Afternoon briefing Thursday 15th January

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 afternoon Times Radio news briefing for Thursday, the 15th of January. Kemi Badanok has sacked Robert Jenrick, her shadow justice secretary.

0:43She's explained in a video that she was presented with irrefutable evidence that he was plotting in secret to defect. It is my responsibility to protect our party. And faced with that information, I took the only decision that any responsible leader could. Because the British public are tired of political psychodrama. So am I. They saw too much of it in the last government. They're seeing too much of it in this government. I will not repeat those mistakes. Nigel Farage reacted to the news breaking while at a press conference himself unveiling Reform UK's new leader in Scotland, saying he was very surprised it had been announced.

1:21Well, I never reveal private conversations with anybody, which is why, you know, when people like Malcolm came to me to talk and he was a frontbencher, nothing ever leaked. So I'm going to say that I've had conversations with a number of very senior Conservatives over the course of the last week. He went on to say he had not signed anything with Robert Jennerick but did have conversations with him specifically. Mr Jennerick has been a Conservative MP since 2014. The technology secretary has said she will not rest until all social media companies meet their legal duties regarding the creation of fake explicit images.

2:00X has vowed to pressure and prevented users in the UK and some other countries from using their AI feature to edit photos of real-life people to make them wear fewer clothes. Kate Devlin, professor of AI and society at King's College London, explained the details to Times Radio. They're not completely banning this, they're actually geo-blocking it. So if your country has rules about deepfakes that say you can't make deepfakes of real people, then you should not be able to do that using X's grok. Beyond that, it depends on what those images are. So there are already, and have been for decades, laws, for example, around creating what's termed pseudo-photographs, of child sexual abuse imagery.

2:37The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has told Times Radio he will be horrified if the head of West Midlands Police is still in his job at the end of the day. Craig Guilford oversaw the decision to ban Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a football match over fear of clashes. Evidence for that decision has been found to be weak. Mr Streeting told us what he thinks of the chief constable's position. Bluntly, I'm absolutely shocked that he's still in post. I genuinely thought that having misled Parliament, that having misled the public and having had one of his own local MPs, the Home Secretary, saying she had lost confidence in him, I honestly thought that anyone with integrity would at that point say, I have to resign.

3:2527 councils have asked for the local elections in May to be delayed, 21 of which are Labour run. Ministers asked councils whether they wanted to postpone them to 2027 to give them time to handle restructuring plans. The councils cover more than 5.2 million people. The government says many of the roles are zombie positions as the roles will be abolished. Nigel Farage has called it a democratic outrage. Russia says it's expelled a British diplomat who they claim is a spy. The FSB, the successor to the KGB, said he was working undercover and has been given two weeks to leave. For more stories like this, listen throughout the day to Times Radio.

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