Hello, welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heel and I'm joined today by Isabel Harbman and Tim Shipman.

Now this afternoon, it's been promised questions. Tim, who came out on top this week?

Well, I mean, it's more a case of who came out on bottom, I think, which was Keir Starma, who had a pretty torrid time.

I think the most striking thing about this was just how absolutely unpleasant the whole thing was.

Starma is in a right old knack about being put on the spot about the departure of half of his staff,

and then Kemmy Badernaut kind of nailed him to the wall on the peerage for

Matthew Doyle, his former director of communications, who was campaigning for someone who was then

convicted of having child porn, essentially. And, you know, coming off the back of the Mandelson thing,

Kemi Bader Nock said, you know, this is what a former prosecutor might call a pattern of behaviour, which was sort of a decent line. And what the point she wanted to nail, and I think she did, it was a pretty, it was a decent performance, so it wasn't one of her absolute classics. And Starma just didn't answer anything. He was just throwing around. Your party's shrinking, you're terrible. You're all terrible. We're brilliant. But the key line, I think, and the argument she was trying to

prosecute, she basically said to Stama, he only cares about the victims when he's trying to save his

own skin. And she said that applied to the grooming gangs, where he tried to resist, holding an

inquiry until it became impossible not to. It was the same with Mandelson, where he tried to resist holding an inquiry until it became impossible

not to. It was the same with Mandelson, where, you know, he initially defended him before

firing him and then said, oh, we've all been lied to, it's all terrible, nothing to do with me, Gov.

And then now the Matthew Dawes situation, where the Sunday Times, and I'll, we should name

the journalist, Gabriel Pogran, a protégé of mine when I worked there, brilliant author of two books about the Labour Party.

One of the finest reporters in the land has been going on at this for months and months.

And Doyle's peerage was confirmed after Pogrand had written a front-page story in the Sunday Times,

basically saying, this is completely wrong and look what this guy was up to.

And Stama, you know, just sort of has ignored it.

For months and months, they claim there was an investigation.

They won't say who investigated it, what questions they asked and what it concluded,

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