Olly Robbins: I was asked to find job for Starmer aide and not tell David Lammy
Downing Street pushed the Foreign Office to find a diplomatic role for Keir Starmer’s communications chief over the head of the then foreign secretary, the former head of the department has revealed,Testifying to MPs at parliament’s foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday, Olly Robbins said he had several conversations with No 10 about finding a role for Matthew Doyle, who was later suspended as a Labour peer after it emerged he had campaigned for a friend charged with possessing indecent images of children,Robbins said he had been asked not to mention the idea to David Lammy, who was foreign secretary at the time,Robbins described the conversations as part of more general pressure from people at the top of the government to place senior political figures in senior diplomatic posts,He made the revelation while testifying to the committee about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Washington ambassador.
“There were several discussions initiated by No 10 with me about potentially finding a head of mission opportunity for Matthew Doyle, who was then the prime minister’s director of communications,” he said.“I was under strict instruction not to discuss that with the then foreign secretary.”He added: “It was, to be honest, hard to find something that I thought might be suitable.But I also felt quite uncomfortable about it and I kept giving advice that I thought this would be very hard for the Foreign Office, and hard for me personally, to defend.”Doyle himself was part of Mandelson’s vetting process, telling the prime minister he was “satisfied” with the former Labour peer’s responses about his relationship with the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Robbins added that No 10 had later asked Mandelson to find Doyle a role in the US network instead.He told the committee it had been part of “a creep of senior diplomatic roles going to non-career diplomats”.He added: “It was difficult for me, personally, honestly, as a leader, to explain why very talented and experienced diplomats were having to leave the organisation, and people who would be widely considered to have rather fewer credentials would be input in these important jobs.”Robbins said the conversations happened in March 2025, shortly before Doyle quit Downing Street.He was then given a seat in the House of Lords, but was suspended from the Labour whip this February after it was reported that he campaigned in 2016 in a local election on behalf of Sean Morton.
Morton is a former Labour councillor in Scotland who had been charged with possessing indecent images, and was convicted two years later.Doyle has been contacted for comment.
Sonos Play review: a great jack-of-all-trades portable speaker for home or away
The Play is a new portable wifi and Bluetooth home speaker that packs the best of Sonos into a jack of all trades that is intended to be a reset point in the company’s recovery from its app debacle that lost it faith, favour and a chief executive.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.It is the first truly new music speaker since Sonos launched its new app in May 2024, which junked fan-favourite features while causing stability and usage problems for new and old customers alike
How a fiery attack on Sam Altman’s home unfolded
In the early hours of 10 April, a man approached the gate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco and hurled a molotov cocktail at the building before fleeing. The suspect, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, was arrested less than two hours later while allegedly attempting to break into the headquarters of OpenAI with a jug of kerosene, a lighter and an anti-AI manifesto.Federal and California state authorities have charged Moreno-Gama with a range of crimes including attempted arson and attempted murder. His parents issued a statement this week saying that their son had recently suffered a mental health crisis. Moreno-Gama, who has not yet entered a plea, faces up to life in prison if convicted
Kenyan firm sacks more than 1,000 workers after losing Meta contract
More than 1,000 low-paid workers in Kenya have been abruptly sacked by an outsourcing company contracted by Meta, in what activists said was a shocking move exposing the precariousness of tech jobs in the global south.Sama, a company based in Nairobi to which Meta outsourced content moderation and AI training work, announced on Thursday that the workers were being laid off after Meta terminated a contract.Last month reports said some Kenyan workers involved in data annotation were asked to view content filmed using Meta’s AI smart glasses showing wearers using the toilet or having sex.The sacked workers, many involved in AI training, have been given six days’ notice, according to the Oversight Lab, an organisation that advocates for fair regulation and deployment of technology across Africa. It said it was advising the workers on legal options
UK’s OnlyFans tops $3bn valuation amid talks to sell stake to US investor
OnlyFans, the UK adult video platform, is in talks to sell a minority stake to a US investor that will value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn).The London-based company is in advanced talks to sell a stake of less than 20% to the San Francisco-based investment firm Architect Capital, according to the Financial Times. Sources familiar with the process confirmed the talks to the Guardian.OnlyFans has decided that offloading a minority stake is the best guarantee of stability for a business dealing with the death of its owner, Leonid Radvinsky
Finance leaders warn over Mythos as UK banks prepare to use powerful Anthropic AI tool
British banks will be given access in the next week to a powerful AI tool that was deemed too dangerous to be released to the public, as a series of senior finance figures warned over its impact.Anthropic, which has so far limited the release of the new model to a small clutch of primarily US businesses, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, said it would expand that to UK financial institutions.“That is in the very near term, in the next week,” Pip White, Anthropic’s head of UK, Ireland and northern Europe operations, said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “As you would expect, the engagement I have had from UK CEOs in the last week has been significant.”Anthropic, which is the company behind the Claude family of AI tools, has said that its latest model, Mythos, poses an unprecedented risk because of its ability to expose flaws in IT systems
US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secret
Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their datacentres, an investigation has found, with demands to block a database of green metrics from public view written almost word for word into EU rules.The secrecy provision, which the European Commission added to its proposal almost verbatim after industry lobbying in 2024, hinders scrutiny of the pollution that individual datacentres emit. It leaves researchers with just national-level summaries of their energy footprints.The rise of AI chatbots has spurred a boom in the construction of chip-filled warehouses with a hunger for power that is being met, in part, by burning fossil gas. Legal scholars warn the blanket confidentiality clause may fall foul of EU transparency rules and the Aarhus convention on public access to environmental information
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