Afternoon briefing Tuesday 28th April

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 Tuesday 28th April. Zakir Starmer's former Chief of Staff has denied telling officials to skip over vetting steps for Peter Mandelson.

0:44Morgan McSweeney is giving evidence to MPs about appointing the peer ambassador to Washington, saying he did recommend that in Downing Street. What I did not do was oversee national security vetting, ask officials to ignore procedures, request that steps should be skipped or communicate explicitly or implicitly that checks should be cleared at all costs. I would never have considered that acceptable. Mr McSweeney says he made a serious error of judgment in supporting Peter Manilson's appointment. The former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Philip Barton, has told MPs it was not normal practice to announce the appointment before vetting and he says he didn't get a chance to raise his own worries.

1:21I had a concern that a man who, demonstrably from the public record at the time, and it was clearly much bigger than we all knew, had a link to Epstein and that Epstein, through both the presidential election campaign in the US and more generally in US politics, had been and was a controversial figure. And I was worried that this could become a problem in future. Peter Mandelson has always denied any wrongdoing in connection to Jeffrey Epstein. MPs are voting on whether Sir Keir Starmer should face sleaze investigation to look at whether he misled Parliament. Labour MPs are under a three-line whip to oppose that.

1:59The Conservative's Shadow Cabinet Minister Alex Burkhart spoke to Times Radio. I think Labour MPs are being put in a very unfair position because it's clear that the Prime Minister's done something wrong and he is now going to dip their hands in the blood. We know that the Prime Minister has a track record of throwing his employees under the bus when life gets difficult for him. And I'm afraid he's about to do the same thing to his party. Zakir Starmer's always denied misleading MPs. BP has more than doubled its profits for the first three months of the year thanks to the war in Iran. It made£2.4 billion, almost half a billion more than expected.

2:36Times Radio's business correspondent Dominic O 'Connell explains why. It's not so much high prices that help oil companies, but the volatility in the oil price. And they say in their statement to the stock exchange that it's their trading operations which make money when prices are rising and prices are volatile that have made the big difference. The king will emphasise unity with the US as he tries to repair a fractured relationship during his state visit. Donald Trump has criticised the prime minister repeatedly in recent months but has also played down the role of NATO allies in the war in Afghanistan.

3:07The king is expected to speak about his pride in the British armed forces during a joint session of Congress. The Times' Times' royal editor Kate Mansi says that is where the trip will become more political. Now we're going to see the King walking into soft power. We always hear about this diplomatic tightrope that he walks and no truer is it than during this visit. And the government's promised it will introduce some sort of social media restrictions for children under 16. It's climbed down at the last minute during a standoff with the House of Lords in order to get a children's bill passed before Parliament breaks up.

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