of a slightly odd kind of... ..eye to eye before the storm. is it middle of...well, we're sort of between manifestos and then what will be the hurtle towards polling day. that's like the eye of the hurricane, where it's all like... ..and then it's quiet and then again. yeah, i think it's a i think it is a bit of that because now obviously, you know, events nearby and all of that. but you know, if you're one of the political parties that has already put out their manifesto, you can't really start to say, "ah—ha, we've got a new policy. "let's announce that. " because was it not in that pamphlet you put out last week? yeah. and you can't start saying we're going to charge around the country 24/7 for the next fortnight because, you know, even political campaigns would realise that everyone ends up in a heap after a while. yeah. and you know, we're counting down towards the question time that's happening on the bbc a bit later this week on thursday, there's that head to head sort

of prime ministerial debate also on the bbc, a week on a week tomorrow, a week on wednesday. so, yeah. i kind of feel like... i've got that in my phone on the wrong day. 0h, have you...? i thought it was on the friday. yeah. no, there is going to be something i think on the friday too, a week on friday. so, yeah, that's kind of the vibe. that's kind of the vibe i think at the moment. i'm going to call this the champagne problems period. oh, yeah? because that's the halfway point on the on the set list for taylor swift's eras tour. is that right? halfway through the concert. right, well, there you go. i think that's entirely zeitgeisty and appropriate and very adam, yeah. right, let's see what else we can shoehorn into this episode of newscast. newscast from the bbc. hello. it's adam in the studio. and it's chris in the studio. face to face, you're not in the back of a train. so i've spoken to you on a train, in a car and a pub garden, in a car park. yes.

and then there's the boat that i've attempted to speak to you. and then just because i'm competent with the various bits of kit, i've just had to say i'll sort of give up and send a postcard. it was fun that day you were on the on the landline, though, back to that late �*80s. oh, yeah, what fun. anyway, you've got a bit of a scoop today and to introduce us to the story, you need to introduce us to a guy called john caldwell. yes, john caldwell is a billionaire. he was in the sunday times rich list recently, i think it was it was the 109th. i think something like that, he is worth around one and a half billion pounds, according to the sunday times rich list. he founded phones for you. he's been a kind of serial entrepreneur. and at the last election, he gave half a million quid to the conservative party. and he said to me today, he's voting labour, and he's voting labourfor the first time in his life. so it's kind of quite something. you know, obviously people change their votes, all sorts of people change their votes between elections and any one

person, however much money they've got sloshing around only has one vote. but if you decide that you're going to be public about your political affiliations, and he was in the past about the conservatives, not least because you have to declare that you're a donor of that sort of scale, and then you're willing to invite someone like me to rattle around in his quite a pad in mayfair, 101 rooms. what?! ..in his...i think someone said to me it was 39 toilets, anyway. did you use any of them? i didn't, actually. i didn't require to answer the call during my stint. but yeah, there was a lot of chandeliers with more bulbs than you could possibly you could possibly count. anyway, he has decided not only that he's going to vote labour, but he's publicly going to say as much. so, you know, political parties really sort of cherish these kind of endorsements, particularly if they can steal an endorsement from their principal opponent. and so, you know, labour were sort of proudly wanting to invite us along because he's something of a kind of trophy, if you like, from their perspective. and let's hearfrom the man himself. my thoughts on labour historically were very negative. and what i've seen now, the more and more i've looked at labour,

is a transformation. is this going to be the first time you'll have voted labour? the first time in 51 years, yes. and i suppose timing wise, it really works for labour in terms of their narrative this week, because it started off with rachel reeves, the shadow chancellor, doing a big interview in the ft about growth, which was to preview the fact she was going to have her infrastructure advisory council loads of ceos meeting on monday. and then today you've got a successful businessman sort of sealing the deal. yeah, these things are choreographed by the political parties. and, you know, it would...let me be transparent about how these things happen. labour phoned me up and said, "do you want to come along?" oh, so it was him. it was them, not him. it was. . . it was via them that we went to... i mean, obviously he invited us to his house, but it was labor who were saying, do you want to come and interview this guy who's going to who's going to back us? and it's not entirely surprising because he's been saying things pretty disobliging about the conservatives for quite

a while, but had never previously said that he would be voting labor, and he has never voted sort of labour before. and yeah, it kind of works for them on their argument about growth. i mean, not least because he kind of personifies the idea of economic growth because he's self—made, he's a self—made billionaire, grew up in very ordinary circumstances in stoke—on—trent, born in the �*50s and left school at 16 or certainly before he completed his a—levels. so he talks a lot about the importance of economic growth, which, of course, is the mantra from keir starmer. there is, of course, that big question about can labour if they win, actually deliver. it goes one thing saying that that's what you want. i mean, not many people would disagree with that idea, that economic growth is something you should strive for. some would, but not many. but can you actually deliver it? now, he kind of personifies that, given his own story, and therefore, from their perspective, is kind of a usefulfillip, as well as that sense of, you know, giving that impression of momentum. because, as i say, he has only one vote himself, but giving that impression

of a momentum and an endorsement, and i guess party seek endorsers because they hope that that might tempt to waver it think, "oh, well if such and such is backing them, then maybe i'd be willing to do that sort of thing." so that's that's the pull to labour. let's hear him talking about the push away from the tories now, and this is quite an ear catching sound bite you got from him. what, in your view, has gone wrong for the conservatives? is rishi sunak a dud? 0h, absolute dud. all the criticisms and the criticisms that i made of rishi during his chancellorship, i think, were pretty much evidenced in the d—day situation where a complete lack ofjudgment. are you going tojoin the labour party? will you consider giving money to them in the way that you have for the conservatives in the past? the labour party, in my estimation, as much as i disagree with some of the policies are the absolute

very best for britain going forward, it's quite possible i might support them financially if they needed it next time round if i think they've done an amazing job. see? so i was led towards...a critic might say it was a bit of a leading question, wasn't it, chris? you know, because i did say to him, you know, do you think rishi sunak is a is a dud? and yes, it is. but it was leading because that's where the his argument was leading. he had basically said to me, "look..." and these are my words, not his. but it effectively said, "look, i am a small c conservative." he believes in enterprise. he believes in the importance of economic growth and he thinks the labour party has radically changed. so therefore you think, well, so why have you gone off the conservative party? he gave them a half a million quid. now he gave them, he says, half a million quid last time round because he was particularly keen on avoiding a jeremy corbyn government. he really, really, really didn't want that. and the conservatives were the natural vehicle of opposition to that prospect. equally, he said he'd voted conservative for decades prior to prior to that. so, yeah, it seemed to me reasonable to try and tease out, well, what really did unseal the deal with the conservatives? and it was rishi sunak, he is particularly critical of his time as chancellor

and the furlough scheme. he think that that led to a lot of wasted, wasted public money. oh, and that's going to wound rishi sunak mentally and emotionally because that's his kind of main calling card for why people should back him. and there might be many, many newscasters of all sorts of ranges of views about rishi sunak who would respect him for the furlough scheme. and you also do wonder how different that scheme would have been under other governments up against the clock, needing to find something to avoid, i mean, notjust depression in an economic sense in terms of spreadsheets, but destitution for a lot of people. and the argument you would hear back from rishi sunak and others is that the scheme might not have been perfect and might have been open to fraud, but what else can you do? and of course, billionaires were kind of fine during covid. just like that. with a 101 bedroom. well, indeed, indeed.

so it's also worth saying that he is not 100% full of praise for labour. he has criticised some of their policies, not least the idea of putting vat on private school fees. so he acknowledges there's some things that he doesn't agree with them. but, you know, he's saying what he's saying, and it says something because, you know, as i say, from his perspective, you don't have to come out in front of the cameras and do all of that stuff and open yourself up to, you know, the politicalfray. just to go back to the labour growth mission, i'vejust been mulling this over for the last few days, and actually, 0k, people say, oh, it'll take a while for economic growth to pick up if it's going to pick up because of labour policies. but actually we'll get a bit of a preview because when rachel reeves does herfirst budget, she has to submit all her budget measures to the office of budget responsibility, and they do do a calculation about what those measures might do to the uk's growth rate in future years. so, actually, the growth might sort of materialise in theoretical terms quicker than you might think. yeah, maybe, maybe. and the other thing we know, because labour have gone out of their way to say

that they believe in the office for budget responsibility in that process. you remember that liz truss, the former prime minister, kind of decided that she really, really didn't like the obr and would sort of bypass it. and labour sees on that as being a sort of symptom of kind of economic incompetence. so labour are making a big thing of revering the structures of the obr. and the reason that matters is that they can't therefore do a budget super quick if they win, because the lag time required for the obr to do its number crunching is about ten weeks. in other words, basically that means the autumn. but they would be able to do, labour, were they to win, a king's speech, that sort of all of the flurry around the horses and all of that kind of stuff, when the king reads out a government's programme forfor government, then you could expect that whatever the outcome of the election, because it would be a new government, whatever its political complexion, and they would be wanting to set out the stuff in their winning manifesto to to crack on with. right. the lesser spotted boris johnson has been spotted, but in leaflets and social media.

what's your take on borisjohnson�*s very low key comeback? yeah. so he's been out of the country for quite a lot of the campaign. and talking to folk around borisjohnson in the last few days, they were making it clear that he had offered videos, or indeed written endorsements, to any conservative candidates who sought them as... kind of like cameo, when you can pay celebrities to say happy birthday. but to be clear, i'm sure we're not suggesting any money has changed hands in this instance, it is it is endorsements because they have been sought. but yeah, his team and those around him were saying, look, he hadn't cherry picked who he thought was worthy of an endorsement. if somebody sought one, then he gave them an endorsement. if they were a conservative candidate. and there's been a smidgen of those. and then they were saying, "look, of course, he wants to see the conservatives do well and to win them for people to vote conservative, etc, etc. of course, what we've not seen yet is borisjohnson appearing on the stump,

kind of, you know, with a gaggle of candidates or or all the hullaballoo that would probably surround him. we have not seen that yet. yeah, he hasn't done a photo op. and rishi sunak did a photo op today in devon in what would be considered a very, very safe conservative seat. and laura has talked about this a few times now because she's just really, really zoomed in on this. the places that the pm is going... yeah. ..are places where it's like, well, hang on, if you were confident you were going to hold on to ultra safe seats, you wouldn't necessarily be spending your time there. quite. and there's loads of examples of that, and there have been for quite a few weeks, and we're able to paint in more sort of day by day. i think what we're also seeing more, and this has been sort of subtle, this, it's almost like a kind of crossfade—y type thing, is that we were talking with our newscasts last week about those remarks from grant shapps, the defence secretary, who had given that interview on times radio, where we talked about the quote unquote "super majority," the danger as he saw it, of a of labour winning

and winning big. and by the way, as we're recording this, there's been another so called mrp poll from ipsos. these are these polls that don't just do the kind of percentage support for the various parties, but translate it into seats. multi linear regression and post stratification, something or other. yes. and this latest one suggests an absolutely colossal labour majority. and so i think what we're seeing now subtly, some more subtle than others and some a lot less subtle than others. and grant shapps was very unsubtle when he did his take on it last week — is the conservatives tilting towards talking about what they see as the danger of a labour win, and as they would see it, the really big danger of a really big labour win while still saying that they're fighting for every vote and they'd really like to win. and, of course if you want to, as a conservative, reduce a labour majority, prevent a labour majority

or whatever, then you need as many votes in as many places as you can get them. so the two things aren't entirely inconsistent, but there's been a shift, i think, in the tone of their messaging, which i guess just reflects what the opinion polls are consistently saying. and therefore, the mood, if you like, of this election campaign, which i guess someone likejohn caldwell is attempting to articulate as an individual, that they are out of necessity having to respond to that. and i guess hoping that in so doing, perhaps particularly that sense of the prospect of a labour big win might put some people off if they feel that any party winning big is not something that would be in the interests of a sort of vibrant democratic process in the years to follow. should we launch our new feature? oh, yeah. well... or i could just tell you what it is. yeah, i have no idea. that's the launch. so i was thinking because of the timing of the election, it's the school holidays in several parts of the uk, when it's polling day on the 11th ofjuly.

so i wonder if we're going to see a record high number of postal votes. mm—hmm. and also the postal votes have started to arrive on people's doorstep. yes. so on that point, the election has started. that's the, i think, the the point to make — people are voting now. and then if you look at the trend of the proportion of the electorate voting by post and you go back to 1997 and you run it to 2019, i haven't got the exact numbers in front of me, but it's gone up, and it's gone up a lot. it used to be very...it used to be negligible. and now if you look at previous recent general elections, it's around about a fifth. yeah. that is a lot. postal votes are now going out and a lot...the evidence suggests, as far as i understand it, there's a lot of people who have asked for a vote by post, tend to vote pretty much as soon as they get it. so a lot of people are voting right now or have a, you know, their polling card on the kitchen table or whatever. so, yes, we're doing this countdown to two

weeks on thursday, but, actually, people are hearing things and will be hearing newscasts and various other things. and using it in decision making tonight. and thinking, "you know what? "it's time to vote," and then doing whatever they're going to do. so the election is now under way in significant number and we shouldn't in our, "ooh, how many days to go are there. what does the countdown clock say?" yes, granted, probably 80% of those who choose to vote will vote on voting polling day, but a substantial minority will be voting in the coming days and week—ish. and i love that you said all that holding a pen. it felt quite apt. it should be a pencil. i suppose you can vote with whatever tool you want at home. also on that note, i thought it was interesting in keir starmer�*s interview with nick robinson on panorama on friday, keir starmer used a new formulation of rather than "not a single vote was being cast" — because he knew the postal votes were going — he said "not a single constituency has been won." so that's the new version of... 0h! .."it�*s still too early to say." well spotted. i hadn't noticed that. exactly. and then of course, then of course, he said his thing about brexit. so we're more excited about it.

and people also tend to sometimes confuse, i've noticed, and far be it for me to accuse others of mangling words in front of microphones because my goodness, i do enough of it myself. but confusing, like, ballot paper with ballot box. yes, when people say, "oh, what are you doing in the ballot box? it's what are you going to do in the ballot booth? exactly. well that would be a shock for the for the tellers that the... surprise! how did you get in there?! anyway... you've distracted me from what our actual new gimmick is. oh, what is it? so i always think... you never told me. because you didn't let me, to be frank. because there's going to be probably, in theory, so many more postal votes... oh, yeah! ..because of the school holidays, that's made me think, why don't we try and find the newscaster who is going to be furthest away from home on the 11th ofjuly? what, having voted ? yes. and so they've applied for a postal vote because they're going away. and we want to find the person who has gone to the farthest flung place... at the time the polls open if you're voting physically. yes. that's a good idea. so where are you going to be

on the 11th ofjuly that is furthest from your home where you're registered to vote? and we'll do like a little kind of like race across the world style thing. newscasters around the planet who have voted, because we know there are newscasters all over the place. yeah. but who have voted. i haven't come up with the name for it yet. vote across the world. except you won't have voted across the world because you will have done it at home. yes. anyway, anyway, let's. .. that's too much working out. people have passed around for a title for this. exactly. people have got the concept now and you know how to get in touch. it's newscast app bbc.co.uk or you can whatsapp us on... oh, i haven't said this numberfor a while. 03301239480. and if that's just someone�*s mobile number, i'm really sorry. i'm pretty confident that's ours. you said that with great confidence. gusto. anyway, chris, lovely to catch up with you. and you. see ya. newscast from the bbc. now, please welcome miss information — that's what she's called on americast. and the wrangler of the undercover voters, social media

and disinformation correspondent marianna spring. hello. i like being the wrangler. you're the wrangler. the undercover voters who are 2a people in eight constituencies based on research from the national center for social research, eight kind of interesting constituencies, three made up voters in each representing interesting voter types. and you have different phones for each one to see what social media they're presented with, because there's no way of us knowing what other people's social media feeds are like. spot on, except private with no friends. yeah. you've got no friends. got no friends. they're fictional people. not real. yes. well, the undercover voters are halfway through the election campaign now. can we can we sum up what they're getting? yeah. so i think there's been it's been really interesting sort of looking at, i guess the social media stuff that they've been pushed falls into two camps. the first is the official stuff. so by official stuff i mean either the paid—for adverts that the parties themselves are buying and then targeting at people or the other kinds

of content that's coming from their own pages. so the labour party or the conservative parties page, for example. and it's quite interesting, i've seen quite a few adverts popping up in my undercover voters feeds, particularly because they're based in battlegrounds. so it's kind of unsurprising that the parties are paying for ads. so for example, i've seen quite a lot introducing labor's candidates in particular areas or ones from the conservative party saying "voters, please don't give, please don't give keir starmer "a huge majority." and if you look at the numbers, so the money is quite interesting as well. so who targets me are a group that basically collate the money that's being spent that the parties have to be transparent about on, for example, facebook�*s ad library. so this is the money they've spent on adverts on meta's sites. so that's facebook and instagram. so labor's spent more than £1.5 million while the conservatives have spent around 840,000. this is from the start of the campaign up until the 14th ofjune. and then if you look at the other parties,

they�* re a lot less. so the greens have spent £65,000, the lib dems £69,000, reform £11,900, snp £6,800 and applied camry £3,500. reform £11,900, snp £6,800 and plaid cymru £3,500. interesting that a league table there. do we know who's getting the most bang for their buck? can you even work that out? well, first kind of answer is kind of not really. but the most interesting thing this election has been actually the not paid for stuff. so the stuff that is connected to their official accounts but that they can't pay to target at people has been getting loads of reach. so like videos, memes on tik tok, for example, where you can't pay for political ads. and it's quite interesting, if you look through the kind of league table of likes, like you've got labour and reform who have done pretty well in terms of their likes on videos versus, say, the conservatives greens snp primary. ——say, the conservatives greens snp, plaid cymru,

the liberal democrats, who have all kind of had a sort of similar. but when it comes to tiktok as well, again, it's quite hard to tell. so views are probably more important than likes. but with views, you know, people can be rewatching one video in particular or people can be not even based in the uk. they might be recommended this and they can't vote or they might be too young to vote in the election. so it's hard to know even based on the traction they get... if they're reaching the right people. yeah, exactly. and then it would suggest that if you're the social media manager for a political party, rather than making a classic ad, then paying for it to appear on people's facebook feeds or on instagram, you're better off just making something that on itself is quite consumable content that mightjust go, not necessarily go viral because they're not really going viral, but that willjust pop up and be of interest to people. yeah, and i think that's because if you think about how people are consuming the election on their phones or me on my 2a phones, is that, you know, we're all quite used to paid is sponsored or an ad, for content now, like we know when something is sponsored or an ad, and i speak for myself when i say

i'll often like flick over it and be like, oh yeah, ok, that's paid for or whatever. whereas when you see content that looks what we call organic or native to the platform, it kind of matches up with everything else. so you might be more inclined to kind of stop, give it a bit of a look. it's the kind of thing you maybe enjoy. like a lot of the stuff has been quite funny, so people like it. there's a kind of meme battle going on, particularly between the conservatives and the labour party and so people kind of enjoy that content. some content from reform is very sort of like talking to camera. nigel farage talking about policies in a kind of like a very conversational way. and then you've also got the liberal democrats with a lot of kind of like quite funny memes. obviously it davey�*s been kind of out and about on the campaign trail and they've used that quite a lot. so you find that yeah, it's that sort of stuff that, thatjust seems to be getting a bit more engagement. but what's interesting is it's not just the stuff from the parties that's getting lots of engagement, it's also the stuff from other people, like the total unofficial stuff. so political supporters, activists, all that kind of thing. also unidentified accounts

that is succeeding in reaching almost as many people as... and that's what this shift in dynamic i think kind of means. like, if it's not about paid for ads and it's more about the kind of native content to the platform, anyone can make that, and people can find themselves going viral who don't anticipate it. some of that stuff is really good and is people expressing their opinions, and that's obviously a very valid and important thing to do during the election. some of it, as we've chatted about on previous episodes of newscast is misinformation, ie fakes networks of accounts and allegations about bot accounts. and the social media companies have taken quite a lot of action after my investigations on this stuff. two observations. one, some of this stuffjust isn't that new really, is it? because you think back to 2015 and miller fandom, which was a bunch of i think there were women in their late teens, early 20s who had a thing for ed miliband and made quite funny memes about ed miliband. and for a couple of days in the 2015 election, people were like, what's this millifandom thing?

it's a supercharged version of some stuff that's been around for a little while. and the other thing is they'll be learning, don't make a hostage to fortune. in other words, don't do a video with a blank whiteboard or some very patentable over bits of content, because your enemies will take it and remix it with some with words or pictures or content that makes you look like an idiot. yeah. and exactly on that point is that if you think back to like you say, kind of like fandoms, political fandoms, we also obviously have like fandoms in all other walks of life, not just politics. those things aren't new, but i think what feels different this time is actually kind of two key changes in the social media platforms that people are using. one is that tik tok is a thing, it wasn't before, and the other is that x is different to how it was when it was twitter since elon musk bought it. and i think that that explains this kind of turbo—charged feel of like everyone can get involved, everyone can edit the white board, everyone can make their own content. you've got ai kind of chucked into the mix. and so while that's a good thing, because you've got lots of people who are feeling like they can get involved and make their voices heard. the flip side of that is that

there's a real absence of any kind of, like, order or regulation or rules, and you're kind of reliant on the social media companies, which is why they then been taken taking action off the stuff i'm exposing, although i don't know if that's the best way for the companies to work. well, mariana, thank you very much. thanks for wrangling all the undercover voters for us. always a pleasure. newscast from the bbc. hello. here in the uk, we're at long last starting to see the signs of some weather that feels much more like summer than it has done so far this month. other side of the atlantic, though, eastern canada, eastern side of the united states, summer has arrived with a vengeance. a long lasting, intense and life threatening heat wave, potentially record breaking, will affect many cities in the east. temperatures into the high 30s by day. but add on the humidity levels, it will feel like it's above a0 degrees for days on end. now, that sort of heat is not coming our way, but it will affect our weather in some form. we've got heat and humidity out towards the east, clashing with cooler conditions out in the west at the moment. and that is starting to fire up

a jet stream which will send ripples across the atmosphere, and at long last, move ourjet stream from south of us, bringing cooler air to the north of us, drawing in something a little bit warmer and high pressure, which through the second half of the weekend and beyond, will mean drier and warmer weather more widely. just a few showers to get the weekend under way. but notice the temperatures back to where they should be for the time of year, if not a bit above across most parts of the uk. now to get there, still a few blips around, one such on wednesday morning in terms of temperature. chilly start scotland, northern ireland, for some temperatures down into lowest single figures, but otherwise a fine day for the vast majority on wednesday. most places will be dry, varying amounts of clouds, some good sunny spells. northern ireland, england and wales. a slim chance of a shower in the hills, most will be fine. more cloud, though, into the north and west of scotland could bring some patchy rain, a drizzle, particularly later in the day. and temperatures here, 11—14 celsius, but most climbing a bit, especially across scotland and northern ireland. warmer there than in recent days. another fresh start to thursday, most places dry.

showers just close to the near continent, and more cloud to the north and west, which could bring the odd isolated shower. but for the vast majority, it should be a fine day again, if not more cloud than we see on wednesday. temperatures, though, similar to wednesday's values for most. now, thursday night into friday, we've got one area of low pressure near the continent, very close to the southeast, another one which will push weather fronts into the west as we go through thursday night and into friday morning. so western areas seeing a bit more of a change here. more breeze, more cloud, outbreaks of rain possible. central eastern areas, most should just stay dry through the day. best the sunshine in the morning, more cloud into the afternoon, warm in any strong sunshine, and the weather front will bring outbreaks of rain eastwards across most parts during friday night into saturday morning, and then that dry weather develops more widely. take care.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm arunoday mukharji. lets get you the headlines. vladimir putin arrives in north korea for talks with kimjong—un — his first visit to pyongyang in 2a years. president biden announces legal protection for undocumented people married to us citizens.

from deadly landslides in latin america to drought in china — extreme weather chaos across the world. and singerjustin timberlake is arrested in the us on drinking and driving charges. you're watching bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in the uk and around the world. we begin in pyongyang where in the past few hours vladimir putin has arrived on a much anticipated visit — his first there for 2h years. as you might imagine there was quite the ceremony. here's the moment the plane arrived — lots of guards

with their chins held at an extraordinary angle.