Has the cabinet given up on Keir Starmer?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is Keir Starmer a passenger and not a driver in his own government? At the end of a week of crisis management - with a sacked official spilling the beans on the grubby business of the Mandelson appointment - the charge against the Prime Minister that's really stuck is that somehow he’s never in control of anything within his own government.
Can Starmer weather this out? Or are his cabinet colleagues just playing a waiting game until after the local elections two weeks today? We talk to Sam Coates from Sky News who’s had his ear to the ground.
Later - what did royal protection officers around Prince Andrew actually see? Is it possible they guarded Andrew whilst he was with Epstein without asking any questions? The Crime Agents' Andy Hughes has an exclusive interview.
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK Private Bank, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:11.2 | This is a global player original podcast. I think that there is an element of genuine fury about where |
| 0:18.5 | Kirstama is. You think Cabinet is done. There was a very real conversation |
| 0:23.0 | amongst Labour MPs about whether or not they'd be better off with some of us. A leadership |
| 0:27.0 | challenge. That would be a pretty weird thing to do because it would ruin the UK economy. |
| 0:32.1 | But you've cleverly shifted to another question, which is whether or not it would be wise to do. |
| 0:36.8 | And there's only one candidate out there that it would be wise to do. And there's only one |
| 0:37.9 | candidate out there that might even improve Labour's rating, and that's... I do not think that you |
| 0:44.6 | automatically have to have the succession plan in place for it all to fall apart. At any point in the |
| 0:50.3 | last seven days, have you considered your position and thought about resigning? |
| 0:56.5 | I think it's very important to see what's going on here. |
| 1:04.5 | Last week, my political opponents were saying that there's no way a civil servant wouldn't have told me about the outcome of developed vetting, the security exercise. |
| 1:09.8 | Turns out my political opponents were completely wrong |
| 1:12.2 | about that. Then they said that I was dishonest. It turns out they were completely wrong about that. |
| 1:18.6 | They are now putting any allegation that they can. And I'll tell you for why, they're opposed |
| 1:24.6 | politically to what this government is trying to achieve. |
| 1:33.2 | That is Kirstama this lunchtime, not quite answering the question about whether he thought about resigning, but it has been a horrid and torrid week. |
| 1:38.8 | We are a week on from that breaking news about the Mandelson vetting story. Has that changed everything or |
| 1:47.6 | nothing? Welcome to the news agents. The Newsagents. It's John. It's Maitless. And the latest part of the drama was a lull. |
| 2:04.3 | Because today we had the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, Cat Little, giving evidence to Emily Thornbury's committee. |
| 2:14.7 | And look, there were no bombshells. |
| 2:16.8 | There were interesting details that emerged that |
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