Afternoon briefing Monday 16th February

0:00This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwCWC. Staying competitive means getting ahead, not just keeping up. So how do business leaders cut through the noise and focus on what really matters? PwC takes you further with tech, from optimising the systems that put your data to work, to scaling AI from proof of concept to competitive edge. PwC helps you meet tomorrow's tech demands so you can compete at a speed that rewrites the rules. Discover more at pwc.co.uk. This is the Times Radio Afternoon Briefing on Monday the 16th of February. The Prime Minister says he didn't know anything about a Labour think tank paying for a dossier which smeared journalists, including from the Sunday Times.

0:46Labour Together, which played a key role in helping Sakhir Starmer become Labour leader, paid APCO to look into the personal and religious backgrounds of journalists who were reporting on the think tank's funding. APCO's report included false claims that that journalism was based on a Russian hack. Sakhir Starmer has distanced himself from that. There will be a Cabinet Office investigation into the allegations, and quite right to, and so that is already in place. I didn't know anything about this investigation, and it absolutely needs to be looked into, so the Cabinet Office will be establishing the facts.

1:21Labour Together says APCO went beyond its brief. APCO hasn't commented. Ben Taylor is the Sunday Times editor. The real people who haven't spoken here are members of the Cabinet and Morgan McSweeney, who were fully aware of this and were quite happy to talk about it around Westminster and even tried to get the story going in another paper to suggest that the Sunday Times was being used by the Russian state. Now, they are the people that I would really like to hear from, but I'm not holding my breath. The Prime Minister is promising he'll act within months, not years, to protect children on social media.

1:56That means under-16s could be banned as soon as the end of this year. Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life after viewing content on social media, told Times Radio the government has not done enough. Since this government has taken power, there's been a period of relative inactivity and that is just not acceptable. Where we are now isn't acceptable. So what's really important is they back up this announcement with actions and do something about it. and they seem to have got the message that time is against us. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had dinner with a model during a taxpayer-funded trip to China when he was a trade envoy.

2:35Emails show the then-prince's aide sent Geoffrey Epstein updates and photos of Andrew's meetings with Mia Mookie. Andrew has always denied any wrongdoing. A survey of employers suggests more than a third are planning to cut back on hiring because of workers' rights reform. Businesses are warning in hals protections will be a handbrake on job creation. And Team GB are hoping to surpass their record medals tally at the Winter Olympics after their most successful day in the Games history. Previously, British athletes have never won more than one gold at a single Games. Yesterday, they won two in a day, in the mixed Team Snowball Cross and in the mixed Team Skeleton, taking the total for this year to three.

3:12Skeleton pilot Matt Weston's victory with Tabby Stoker gives him a second gold this Games and makes him Britain's most successful male Winter Olympian ever. He spoke to Talk Sport. We're kind of like going to go down in history as the first people to win this mixed team event, which is, yeah, amazing. And to do it with such an amazing teammate is always extra special as well. So it feels surreal, to be honest, to have two of these Olympic gold medals now, just from one Olympics. It's not something I really, it was obviously something I wanted, but not something I expected coming into this Games.

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