Keir Starmer has told reporters in Northern Ireland that “it was me that made the mistake” in appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador “and it’s me that makes the apology to the victims of Epstein”.It is the prime minister’s first comments on Mandelson since the release of the files relating to his appointment yesterday afternoon.He said:double quotation markThe release of the information shows what was known.That led to further questions being asked.Unfortunately, because of the Metropolitan police investigation, we can’t release that information yet.

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that it was me that made a mistake, and it’s me that makes the apology to the victims of Epstein, and I do that.That’s all from us on the UK politics live blog, thank you for following along.A quick recap of today’s developments:Prime minister Keir Starmer said he “made the mistake” in appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador “and it’s me that makes the apology to the victims of Epstein”.It was his first comments on Mandelson since the release of the files relating to his appointment yesterday.Starmer said the documents “shows what was known” about Mandelson’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein at the time of his appointment, and that “led to further questions being asked”.

The prime minister said that exchange cannot be published yet as it forms part of a Metropolitan police investigation.Downing Street denied leaving key details out of documents.Starmer’s official spokesperson said there was no “cover-up” after a comment box in the due diligence report reserved for his response was left blank.MPs have voiced anger over the £75,000 severance payout Mandelson received after he was sacked as ambassador to the US last year.The documents showed he initially asked for more than half a million pounds.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said Mandelson should not have received anything.“If someone has been dishonest and lied, you don’t give them a severance payment,” she said.“So something very dodgy has happened.”Cabinet minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said the taxpayer-funded payout was “value for money”, as it was negotiated down from £547,000 to £75,000.He suggested that the money should be donated to a charity supporting Epstein victims, saying it would be “the decent thing” to do.

The Liberal Democrats urged Keir Starmer to refer himself to the ethics adviser for potentially misleading parliament.The party suggested the revelations in the Mandelson documents were at odds with Starmer’s repeated insistence that “full due process was followed”.Elsewhere, Hannah Spencer, the newly elected Green party MP for Gorton and Denton, delivered her maiden speech during a debate marking International Women’s Day (IWD).“Four weeks ago today, I was in college, a plumber learning how to plaster.And today I’m in parliament as an MP,” she said.

“Being here is the honour of my life,”Several Labour MPs are in talks about defecting to the Greens, but are seeking guarantees they would be backed electorally by their new party, the Guardian has been told,A series of senior Green figures have confirmed that talks with several MPs are happening, but that none are yet at the stage of wanting to commit,Jess Phillips read out the names of the 108 women killed in the UK by men – or where a man has been charged – in the last 12 months in parliament,“We refuse to forget these women, who all deserved so much more,” the Labour MP said during the IWD parliamentary debate.

Over in Scotland, the deputy first minister Kate Forbes said her government had not been consulted on proposals from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to build two defence technical colleges in the country, claiming to have received no details on the plans.Earlier today the defence procurement minister Luke Pollard and Douglas Alexander, the Scottish secretary, said the MoD would spend £20m on the two colleges (known as DTECs) but only if the Scottish “stepped up” and match-funded them.Forbes said this was news to her administration.She said:double quotation markWe welcome any announcement involving Scottish colleges.However, at this point we have received no details from the UK government, have not been consulted and have received no formal request for match funding.

Pollard told reporters at an event near Glasgow airport that Scottish government officials were fully aware of the DTEC programme, which was already being rolled out in England and Wales, but he and Alexander admitted their cash offer was new.“Well, we’re making the offer today, and it’s for them to make a determination,” Pollard said, arguing that to date the Scottish government had shown hostility to defence training spending, referring to the refusal by Scottish Enterprise to fund a Rolls-Royce advance welding training centre in Glasgow because of its military links.“We have spoken to Scottish government officials about DTECs in Scotland and have been for quite some time.“We’ve been absolutely clear with our Scottish government that we expect to see more support for skills in Scotland because the MoD as a reserved department is putting in huge amounts of more money into Scottish businesses, but we need to see a collaborative approach on skills if we’re to realise the full benefit of that increasing defence budget.”Forbes said Scottish ministers agreed that collaboration was needed.

She said the £50m defence growth deal Pollard and Alexander also announced today overlapped with some Scottish investment initiatives.“This is why working together is important, and the Scottish government has requested a role on the committee which will support the design and implementation of the defence growth deal in Scotland.”For the 11th year running, Jess Phillips has read out the names of women killed in the UK by men – or where a man has been charged – in the last 12 months in parliament.Speaking today during a debate to mark International Women’s Day, it took Phillips just under five minutes to read out the 108 names collated by the Femicide Census project Counting Dead Women.She said:double quotation markWe refuse to forget these women, who all deserved so much more.

I want to once again thank the Femicide Census for the tireless work that goes into collating these names every year.We find it difficult to listen to them, and they look through every single story.I express my profound gratitude for their work, and the work that they do to raise awareness of women and girls who have been so tragically killed by men.There is so much more that I could say in conclusion, but the list continues to speak for itself.I will finish by saying only this – may these women get the justice that they deserved, and may we honour them by preventing others from suffering the same fate.

Our political correspondent, Alexandra Topping, reported earlier today that 19 of the women named were believed to have been killed by their sons, as research showed that almost one in five women killed by men since the last International Women’s Day were suspected victims of matricide.You can read her report here:The Liberal Democrats have reacted to the Mandelson files, as they urged Keir Starmer to refer himself to the ethics adviser for potentially misleading parliament.The PA news agency reported that the party suggested the revelations in the emails, including national security adviser Jonathan Powell’s concerns the appointment was “weirdly rushed”, were at odds with Starmer’s repeated insistence that “full due process was followed”.Lib Dem Cabinet Office spokesperson Lisa Smart said: “The prime minister has not only shown a catastrophic lack of judgment over Mandelson’s appointment, the evidence is mounting that he misled parliament.“Keir Starmer must refer himself to the independent ethics adviser to determine whether he breached the ministerial code.

“He promised to clean up politics after years of Conservative sleaze and scandal, now he must lead by example.”Prime minister Keir Starmer said he “made the mistake” in appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador “and it’s me that makes the apology to the victims of Epstein”.It was his first comments on Mandelson since the release of the files relating to his appointment yesterday.Starmer said the documents “shows what was known” about Mandelson’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein at the time of his appointment, and that “led to further questions being asked”.The prime minister said that exchange cannot be published yet as it forms part of a Metropolitan police investigation.

Downing Street denied leaving key details out of documents.Starmer’s official spokesperson said there was no “cover-up” after a comment box in the due diligence report reserved for his response was left blank.MPs have voiced anger over the £75,000 severance payout Mandelson received after he was sacked as ambassador to the US last year.The documents showed he initially asked for more than half a million pounds.Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said Mandelson should not have received anything.

“If someone has been dishonest and lied, you don’t give them a severance payment,” she said.“So something very dodgy has happened.”Cabinet minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said the taxpayer-funded payout was “value for money”, as it was negotiated down from £547,000 to £75,000.He suggested that the money should be donated to a charity supporting Epstein victims, saying it would be “the decent thing” to do.Elsewhere, Hannah Spencer, the newly elected Green party MP for Gorton and Denton, delivered her maiden speech during a debate marking International Women’s Day.

“Four weeks ago today, I was in college, a plumber learning how to plaster.And today I’m in parliament as an MP,” she said.“Being here is the honour of my life.”Several Labour MPs are in talks about defecting to the Greens, but are seeking guarantees they would be backed electorally by their new party, the Guardian has been told.A series of senior Green figures have confirmed that talks with several MPs are happening, but that none are yet at the stage of wanting to commit.

Several Labour MPs are in talks about defecting to the Greens, but are seeking guarantees they would be backed electorally by their new party, the Guardian has been told.Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens in England and Wales, has said publicly that he has chatted to Labour MPs about the idea of switching sides, with the leftwing party enjoying a surge in membership and having overtaken Labour in some recent opinion polls.A series of other senior Green figures have confirmed that talks with several MPs are happening, but that none are yet at the stage of wanting to commit.“We already have a lot of experience of Labour councillors defecting to us, so this is not a surprise,” one said.“But it takes time.

You get to know people, and realise they would be much happier with us, but you never know when, or even if, it will happen,It’s a very personal thing,”Read the full report here:Back on the Mandelson files, the former chancellor George Osborne said he would have told the peer “see you in court” in response to his request for more than half a million pounds in severance pay,The government documents released yesterday relating to Peter Mandelson showed he asked for £547,000 as compensation after he was sacked as ambassador to the US last year,He was instead given £75,000.

Reacting to the release of the files on his podcast Political Currency with Ed Balls, Osborne said: “The only brand new piece of information was that Peter Mandelson received a payoff of £75,000, which I have to say, it’s very odd that they signed off on that … If I’d been chancellor, I just absolutely would have said, ‘no, see us in court.Forget it.There’s no way he’s going to take us to court … we don’t have to pay anything’.”He said he believed the files did not make much difference to the prime minister’s position.“It didn’t make it better, but it didn’t make it worse,” Osborne added.

“And I guess for him, therefore, it’s not a bad day.”After Hannah Spencer delivered her maiden speech, Melanie Ward, Labour MP for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy, joked to the trained plumber and plasterer that the Palace of Westminster was “in need of some maintenance”.“It’s entirely possible that both her plumbing and plastering skills will come in useful in the very near future,” she said.Hannah Spencer listed the names of women that are honoured by the people of Manchester, saying they “give a nod” to the statue of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, and remember activist Hannah Mitchell, trade unionist Mary Quaile and mill worker Annie Kenney.“And of course, Elsie Plant, who’s from just down the road from me and who I named one of my beautiful greyhounds after,” said Spencer, on the suffragette and activist who lived in Stockport.

She continued:double quotation markI think of these brilliant women a lot, and especially today as we debate International Women’s Day.And I think of many others too, from pits, slums and factories, the women who changed the system so that I could be here, the women of colour whose names we will never know because history it didn’t bother to recognise or remember them.But we do today because without their struggle and their fight and their determination to stick together, none of this could be possible.Over in parliament, we have heard Hannah Spencer, the newly elected Green party MP for Gorton and Denton, make her maiden speech during a debate marking International Women’s Day.She said:double quotation markFour weeks ago today, I was in college, a plumber learning how to plaster.

And today I’m in parliament as an MP.And being here is the honour of my life.But I don’t want this to be unusual or exceptional.I truly believe that anyone doing a job like mine should get a seat on these benches.And where I’m from, we’re taught to look after each other, to look out for each other, to stick up for each other, and to stick together, to see each other as human.

And I’m so proud of that humanity, and that people in Gorton and Denton, and Burnage, and Levenshulme, and Longsight, and Abby Hey, feel that way too.It’s in our blood and in our bones.We see each other as human.In Scotland, the former Scottish chief nursing officer who was roundly condemned after reportedly offering to placate grieving relatives with enough money for a Disneyland holiday has quit as chair of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA).In the run-up to May’s Holyrood election, Fiona McQueen became a lightening rod for criticisms by relatives and opposition leaders of the dismissive NHS response to the deaths of people from infections caught at Queen Elizabeth university hospital (QUEH) in Glasgow.

While chief nursing officer, McQueen was said to have asked in December 2019 why Greater Glasgow & Clyde health board did not offer the families £50,000, which would cover the costs of a trip to Disneyland in Florida, instead of denying responsibility.Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, described her alleged remarks as “utterly shameful”.He has repeatedly accused the Scottish government of pressuring the health board into opening the hospital too early, just before the 2015 general election, and of ignoring evidence it was unsafe.McQueen said she had no recollection of making them, and has denied claims by one family that she offered them £20,000 and a holiday during a phone call in 2019.However it emerged today that she has stepped down as SPA chair with immediate effect for family and personal reasons.

Separately, the Crown Office is investigating seven deaths at the QEUH and its attached children’s hospital following infections linked to contaminated water supplies and ventilation systems.The infections are also at the centre of a six-year-long public inquiry.Angela Constance, the Scottish justice secretary, thanked McQueen for her “commitment to good governance, openness, transparency, and ensuring that people are at the heart of decision making has been central to the SPA’s progress”.The prime minister is in Belfast where he met with leaders from across Northern Ireland’s political parties ahead of a UK-Ireland summit taking place in Cork in the Republic of Ireland.Keir Starmer said he would help people in Northern Ireland struggling with the cost of living and that he was determined to “clamp down” on consumers “getting ripped off” on their energy bills