Gavin Grey: UK correspondent on Prime Minister Starmer facing scrutiny over Mandelson saga

UK Prime Minister Starmer is fighting for his job as he faces MPs to explain the sacking of the top civil servant in the UK Foreign Office.

It follows the revelation that his department didn’t tell the Prime Minister that Lord Mandelson failed security vetting.

Mandelson took up the role of UK ambassador to the US in February 2025, but seven months later he was sacked over ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

UK correspondent Gavin Grey explained further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Devin Gray UK correspondence with US. Hello, Gevin, hither hell right?
So tell us on a scale of one team, how
much trouble kirs Armazon.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Oh, I think he's veering on the nine to ten here.
I don't think anything's gonna precisely knock him off his
perch today. But his position as Prime Minister in the
UK is massively under scrutiny and in grave danger. And
this really is another sort of Epstein related thing, all
relating to Lord Peter Mandelsson, the man who had twice

(00:30):
had to leave cabinet under Tony Blair as a minister,
then got appointed as the Ambassador to America, the UK
Ambassador to America, the absolute pick of all jobs for ambassadors.
He'd never been an ambassador before, but got the nod
ahead of several other very very important candidates, and it

(00:51):
was quite a shock at the time. It was a
personal appointment by the Prime Minister. And then of course
we now know he was linked to Epstein, and then
he got the sack after just seven months. Now today
the Prime Minister is having to answer questions about again
about what he knew when relating to his security clearance
for Peter Mandelson, the seventy two year old is said

(01:14):
to have failed his security clearance, but the Prime Minister
is claiming he didn't know that and he wasn't told that.
Now there are different restrictions on what civil servants are
able to say regarding national security and regarding these security checks.
But I'm afraid to say it either looks like the
Prime Minister is inept, he's ignorant of things, he isn't

(01:38):
in control, or he has lied to Parliament and all
the opposition leaders have unified to say he's got to resign. Now,
there aren't those calls, I'm not getting the sensor are
those calls within his own party yet, but they are
growing by the day. Today the Prime Minister faces Commons,
the House of Commons, that has to answer questions. It's
lively to be a very very sparky affair tomorrow. The

(02:02):
man he sacked, the former head of the Foreign Office
as a civil servant, he's giving evidence and that's going
to be very interesting, Heather, whether he decides to protect
his own reputation and go out all guns blazing.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
So tell me, Kevin, what's the worst case scenario for
the Prime Minister here? What are is MP's looking for.
Is it just a shoddy performance, like a bit of
a flubbing in the media, or is it evidence that
he's lied.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
I think if he's found to have lied or misled Parliament,
as the phrase goes, that will be an immediate, have
to be resignation, and there will be huge pressure on
him to do so. But he has this knack of
managing to throw other people under the bus. So he's
already lost two or three top civil servants and the
last one, as you said, Sir Oli Robbins, a well respected,

(02:49):
well revered character within the Foreign Office. Just critics would
say thrown under a bus. Others would say, well the
Prime Minister wasn't told. That's scandalous and he's got to go.
But either way, I think these are going to be
very very tough forty eight hours, seventy two hours for
our brand minister.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah, it does sound like it. Now the baby food,
what's happened here? Do we know?

Speaker 2 (03:11):
This is really really worrying in the police in Austria
urged people to be vigilant after a sample of baby
food was found to contain rat poison. It was found
in the eastern region of Bergenland and the poison jar
of carrot and potato pure have been reported by customer.
The customer reported that they noticed before opening it that

(03:33):
the lid had been tampered with and thankfully their baby
did not consume the food. Now, what the company is saying,
it's a manufacturer called hip Hi Double p. They are
very very popular with baby food around the center of Europe,
Austria and so forth. They are saying, look, the jars
are leaving their factory in perfect order, but the police

(03:56):
are saying nothing. They're saying nothing on the theory that
this is some stortion attempt. However, the police have said
that they did have a warning from German investigators and
tampered jars have already been seized in the Czech Republic
and Slovakia, So that does kind of suggest, doesn't it
then lean to this theory that there is somebody attempting

(04:17):
to extort either the supermarket involved SPA or the actual
company manufacture itself. But either way, people are being warned
when you get any jar that has not got that
label on it that seals its shut and shows you
nobody's opened it, then don't buy it.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Good advice, Hey, thank you very much, Gvin has always
Gavin Gray, UK correspondent.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
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