a 26—year—old man was arrested on suspicion of three counts of murder. and barbora krejcikova is wimbledon champion — the czech player beats italy's jasmine paolini to win the women's singles title for the first time. now on bbc news, political thinking with nick robinson. welcome back to a new series of political thinking, a conversation with, rather than an interrogation of, someone who shapes our political thinking about what has shaped theirs. quite a lot has changed since we were last on air. that landslide labour victory, to name but one. now, speak to any labour insider and they'll tell you that my guest today was at the heart

of that victory. pat mcfadden was labour's campaign coordinator and he is now at the heart of keir starmer�*s governing project. he's what's called chancellor of the duchy of lancaster. we'll discover in a few minutes exactly what that means. but it does mean that he's key to delivering that promise on the front page of labour's manifesto — change. and one reason he got thejob is that it's not the first time he's been at the heart of government. he was tony blair's political secretary 20—odd years ago. pat mcfadden, welcome back to political thinking. good to be here, good to be here. i want to know, what was it like on the night of the election? that exit poll comes in at ten o'clock. how was it for you? it was an enormous relief. i was sitting in my house in wolverhampton, where i'd been campaigning during the day, and in the nearby target seat

for us in dudley. and it's such a moment. i remember looking at the clock and its five minutes to ten, its four minutes to ten, and then itjust flashes up and the emotion was relief, not ecstasy. just after so many years out of power, after so many lost elections, that we'd done it. so if it's relief at ten o'clock on that night after the polling closes and you see the exit polls, when did you allow yourself some exhilaration? when was there a moment where you punch the air and hug your colleagues and shout forjoy? well, one of the curious things is you get the exit poll and then nothing happens for hours.

you get a result from sunderland, gateshead, where they're really quick at counting the votes and then you don't get many more results for hours. so it's really only by, you know, once you get to sort of 2:30/3am when they start to come through really quickly at that time. and that is another sense that this is real, because even when the exit poll comes out, there's part of you thinking, "well, this is quite a multiparty system now, there's a lot going on here. is this accurate?" and it turned out, as the exit poll has most of the time in recent years, to be pretty close to the mark. and were you on the phone to keir starmer the second that came out? not the second, but we spoke pretty quickly. as you can imagine, that was a very nice, warm call. an emotional call? as emotional as keir and i get, which is not...probably not wildly. i guess he too was was very relieved. so he was in london at that point.

i'm still in wolverhampton and, you know, i don't come back to london until about eight o'clock the following morning. and you come back as a member of the cabinet. you go to downing street. was that the first time you'd been back to downing street since you worked there as political secretary for tony blair and then as a minister in the last labour government? it was the first time i'd been in the door. i think i'd been there as an mp to hand a petition in with a family from my constituency. but that moment, being in the street and we took our children, and seeing, keir starmer arrive in a car, seeing the new prime minister step up to the podium, with mostly labour staff and family and friends and so on, was a really, for me, a really

wonderful, beautiful moment. and you knew what power was like. you'd been in downing street under tony blair. but it's different, isn't it, when you're at the cabinet table? last time we spoke on political thinking, you talked about your heritage. yourfather, james, a labourer, your mother, annie, worked in a council children's home. is there a bit of you at a moment like that that thinks, "wow, what would they have thought to see me, their son, here at the cabinet table?" yeah, i guess there is. i guess there is. and you're right, i'd been in number ten before in different ways. i'd been a staff member there during the tony blair years. i had been a minister of state when gordon brown was prime minister. but this was the first time where i'd been appointed to the cabinet, as it were, in my own right, as a full cabinet member.

and it's notjust me. i mean, i looked around that table on saturday morning when the cabinet met and two thoughts struck me — one, all his friends who i'd been working in politics with for many years with the shadow dropped, so i'm looking across the table at secretary of state for health, wes streeting. on my left is secretary of state for education, bridget phillipson. and so on around the table with that team. the second thing that struck me, and there's been some commentary on this, is around that table are more people from ordinary backgrounds than has ever been in a cabinet in british history. and keir starmer uses the phrase "working class". for years people didn't say working class. there was a great debate, you'll remember, aboutjohn prescott when he was tony blair's deputy —

was he still working class or had he become middle class? it's interesting that keir starmer uses the phrase again and again, talks of working—class families like mine and working to help them. why is it important? it's not a qualification for leadership in itself. i don't believe it is, but i do think it's notable, particularly in this country where so many of the leading jobs in the country, and certainly in the professions, aren't going to people like that. and this has been an issue in the uk for many, many years, whether it's seniorjudicial figures or around the different professions. and i did an interview with somebody during the election and he was asking me about this, one of thejournalists, and he said, "do you really think this still matters in britain of 2024?" and i thought, are you kidding? of course it matters. not in the sense that i wake up every day thinking about it, but if you look around the country at who wields

influence and who's got the sort of keyjobs in the uk, you can't deny this still matters. so i think it is at least notable. and i hope it will help guide the politicians around that table, remembering where they came from, and trying to do things for people from similar backgrounds to their own. well, let's talk about what you're doing now. you were the campaign manager throughout the election. you became the voice, the face of the election for many people. you now have this utterly puzzling job title to most people, chancellor of the duchy of lancaster. translate into fluent human, if you would. what does that mean? well, we could, you know, this goes back to the sort of 1300s and henry iii, so we could be here all day. but in its modern incarnation, this title has been used really as minister for the cabinet office, the secretary of state in the cabinet office,

who is really in the engine room of government. that means working really closely with number ten on a whole range of issues. and it's a coordinating role, it's an unblocking role. it's, you know, trying to get stuff done. and that's in the spirit of this prime minister, because he's not a massively ideologicalfigure. he's a person that wants to get stuff done. so you're the enforcer? that's what he wants me to help him with. enforcer? progress chaser? all those things. i mean, enforcer sounds a bit harsh, but yeah, he wants another cabinet minister at the centre. the centre of government is really the prime minister, the cabinet office and the treasury. and things can work well when they're all pushing in the same direction. when you were in charge of the money, the shadow chief

secretaryjob, it was said that the most powerful thing in the labour party was a twitch of pat mcfadden�*s eyebrows, that anybody who suggested they wanted to spend some more cash would be greeted with this minor twitch, which meant don't even think about it. now you're the enforcer, will there be a bit more eyebrow twitching? what will you what will you do? it was a shared endeavour. and it's an important point, actually, because we had to take account of the situation changing, interest rates liz truss crashed the economy. i get the policy point. i was asking about the way in which you got your way. but there was another, you know, there was another lesson which i always talk about, these tests of trust that political

parties have to pass. and for me, passing the test of trust on the economy and public money was just as important as the other major one, which is national security. and, you know, i always think you're not going to get listened to on policy unless you pass those. so it was a shared endeavour. keir starmer really bought into this. rachel was bought into it, i was bought into it. and to be fair, all that stuff about eyebrows and so on, we didn't really have to have a lot of fights and arguments in the shadow cabinet about this. i think people realise that writing a big christmas wish list of public spending and calling it radicalism just wasn't the case. anybody can do that. it's an interesting word that, radicalism, because this week you were praising your old boss, tony blair. you said that you owe tony blair, the labour party owes tony blair a great debt. he, at the conference you were speaking at, speaking to me on the today programme on other

occasions, has often said he wished he'd been more radical, more quickly in government. he'd realised the power he had with that big majority. have you learned from that? do you want to be more radical than people think you're being? well, we've been out of power for 14 years, and we shouldn't waste a moment. this is the chance to implement change and we're in a position now where we've got a good majority for the next few years. i do also have to say, though, this was an argument during the campaign as well as after it, having a big majority doesn't give you any more money. it doesn't magic up money, nor does it mean, as some of the right—wing newspapers were suggesting, that somehow there would be this change in the character of the labour party if it had a big majority, that somehow we'd all become things that we are not. that won't happen.

but i do believe, you know, we are there to govern, we're there to do things. and insofar as we can, except in the economic constraints and the inheritance that we've got, which, if anything, is worse than we thought of, then we've got a job of service to do. and keir starmer likes to talk in terms of missions. and when he first did it, i think people just thought it was another word for pledge or promise. but he means something rather different, doesn't he? and he talks of working in a different way with these policy boards across government. now, there are people, you'll know this, who as soon as they hear policy board admissions, they just start to yawn. just so incredibly dull. is it important? are you saying it's different? well, what he means by all that is, i think two things.

one is just trying to think about long term. i liken it to a ship on the ocean, where if you haven't got the engine on, you're just going to get buffeted around by the weather. and there's always the political weather, there's always headlines you didn't... events and so on. but it is easier to navigate if you've got the engine on and you know, you know where you're going. and for the prime minister and for the government, the sense of mission around five key things is the sense of direction. and what he's saying is you don't do this overnight, but it's your long—term goal and your short—term policy should be aligned with that. i think one of the things that frustrated him watching the previous government was all the sort of chaos of the reshuffles, but it wasn't just the chaos of the reshuffles, you had loads of churn in top civil servants, and it meant lots of policy discontinuities. and people just looking at the uk and saying it all feels a bit chaotic. and i think he would like to bring a sense of order and direction to that. and if you

take something like health, for example, you've got a new secretary of state. you've mentioned him, wes streeting. he's said some quite bold things about the nhs having failed. what does it mean, though, this different approach? does it mean that policy is taken by a much wider group of people than that, that this board brings in other personalities? alan milburn has been mentioned, for example. yeah, well, look, his mission is to get the waiting list down. you know, we enter government with the lowest level of public satisfaction with the nhs ever recorded. what wes streeting is saying, quite rightly, is, look, we love the nhs, but we're not here to turn it into a shrine. this is a thing that's much loved but isn't working as well as it should, and we might as well uncover all that and expose the problems and then start to deal with them. now, what's the difference between this and any other secretary of state for health who would say that? i think we're going to try

to work together a bit more so that if he's got a blockage somewhere which isn't part of the department of health, there's a forum for raising that and dealing with it. and it's an age—old whitehall problem, this, all the silos and so on. so if i can and if number ten can help with sorting some of that stuff out, then hopefully that will be a good contribution. so if he says the welfare system isn't helping or if some other parts of that... you know, we can bring it together a wee bit more. that is where the boards can operate. now, you've a couple of times said we haven't got any money. you know, and you still haven't got any money even though you've got a majority. tony blair, your old boss, was pretty stark this week. now, as well as saying you needed to embrace technology, he said this week that you should look carefully at this election result. that reform uk, seen as such a problem for the tory party, could be a problem for labour as well. do you share that view?

well, i spoke at his event the other day and i said, in the context of this changing political landscape, that curiosity is a duty of political leadership. i was brought up on traditional labour tory fights. they were, in the main, about tax and spend. not always. i mean, in recent years europe became more of a feature of them, but mainly about tax and spend. i think we are now probably in a different political landscape. it's quite interesting what's happened in the labour party in the last five years. you know, we've changed into more of a recognisable centre left party if you like, compared to where we were five years ago. but on the right there's a much more fluid

and uncertain picture emerging. and i genuinely, without being partisan about this, just being interested, you know, i'm very interested in what is now going to happen in the conservative party. will it face down reform and try and fight reform, or will it become more reform—like? i think that is a fascinating question. but he thinks there's a question for you, too, that working class voters in, what, 4 million odd, many of them working class, chose to vote for a party that had a different agenda, as you say, from the traditional tax and spend — culture issues were very important to them. and tony blair, your old boss, said, "we've got to avoid any vulnerability on wokeism." i think what tony blair is saying to you gently is that a left government, a government of the centre left, without much money to spend, can be tempted

to please its voters or its activist base by being progressive, by being his word, not mine, woke. you should always remember who you're serving. and i think keir starmer deserves credit for changing the labour party's job description. and if thejob description is i'm just going to keep my activists happy and stakeholder management becomes the day and it might be this stakeholder or this interest group, then you lose touch with the voters. when you do that, you also fail to fulfil yourjob description. what he's done is he's changed that and said it's got to be country before party. and if you're putting country before party, then it's a good guide not to get dragged down the road of stakeholder management and doing things, on whatever issue, because there's a very loud group

who are demanding that you do it. talking of loud groups, last time we spoke last year was in the immediate aftermath of the horror of what happened in october the 7th in israel. and since then, the politics of anger has produced not just protests, but defeat for good labour friends of yours in particular, the man who should have been in the cabinet office with you, i think, john ashworth, who said this week that he'd been the victim of vitriol, bullying, intimidation built on what he said was the foul, obnoxious lie that i was responsible for genocide. and the truth is, there were several labour mps who onlyjust survived in their seats — jess phillips, shabana mahmood — who also believed that that was what's going on. do you?

the first one, jonathan ashworth, i should say, i mean, i regretany labour colleague who lost their seat, butjust personally, i worked really closely with him. he was a really important part of the election campaign. and, you know, we we talked a lot. we met a lot. he was really part of the core team that helped shape the labourcampaign, so i deeply, deeply regret the loss of his seat. i think two things on the point you're making. first of all, there is clearly a level of anger with us in parts of the community that contributed towards those results and we have to see that and think about it and think about how to react to it and respond to it and where we've lost trust and support. you always want to work to get that back. but there is another thing is that the campaign in some of those seats was pretty aggressive.

jonathan himself was subject to some pretty ugly intimidation on the street. other candidates were too. and in responding, i think we've got a right to point that out as well. because you have to stick up for your values. so i do want to understand it fully, but i want to stand up for campaigning in the right way. might there be a role for government action, or for policy change, to say we cannot have that sort of behaviour on the streets of britain? you want free debate, but i don't want to see candidates hounded, surrounded by people, filming everything, trying to goad them into a reaction in the street. it happened tojonathan ashworth. it's happened to other people, too. it's not acceptable. there'll be other people shouting at the radio saying, "just change your approach to gaza. change your approach to israel, for goodness�* sake, stand up to israel."

look, there might be and i think, you know, this debate is so hot that it's been quite difficult to communicate on it. you know, one of the first calls that keir starmer made was to the prime minister of israel expressing enormous sympathy for what had happened on october the 7th, but also calling for a ceasefire, calling for more aid, asking him to work towards a solution. that ended up with a palestinian state. that was one of the first calls he made at the weekend. it's quite hard for us to get a hearing for some of that in parts of the community. but we'll keep going. let's return to where we began, how it felt to win when you met all your new colleagues, what, 411 members of the parliamentary labour party? you described that photo opportunity. there was gathered all together with keir starmer as the new prime

yeah, it was, it was. it was wonderful to see over 400 labour mps standing there in church house. and, you know, it's a great result for us and i hope we can do good things for the country on the back of it. are you yet the man? because it seems to me this is your personal instincts to say, "well, hold on, fellas, it could be turned around in five years. don't take it for granted. don't think we're here for very long." well, first, you know, the point is to win a majority of seats. and it's, you know, some of this stuff about vote share, i think it's like winning a football match. and somebody saying, "oh, but the other team had more corners." that's not, you know, the point is to win a majority of seats. and that's what we did. that's how british government is decided.

of course, you never take anything for granted and you have to work hard every day. in a democracy, the accountability is constant, and that's a good thing about it. but i do also think after 14 years out of power, the labour party, you know, can enjoy its moment of victory and i hope that they do, we do. you mentioned the football. you're a proud scot with irish roots. are you anyone but england or can you bring yourself, can you bring yourself to watch the game? i wish i had a pound for every time i get asked this. the honest answer is i'm not pretending to be an england fan, but i do hope that england win this final on sunday night because it will make my constituents really happy. it will make the country really happy, and it will prove that england only ever wins anything under a labour government. pat mcfadden, thank you so much forjoining me on political thinking. thank you. few people had heard of pat mcfadden before the election campaign,

when he became the voice, the face of the labour party. and just as he has in the last half hour, he expressed caution about what labour could do but confidence that they could bring about real change. now, the test is on. thanks for watching. hello. well, it's been a pretty cloudy start to the weekend for most parts of the uk. the thickest cloud running thin off the north sea, affecting east scotland and eastern england, where we've also seen some outbreaks of rain. but across the south and west of the country, that's where we've seen the best of breaks in the cloud, although we did have some very heavy downpours across some southern coastal counties. with the sunshine coming out across parts of southern england,

we saw temperatures in the warmest spots reach the low 20s, which felt, i'm sure, quite nice. now, overnight tonight, the low pressure in the north sea stays put. it will continue to feed in these northerly winds, with further outbreaks of rain at times affecting eastern areas of both scotland and england. temperatures, for the most part, staying into double figures. and for sunday, i think, overall, with that area of low pressure continuing to feed in the cloud across the eastern side of the country, it's here where we'll see damp weather to start off the day. probably quite a lot of cloud elsewhere as well, but i suspect there will be some sunny spells for western scotland and the southern half of both england and wales. where the sunshine comes out, temperatures will push on into the low 20s. it will feel quite nice. but for eastern areas of scotland, eastern england, particularly around those north sea coasts, those temperatures still very disappointing for this time of the year. and heading through monday and tuesday, the next area of low pressure slowly tracks across the uk from the atlantic. now, on monday, the rain really is limited to the south—west, so parts of wales and south—west

england could have some heavy rain, maybe some thunderstorms mixed in with this, maybe some localised surface water flooding to watch out for. but away from that, there should be a fair amount of dry weather and those temperatures are a bit higher than they have been over recent days. we're up to 21 in glasgow. central and eastern england quite widely seeing temperatures into the low 20s. make the most of that relatively dry day because through tuesday, as the low pressure works into the north sea, the heaviest rain will be across the eastern side of the uk. probably the driest weather, through the afternoon, will start to move into northern ireland, wales and south—west england. temperatures — high teens to low 20s. quite close really to thejuly average for quite a few places. beyond that, it stays quite unsettled across the north—west of the uk, but further south, high pressure might give us a run of three or four days of dry and relatively pleasant weather, before unsettled conditions return.

live from washington. less than 2a hours to go before the euro 2024 football final. england face spain with the england manager saying all his players are fighting fit. i'm not a believer in fairy tales, but i am a believer in dreams. and we've had big dreams, we've felt the need and the importance of that, but then, you know, you have to make those things happen. in other news — israeil�*s prime minister benajmin netanyahu says it's not clear a deadly attack in gaza against two top hamas commanders was successful in killing them. the hamas health ministry says at

least 90 palestinians were killed. barbora krejcikova is wimbledon champion — the czech player beats italy's jasmine paolini to win the women's singles title for the first time. hello. england manager gareth southgate

says england players can bring happiness to the nation