Why does Keir Starmer keep promoting the friends of paedos?

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1:03This is a Global Player original podcast. How dare he criticise us? We weren't the ones stuffing government with hypocrites and paedophile apologists. He can't build a team, Mr Speaker. He has no plan. He can't even run his own office, let alone the country. He is now dealing with a new scandal of appointing someone who campaigned for a man convicted of having indecent pictures of girls as young as 10. Isn't the Prime Minister ashamed that that will be his legacy? That is the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, at Prime Minister's Questions. once again lacerating the Prime Minister for appointing someone who had made excuses for had continued a friendship with a paedophile.

1:51This is not Peter Mandelson, but instead the Prime Minister's former head of communications, who he put in the House of Lords, Matthew Doyle. So why is the number 10 vetting system backfiring so spectacularly? And why does the Prime Minister appear to keep making the same mistake? Welcome to the News Agency.

2:15the news agents it's lewis it's emily and a little bit later we're going to be hearing from the author of bonfire of the murdochs gabriel sherman he's just written a book which explodes the family dynamics at the heart of one of the world's most powerful empires meanwhile back to prime minister's questions the last prime minister's questions before the half term recess something that the government is absolutely desperate to get to and once again as we were saying Keir Starmer having a pretty torrid time in the Commons this time not having to defend Peter Manelson but instead his ennoblement of Matthew Doyle his former communications chief he was only appointed at the very tail end of last year and Doyle has been suspended from the Labour whip after it emerged following reporting from the Sunday Times that he had previously supported a councillor labour councillor later convicted of child sex offences.

3:10Doyle had publicly backed the Scottish labour politician Sean Morton in 2016-17 even campaigning for Morton after he had been charged with possessing indecent images of children. Morton was later convicted for those crimes. This issue has resurfaced after Keir Starmer gave Doyle a life peerage in the New Year's honours list. Number 10 is saying that he had not fully disclosed the extent of his support for Morton during the appointments process. Sound familiar? Prompting yet another political row and questions about vetting. Doyle, for his part, has apologised, saying he initially believed Morton's claims of innocence and cut ties after the conviction, although there is some dispute about that as well.

3:59And we find ourselves, therefore, and Labour Party finds itself, therefore, in another political row, a kind of mirror image of the Mandelson row, where Keir Starmer is having to get up in the House of Commons and say that I was misled about a political figure's extent of connections with a paedophile. When you hear the details like that, they are so lurid and so appalling that it seems like a very obvious sort of black and white case. But I guess I would just caution a little bit on us sort of tumbling into what feels like the momentum of moral panic. I mean, to take Matthew Doyle step by step at his words, he was campaigning for a man who he believed was innocent before he was convicted.

4:44Now, I totally get on the one hand, you can call it a failure of judgment. The man had been suspended by the Labour Party at the time and he had been charged by the police. But Doyle only remained supportive until the moment he changed his plea to guilty. And then he says he suddenly understood that the man was hadn't been wrongfully charged and all those pleas of innocence were absolutely ridiculous. And he realized the mistake he'd made. And I suppose all I'm doing is saying this was a case of mistaken loyalty, mistaken blindness, really. But you can also step back and say we still live in an era and a place of presumption of innocence in this country.

5:24We want to kind of maintain that respect for the role of the rule of law. Doyle says he made a mistake. And I think we have to be very careful once again with this sort of alighting of anyone who has ever come close to a paedophile with the horrors of paedophilia itself. I mean, the bigger question, I guess, or part of the question is, if Doyle recognises it was an error and if people kind of say, yeah, he was probably doing it out of loyalty, but that was silly, mistaken. The real question is why Starmer then still put him in the Lords? Because the Lords ends up at this point feeling like a consolation prize.

6:07It feels like a place that you sort of go once you've lost your job as being a comms director. Victor. It's a sort of, you know, it's somewhere that you can farm people out to after Downing Street. And I think that is a bigger question for somebody who says, look, I want to get rid of the Lords or I want to reform the Lords or I want constitutional change. I find the whole system inequable. Then to put people in the Lords seems to me totally the wrong response to all this. And I guess to the original question we asked, which is about vetting, what is it that Keir Starmer keeps doing, where he sort of defers always to others, or he chooses a place of not knowing rather than of knowing the full facts?

6:47Well, I think that question about vetting and about his place in the Lords is exactly the right one, Emily. I think, obviously, these questions are separate about Doyle's own actions, and I think there are questions that he has to answer for, but in a sense, they are less germane and less relevant than Starmer's own. And Gabriel Pogran from the Sunday Times, who's led reporting on this, has laid out the timeline, and I think it is worth rehearsing it because I do think it makes the questions for Starmer still more acute. So the timeline, Pogren says, as he understands it, 3rd of December, Pippa Crea from The Guardian reports that Doyle has been offered a peerage.

7:204th of December, Morgan McSweeney is warned about the Doyle-Morton Association at a Scottish Labour Gala. The PM's now new co-chief of staff, Jill Cuthbertson, is told at around the same time. After the 4th of December, at some point, November 10 launches an inquiry into Doyle and Morton's... Sorry, I'm just going to take a very quick swig. Are you having a Stella there? I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little known fact that Emily enjoys a Stella during about two o 'clock. At about quarter to two. Yeah, and you know what? Who can blame her? 10th of December 2025, Doyle appears on the political peerages list.

7:57So there was a moment and a time, a space of about a week, where Doyle could quietly have been taken off that list. Not least as well another space of time when action could have been taken. The 27th of December, the Sunday Times splashes the details of the relationship. Number 10 claims it thoroughly investigated the matter and is satisfied there were no issues. Downing Street says it will not say who conducted those interviews into Doyle or what they asked or discovered. 7th of January this year, nine MPs submit a motion expressing concerns about the peerage, something that didn't happen with the Mandelson issue.

8:35Not that we know of. Well, publicly, I mean. 8th of January, 2026, Doyle is confirmed. And 12th of January, Doyle is introduced to the chamber. So I think this is serious for number 10 for a few reasons. One is, is that as we see there, there was clearly political concern about this before the peerage was confirmed. Why didn't number 10 act upon it? And also, again, as a matter of political judgment here, we knew by the time we get to January this year, we'd had the Mandelson fiasco. We'd already had it. Number 10 had already paid a high price for what had happened as a result of Mandelson and Epstein.

9:12You might think, therefore, that if there was even the slightest hint that you could have a scandal, which was even a tenth of that, that you were appointing a guy to the Lords who had got these connections, that it might be worth putting a pause on things and investigating more comprehensively and thinking about that politics. The fact that they didn't do so, I think once again reaffirms that there is just a political problem at the heart of number 10. And that is something that we saw, it wasn't just Kemmy Badenock on the floor of the Commons today asking these questions. We saw Stephen Flynn and Ed Davey asking the same question.

9:47Stephen Flynn was one of those MPs who actually put a motion down in the Commons in early January, questioning whether Doyle should be sent to the Lords. This was his question, and I thought Starmer's pretty poor answer. Stephen Flynn. Mr Speaker, if I've just listened to the Prime Minister correctly, he's essentially rolled the same pitch in relation to Matthew Doyle as he did with Peter Mandelson, that they weren't clear with him. He appears to be the most gullible former director of public prosecutions in history. but he has a slight problem, Mr Speaker, because some of us do read the newspapers.

10:26Towards the end of last year, on 30th December, having written to the House of Lords Appointments Commission, I received a response from the Chair, who advised me that as part of their vetting, they provide confidential advice to the Prime Minister on the propriety of a potential nominee. We'll hear at least that advice. Mr Speaker, I have made my position for clear. He knows how the system works. He says he reads the newspapers. He will have read that in nine days their former party chief executive goes on trial for embezzling money. If he will have read that at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital we see one of the worst failures in Scottish public life—vulnerable children and adults put at risk, evidence of serious warnings to the SNP Government were ignored.

11:18He should have been looking at those, not looking at the newspapers. As I say, look, I think, again, if you're being charitable to the Prime Minister, as you say, Emily, look, they've looked into this and they were reasonably credulous and didn't want to have that panic, as you described, just because you have a connection to someone who has been a paedophile. Fair enough. OK, fine. But at this point, when he's then turning around the Prime Minister himself and saying, I was misled, it's the same sort of litany of excuses. Frankly, it just makes him start to look a bit of a fool. Starts to make the Prime Minister look like he is credulous when he ought to have a little bit more judgment.

11:51It again brings the judgment question central into our politics. Yeah, and I guess it's about curiosity as well, isn't it? It's about wanting to find things out versus wanting them to go away. And I have been told this in policy areas as well, actually, that people who thought that the Prime Minister would have views on an economic conundrum or something that the Chancellor was introducing or something to do with the way the numbers running up said he was incredibly hands-off. Now, quite often, I think delegation can be a sign of confidence. If you've got a crack team around you and you go, I don't need to know that because I know that's going to be sorted out, that's brilliant.

12:32You're the better leader for it. But actually, if the system is not in place and you are not curious, then you are going to end up with a repeating mistake being made, which is that you haven't done enough for the vetting. You haven't done enough to ask the questions. Even when questions are asked in a press conference by journalists who say, I've broken this story. What is your response to it? I think it's not enough then to say, well, I know as much as you do. Well, I know no more than you do, because if you're the prime minister, you kind of owe it to the public to know more than all of us about the thing that is on your plate in front of you.

13:08Indeed. And also the Prime Minister's responses in the Commons, I think, will have done very little to assuage Labour MP's concerns because he had very few answers to any of the questions and instead started kind of scrambling around, as we heard on the clip in response to Flynn there, sort of scrambling around on the floor, trying to find anything that might stick, you know, bringing up completely unrelated matters. And in another way that I think actually that this is kind of worse than the Mandelson thing, which is that, as we've discussed on this show, at least with the Mandelson question, you could kind of see what his objective was.

13:36And you could see that the objective, I mean, whether you agree with the moral compromise or not, and plenty of people wouldn't. It was basically about what he thought was in the national interest, right? He thought that Mandelson would be a uniquely well-qualified figure to be the ambassador in the court of Trump, because we've discussed he kind of matches the mores of the kind of court of Trump. with this. I mean, frankly, this is just a bum on a seat in the House of Lords. And no one thought that Matthew Doyle was especially well qualified to be in the House of Lords anyway. Yeah, he'd been the PM's comms director.

14:03A lot of people in the Labour Party didn't think he was a very effective comms director. But we're basically talking about, as you say, Emily, a consolation prize. And that therefore, because he looked losing his job and therefore to get into another political fiasco in this matter for such for such meagre reward seems again, I think, to suggest that the Prime Minister's judgment again is just wanting. I have to say, I reject that characterisation because I think the implication when you start looking at it like that is, well, Mandelson might have been dodgy, but he was worth it. And honestly, I want to get away from that.

14:39But we literally had that discussion the other day and you agreed. No, I didn't agree. I mean, I agree that Keir Starmer might have made the appointment because he thought that. But I don't agree with the premise that it is OK to appoint somebody who you know is fairly, frankly, incredibly dodgy because you still think they'll do a good job. No, I don't agree with that at all. And I think that is at the heart of everything that is frankly driving the women of the Labour Party and maybe of the country round the bend. I don't think you can speak on behalf of all women in that way. I think there are lots of women listening and I don't agree with what Starmer did either.

15:12But what I'm saying is that I think you can see what his calculation was. And at least you can say, like I say, I'm not saying that it is the right moral conundrum. We've got to get away from that calculation because so often we call these men like super smart or really, you know, very good, you know, manipulator or very good at their job or they've got a real way through. And I just think that's a sort of blindness to, I don't know, I feel like we hear it the whole time. We hear how like these men are super smart and they're really good at kind of getting around the edges. They're really good at sort of doing the thing that nobody else can do.

15:48And it's somehow related to the fact that, you know, like the whole idea of Madison, the dark arts. Well, you know, hasn't that been exposed? He didn't get a great trade deal. He didn't manage to do anything spectacular on the trade deal. No, I'm agreeing with you. I'm not saying that you do. I'm just saying that it's so often that we kind of, we imagine that somehow there is an exchange that is worth making for whatever the perceived crimes, and it very rarely is. Fair enough, I hear that. I suppose what I'm saying is that, look, whatever we agree or disagree about kind of what Starmer's endgame was there, I think everyone can agree that, like, it was not a matter of any kind of national importance that Matthew Dorell ended up in the House of Lords, you know what I mean?

16:27And so, look, we were talking about this before we came on air, weren't we? Like, there is an element with these stories where, in another moment when Mandelson hadn't happened, this story would have barely been... It wouldn't have even really been noticed. People might have thought, oh, that's not great. That seems to be a poor judgment on the prime minister's part, but it would be a page nine, page 10 story. But the fact is, is that because of the political context where we have had Mandelson and you have had a series of poor decisions and poor judgments about his relationship with a paedophile, By definition, whether things that would normally perhaps get less attention is any politician on the Labour benches right now who has had a connection with a paedophile.

17:07That is going to get more attention than it might have done on other moments. And to the earlier point as well, like this is our upper chamber. You know, this should be the place that is reserved for sort of, you know, intellectual Olympians. Right. It should be people who are bringing extraordinary stuff to public life, if you believe in the House of Lords at all. I mean, you know, we can have another debate about that. And ironically, I don't think Keir Starmer is one of those who does. Well, he used to want someone who abolishes. That's what I'm saying. But, you know, if you think of this as being the chamber where the best purist minds and communities and figures are going to be positioned, then let's just stop handing them out to everyone who's kind of tried and failed to work in his office.

17:53right that makes no sense to me at all and one other thing i'd say though i mean like look it goes back to our little our discussion there emily like i think it's absolutely right i mean we clearly should be moving away and hopefully one of the net consequences of this and it's a bit of a reset for the whole westminster culture and so on is that these questions around violence against women and girls that they do become perhaps more instantly disqualify right and i think that is a place that we should end up at but i would just say i mean you know hearing kemi badenock talk about about it it's not as if Keir Starmer and the Labour Party has a monopoly on those sordid little calculations just remind people for example long forgotten now but Theresa May in her government and the sort of dog days of her government when she was scrambling around for every vote to get her Brexit deal through Charlie Alfick her MP for Dover lost the Tory whip in 2017 after sexual assault allegations.

18:45The whip was restored in December 2018 on the day of the confidence vote in Theresa May's leadership. And that was a woman prime minister doing that, right? And it was done for totally pragmatic reasons because she had a knife edge vote and she decided to turn a blight eye to a sexual abuser. Absolutely horrific. And he later went to prison for his crimes, for rape. And this is part of, and has been for too long, part of the sort of rather shabby sordid calculations of politics. So I just don't think that we can pretend or it does very well to hear particular politicians claiming or pretending as if there is one party or indeed one prime minister or one politician who has a monopoly on this hypocrisy.

19:31I don't think you can just shout pedo the whole time. I mean, Kemi Badenock tried to do that today in the Commons and she laid the fact that Keir Starmer hadn't initially called for an inquiry into grooming. I mean, they had 14 years to do the same thing, right? Not her, but her party could have done that at any point in the last 14 years. So I think to sort of batter this back, you know, as if sexual abuse is just a ping pong game, is pretty grim. And again, at the time, the Alfik decision, it was, you know, it did get press attention and there were plenty of people calling it out, but not to the extent that it was perceived to be disqualifying for Theresa May to remain as prime minister, which is basically the, you know if Keir Starmer did that today or tried to do that today that's how it would feel so it's another good example of how the goalposts I think in a positive way are shifting rightly but they hit you in the face as they go but we should remember that they have shifted and remember people's prior attitudes to them before they did in a moment we'll be speaking about the Murdochs the empire the business but more importantly the destruction of a family

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21:48And your medication is delivered directly to your home in discreet packaging. So your experience stays private from start to finish. Do your research. Ask the right questions. Then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer. Again, that's orderlymeds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary. Not medical advice. Eligibility required. See site for details.

22:14The News Agents. Well, Gabriel Sherman is joining us now. He's just published The Bonfire of the Murdochs. And I have to say, Gabriel, when I started to read this, it becomes apparent that it is a book about a kind of tragic family more than anything else. It feels like, frankly, abusive parenting. Yes. Yeah, it's sad and true. You know, when I set out to write this book, I wanted it to be at its core a family saga. You know, it's not a business book. It's not a media book. It's a book about a dynastic family that happens to take place in the world of the media. But it really is, you know, about how these patterns repeat through the generations.

22:59And that's why the book begins looking at Rupert Murdoch's relationship with his own father, Sir Keith Murdoch, and how that sort of domineering abusiveness and emotional neglect kind of creates the pattern that then repeats. And you see it that all this money, all this power, and all of them seem deeply unhappy in their own way. And he has decided pretty early on who is going to take over. I mean, when you draw the characters for us, you know, obviously you've drawn the parallels with Succession. Yes. And I think a lot of our listeners and our viewers will come to this sort of through the Succession prison.

23:36Of course. Succession somehow isn't as bad as what you read in the book. Yeah, it's funny. One of the family members told me when I set out to start writing it, I asked them, what do you think of Succession? Do you guys watch it? They're like, you know, I've seen a few episodes, but the real story is much weirder. And I think that's one of the things I was struck by is, you know, I love Succession. I'm a fan of it. But this story is like the particular details are so sort of specific and sad, like during the height of the phone hacking crisis, which obviously was a massive story here in the UK, Liz Murdoch was frustrated that, you know, her brother James had mismanaged the fallout.

24:10And she said to Rupert, someone has to take the fall for this. Maybe James should take us, take a leave of absence. And Rupert said, that's a good idea. Why don't you go fight? Why don't you go tell him? Why don't you tell him to step down and to have a father to send a daughter to fire her brother is just so cruel rather than doing it yourself. That's an example of sort of the specificity of how Rupert, the abuse took place in this family. And you said that Liz Murdoch took years to recover from that. Yeah, you know, they didn't really reconcile fully until the, you know, the lawsuit that sort of frames the book brought them together when they were objecting to Rupert's decision to unilaterally hand the company to Lachlan.

24:47One thing I want to say is that you brought up, which is both true and also, again, another example of this pattern of abuse. You know, Rupert did decide very early on that Lachlan, his firstborn son, was the golden child, was the one to take over. And yet he never fully empowered Lachlan. He always kept the other kids sort of laying in wait, you know, wanting his approval, kind of holding out hope that maybe they're the ones. And it was this Darwinian struggle that pitted all the children against each other and um Rupert's second wife Anna the mother of the the adult children warned him he said you know this competition is going to destroy the family and he didn't listen and she was right I want to play in the moment from Succession where Logan Roy essentially decides that Kendall is going to be his fall guy yeah you did so well and now you're the face you're across the cleanup The optics make sense.

25:50And what's more, I trust you. I trust you in case it turns and gets nasty. Yeah, no, I get it.