Daily briefing Sunday 15th 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. Welcome to the Times Radio Daily Briefing on Sunday, the 15th of February. Labour activists appear to have paid for a smear campaign against Sunday Times journalists.

0:44Labour Together, the group that helped to get Sir Keir Starmer elected as party leader, hired an American company to investigate reporters. It paid APCO£36 ,000 to examine the backgrounds and motivations of Gabriel Pogrant in Harry, York. Labour Together used to be run by the PM's now former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Matt Vickers, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, has told Times Radio the story is a cause for alarm. I think it's really concerning. A lot of these people from this group are now at the heart of government, have been very heavily involved in this government. When Starmer appeared, he told us he was going to be whiter than white, he was going to clean up politics, and here we are, journalists who dare to ask the questions, who dare to scrutinise the government, who try to hold it to account, to try to let the public know what it's up to, are being dug on and smeared in such a way.

1:29I think it's quite a scary thing, actually, for public discourse and what comes next with this government. It's emerged that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed with a toxin developed from the Ecuadorian dart frog. The poison is 200 times stronger than morphine. Russia has described the news as a Western propaganda hoax, but the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper says that's incorrect. This is a particular chemical. It can be produced synthetically. It can also be found in this particular frog in Ecuador. and we do know that the Russian regime has had possession of this particular chemical.

2:07It is obviously not one that is found naturally in Russia. The country's top prosecutor Stephen Parkinson has told the Sunday Times the royal family are not above the law. Emails reveal that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor took one of Jeffrey Epstein's closest confidants, David Stern, on an official UK trade envoy trip to Asia. He thought Andrew could be accused of misconduct in public office. The legal commentator Joshua Rosenberg says that is a plausible scenario. It's often used against police officers, against ministers, members of parliament, people who hold a public office. So the first question would be whether a trade envoy is a public office.

2:47I think it probably is, but that's something that the courts would have to establish. and then the question is whether he was acting in that public office, acting as such in the events that are under investigation. Andrew's always denied any wrongdoing and seven schools and a nursery have reported more than 60 suspected cases of measles in an area of North London. Laboratories have confirmed 34 cases in Enfield since January 12. Some children have been treated in hospital. And you can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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