Pro

Study.

Source.

A secret meeting between finance executives and a senior Tory cabinet minister arranged by Keir Starmer’s top business aide Varun Chandra has prompted the lobbying watchdog to launch an investigation into his former firm, Hakluyt & Company.

A lengthy openDemocracy investigation has uncovered a host of meetings between Chandra and senior figures in the Conservative government. Among these was a roundtable never properly disclosed by the government, which Chandra arranged, involving then Tory cabinet minister Kwasi Kwarteng and ten leading financiers.

Hakluyt is now formally under investigation after openDemocracy shared our findings with the Office for the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists (ORCL). Hakluyt insisted it has done nothing wrong.

As UK lobbying law only applies when lobbying is carried out on behalf of a client, this meeting with Kwarteng is believed to be the focus of the watchdog's investigation.

While taping his Thursday show, host Stephen Colbert made the surprising announcement that CBS is ending his late night show in May.

The live audience at New York's Ed Sullivan Theater booed when he delivered the news that this would be the show's final season.

"Yeah, I share your feelings," he told the audience. "It's not just the end our our show, but it's the end of The Late Show on CBS. I'm not being replaced. This is all just going away."

Colbert has hosted the top-rated show since 2015, taking over for David Letterman.

The news comes just days after Colbert criticized CBS's parent company, Paramount Global, for paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, whom Colbert regularly skewers in his monologues. Trump claimed the network interfered in the 2024 election by editing a 60 Minutes interview with his opponent, Kamala Harris.