He made the point that

Peter Mandelson was the right person for the job in the era of Donald Trump. He said,

if Carmelah Harris had won the election, there's no way they would have considered

Mandelson.

This was about doing, in his words, what was best for Britain under very tough circumstances

and economic uncertainty as well.

And I think that he came across genuine when he made that point.

But that obviously doesn't detract from the fact that he made this colossal

mistake that has set off such serious repercussions for the Prime Minister and for the country

in terms of how embarrassing it is on the international stage. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean,

I think the interesting thing to me about the explanation about the appointment, which I've heard a lot

of explanations and the cynical one is, well, he wasn't going to get any trouble with Jeffrey Epstein from Donald Trump, because Trump had been up to his neck with Epstein as well. The point that McSweeney made, I thought it was interesting, was we were really after a trade deal with the state. So it wasn't just about cozing up to Trump. It was about having someone who knew about trade deals. And of course, Mandelson had not only been trade secretary in the previous Labour government. He'd also

been the commissioner for trade when he was working in Brussels as a commissioner. So that was

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