Morning briefing Friday 6th 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 Times Radio's Morning Briefing on Friday the 6th of February. Warnings about Sir Keir Starmer's political future have intensified among Labour MPs, amid anger over the Peter Mandelson scandal.

0:47The Prime Minister yesterday apologised to Jeffrey Epstein's victims for believing Mandelson about the extent of his friendship with the paedophile financier. There are also calls for the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, to leave No. 10. Times Radio's political producer, Olly Cole, says Starmer has to perform a delicate balancing act. Sir Keir Starmer has been brutal in the past, but it is a massive weight of a decision to make. To basically say, you know, the man who has engineered, put the whole political project of why you are in that post into being, to say goodbye is a tough thing to do, but I don't see any other route that sort of calms the Labour backbenches and the rest of the party.

1:27Renovation of the Palace of Westminster will cost every taxpayer more than£1 ,000 and takes 60 years to complete if MPs refuse to leave while it takes place. Parliamentarians have been told that the decision about whether to vacate the building will determine the cost of the restoration and whether it will drag on into the latter half of this century. Under plans handed to MPs and peers, a full decant from Westminster would take between 19 and 24 years and cost up to£15.6 billion. Al Qaeda and its network of affiliates have 50 times more recruits than they had at the time of 9-11, according to data compiled by a United Nations monitoring group.

2:09Their figures show that there are now 25 ,000 potential fighters across the world. The statistics were shared as a briefing at the Royal United Services Institute before the publication of the UN Security Council's annual report on the global terrorist threat. Dr Sajan Gohel is the International Security Director at the Asia-Pacific Foundation. Scale doesn't necessarily lead to cohesion or ideological depth. So the growth in numbers masks a dilution in ideological commitment. So unlike the hardened leaders of al-Qaeda that planned the 9-11 attacks, what you now have is that many of these recruits, they don't necessarily demonstrate ideological zeal.

2:51Instead, they're motivated by money. that are involved in local grievances. And a small museum in West Yorkshire could be in line for a surge in visitor numbers following last night's premiere for the latest adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights. Speaking on the red carpet in Leicester Square, the Australian actress Margot Robbie, who was also a producer of the film, spoke about the demands of adapting a novel that was written 180 years ago for the modern-day big screen. She also described how a visit to the Bronte family home in the village of Haworth provided her with inspiration.

3:24We've found ways to kind of keep honouring the book and even, you know, spending time with the Bronte Parsonage Museum. Like today, this bracelet I'm wearing is a replica of Charlotte Bronte's bracelet that you can find at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, which was thought to have been woven out of the hair of her sisters Anne and Emily. Maybe the details you don't get to appreciate or know about. The film goes on general release next Friday. There's more on these stories throughout the day on Times Radio.

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