Steph McGovern

I wonder if if he had let him stand as an MP and then he'd won it, whether things would be different now and Starmer would be gone.

So just on that, before we move on to look at some of the bigger economic stuff, just on that point about the, you know, Mandelson and this appointment and whatever happened, happened.

Fundamentally, whether the vetting was passed or not, Mandelson had a shady past.

We all knew that.

We talked about it when he got appointed as US ambassador.

So, yeah, so that's the big thing that gets me here.

But it's interesting when you look at, obviously, this is a massive deal in politics, but there's also been loads of examples in business where this has happened too.

And, you know, it's quite interesting when you look at some of these.

So I just wanted to tell you, I know you'll know them, but just tell people a bit about them because it's worth, you know, these vetting process problems are happening all the time.

So, for example, you've got

JP Morgan, you know, we talk about them a lot, really huge institution in the financial sector.

Yes, exactly.

So a problem they've had with vetting, which has only just been resolved recently, actually, is a few years ago now, back in 2021, they bought a student loan startup called Frank.

They paid over 130 million for it.

But when they bought it, they didn't verify.

So their vetting didn't check that the founder's claim that the platform had over 4 million users was actually right.

And then it turned out they only had 300,000 users.

So this woman who founded it, this Charlie Javis, apparently just basically made up this list.

She paid allegedly somebody to...

fabricate a list of millions of fake names and emails.