Afternoon briefing Thursday 12th 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 your Times Radio news briefing for the afternoon of Thursday 12th February. Kemi Badanok has written to the civil service watchdog raising concerns about the expected imminent dismissal of the cabinet secretary, Sir Chris Wormald.

0:49She says it seems he is simply the latest person to be thrown under a bus by the prime minister. Antonio Romeo was seen as a contender, but her old boss, Simon MacDonald, has called on the government to rethink. Political editor of the Times, Stephen Swinford, explains. You now have a situation where you have got essentially Mandarin on Mandarin. You have got the guy that was in charge of the Foreign Office when she worked there saying she shouldn't be the Cabinet Secretary. And you've got allies of her and people in government saying this is absolutely outrageous, he's a has-been, it's another man going for a woman, how dare he?

1:22So it's a proper row this morning. Dame Antonia was reportedly investigated when she was Britain's Consul General in New York in 2017 over her expenses and claims of bullying, but was later cleared by the Cabinet Office. Sir Keir Starmer is also looking for a Chief of Staff and a Director of Communications. The government's been asked an urgent question about the vetting processes and hiring of Peter Mandelson. Alex Burghardt asked the government for guarantees about what it will reveal from its investigations. Labour's Chris Ward responded. The government will comply fully and publish documents as soon as possible.

1:57As I said in this House last week, we welcome both the principle and content of that motion and we will deliver on it as soon as we can. As such, government departments have been instructed to retain any material which may be relevant and work is underway to identify documents which fall within scope of the motion. We will do so as soon as possible when the House returns from recess. Reform's Robert Jenrick has said Sir Jim Ratcliffe does not need to apologise for saying that the UK is being colonised by immigrants. No, of course not. The people who should be apologising to the British public is the succession of politicians, the political class in this country, who stood in elections promising that they would do what they said they were going to do, bring down migration, and then proceeded to do precisely the opposite.

2:43And that's got to end. The co-owner of Manchester United claimed the immigrants are draining resources from the state. Sir Keir Starmer said the comments were offensive and called for him to apologise. The suspect in the shooting at a school in Canada on Tuesday was an 18-year-old biological male who identified as female. They killed five pupils, a teacher, their 11-year-old stepbrother and their mother. Lance Young's 12-year-old daughter, Kylie, was killed at the school. I went home not knowing where my daughter was until a high school kid, Maddie Levese, came here and told us her story about trying to save my daughter's life.

3:18The police didn't tell us anything. We had to find out through the community and through kids and rumours in the stands. We had to count because we were watching the news put up body counts and we weren't being told anything. and we were doing numbers and math and figuring out, is our kid in a helicopter or is our kid dead? For more stories like this, listen throughout the day to Times Radio.

3:47This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC. AI is everywhere. In the news, in our hands, but return on investment, not so much. So how do you get beyond the hype and deliver AI that powers reinvention and growth across your business? Strong foundations unlock AI's potential. That's why PwC takes you further with tech, strengthening the data quality, processes and workflows that shape how well AI performs. PwC turns innovation into implementation so you can accelerate from experiment to scale. Discover more at pwc.co.uk.

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5:05All rights reserved. Copyright 2026. McDonald's at the FIFA World Cup 2026.