is labour do not have that important is labour do not have that hold on scotland anymore. you're only going to get into power ever if you team up with the snp. they have a line they have been trotting out about the coalition of chaos between the lib dems and the snp and labour. that is difficult for labour to bat away. looking at the numbers, there is every chance, they hurt labour in 2015 and the tories are trying to do it again this time around. very quickly in the last minute, let's think about ukip. we have more mps now. they seem to have gone down the tubes. what is the point? in the polls they are collapsing. look at the tory voters who went to ukip, they all go back to the tories. theresa may is do what ukip wanted. she is pulling a of europe and bringing back grammar schools. douglas carswell said, myjob is done. a lot of ukip voters will feel the same. vote conservative and you get out of europe and you get

grammar schools. that will really impact on the ukip vote. grammar schools. that will really impact on the ukip votei grammar schools. that will really impact on the ukip vote. i wanted to talk about northern ireland i have run out of time. that could be quite interesting with the concerns over brexit and a hard border. put that on ice for another time. tim stanley and jack blanchard, thank you very much. he would be a political journalist? the duke and duchess of cambridge made an unannounced visit to radio 1 earlier, to talk about the mental health campaign that they are supporting ahead of sunday's london marathon. they surprised presenter adele roberts, who is one of those running in the event, and revealed to dj scott mills that they are keen fans of the station. someone from around me told me you we re someone from around me told me you were a bit nervous about being on radio one today. i don't know what you are talking about. this is the face of calm. is it true that you listen and have text it in? under a

different name. yes. i'd text it in most recently. i was driving to work. shazier anyone to be brave enough to be up at that time of the morning. i stopped in a lay—by and have not text it while i was driving because that is illegal. did you get a shout out? i got a shout out from adele on the day and from sara cox. i don't think it matters who you are. a shout out on radio 1 is still great. the headlines on bbc news: jeremy corbyn pledges labour will protect the triple lock guarantee on increases to the state pension — but theresa may refuses to say whether she will maintain it. officials in paris say the gunman who shot dead a french policeman was known to them as karim cheurfi — a convicted criminal. the nhs trust, under investigation over the deaths of babies, was told it needed to improve ten years ago. an update on the market numbers

for you — here's how london's and frankfurt ended the day. and in the the united states this is how the dow and the nasdaq are getting on. now it's time for meet the author and this weekjim naughtie talks to michele roberts about her new book the walworth beauty. dickensian london in the year of the great exhibition, and the churning metropolis of our own time. brought together by two characters whose stories are intertwined and this and who reach for each other across the years that separates them. michele roberts' new novel, the walworth beauty, is a hymn to london. its changing ways and its enduring character. and also a book about how we live now, that celebrate timeless longings and desires. welcome. there is a ghostly element to this story.

do you like ghost stories? i do love them, and that's partly because i have felt haunted myself a couple of times, and they have had to work out what was going on, and i worked out that to explain a ghost, and the fear itit induced in me, i had to tell a little story to myself to make sense of it. one of the things about the ghostly element in this book is that it is very delicate and gentle. it's not somebody clunking along with his head under his arm or chains, it'sjust a breath on the neck, that kind of thing. was that your experience? yes, it was on the back of my neck, is if someone was pressing cold cobwebs against it. gosh. and then a mirror fell off the wall in the middle of the night and crashed. and i just felt full of terror, the atmosphere was charged with terror. the ghost in my novel, i think, is a bit of a kinder ghost, it's not so scary.

well, i didn't know any of this when we started, but that's really a very interesting story, because the book is wonderfully atmospheric, 1851 dickensian london. and the london that anybody who lives there now in 2011, 2012. you see them, really, part of a continuous story, don't you? i do, and i think anyone who loves large cities with ancient buildings and streets in them, and he walks in, as i do, has a sense, always of history being just below the pavement. it's as though the city is layers and layers of mystery. sometimes, it's popping up, a pavement tilts up, something happens, you pass by an old graveyard, you see an old industrial building. now, the story's told, essentially, by two characters, joseph and madeleine. whose stories are more than a century apart, and they are told in separate chapters which are interwoven in the book. and it's quite clear that you see something, despite all the differences between them, that connects them. what is it? i think they are both very concerned with the lives and fates of young women.

joseph is charging around south london doing research on to the lodgings of prostitutes, of young girls working with prostitutes. and madeleine, a century later, is very concerned with two young female friends of hers, how they survive in the big city, and learning that, obviously, not all young women these days, despite their poverty, feels the need to sell themselves as prostitutes. sojosef and madeline are having the kind of conversation that they are in a sense, haunting each other as much is being haunted. madeleine finds in her back garden, shards of bone, old buttons, cloth buttons, little bits of china, and she can't bear to throw them away. she's been digging the plot. so she brings them indoors, and that's when the hauntings start. by the end of the novel, we understand what those little tiny broken pieces refer to. and do you have a constant sense of the past? notjust in what happens if you dig up the street, but in the characters who walk those streets, what

they thought and felt? and what, in a sense, has been passed on to us? yes, one of my characters is the grandmother of madeleine. she's dead, long since, nellie. but she talks to madeleine, sort of, over her shoulder all the time. and she is a real bridge with the past, because that's how i remember my own london grandmother. her quips and saying, her amazing cockney accent. her bawdiness, her funny stories. i mentioned that the chapters are intermittent, one called joseph and one called madeleine. and the story unfolds way. technically, that's quite a tricky thing to carry off. did you find it difficult and did you simply write a joseph chapter, then a madeleine chapter? or did you do a lot ofjoseph chapters then stick madeleine in? i started with madeleine. and it was clear, quite quickly, that it wasn't going to work with just her as the narrator. and i was thinking, oh dear, is there really a novel here? and then wentjoseph erupted and just opened a door, went up a staircase in darkness,

opened another door, i thought, yes, the story starts now. well, of course, if we didn't know that you were a londoner before this, anyone reading the book would understand that you are, because it's just pulses with a love of the city and its history, its ways and voices. yes, and i've always lived in london. i grew up in the suburbs in london and moved to london as fast as i could. and i walk around it all the time, on my own, often at night. always trying to take a different route, happily getting lost, going to a pub, someone will come and talk to you. london is very alive for me, full of ghosts but full of people in the present as well. in that sense, it is still, especially in parts of south london that you set the bar again, it still has a dickensian feel, that sort of churning, nonstop life. the characters who inhabit it. i suppose it's like any big city, but london seems to have that quality. i think partly it is because we've got the city of london. and it is always renewing itself,

following up new buildings, old ones come tumbling down. and people are very energised, very driven, they hurtle about. even where i live in southeast london, on the main street, a sort of hurtling that goes on. this is the london that you love. the london i love is very much the modern city, but the city with all its echoes of dickensian times, through old industrial buildings. they are venetian, they are neo—byza ntine, they are neo—gothic, theyjust send me into rapture. i assume you love dickens? do you know, i have a lot of trouble with dickens. i find him a very difficult writer to read. that's interesting, why? partly, it's the carnivalesque, elaborate baroque prose. partly, it's the length of the novel. to my shame. partly, it's his absolute incapacity to create interesting women characters who aren't just sugar dolls. well, there we are, we'll get some letters about that. but there is that wonderful capture of a life that is, i suppose, now people would talk about it as being magic realism. you know, spontaneous combustion,

all the things that happen, there's a kind of life that takes us out of the here and now with wonderful beeps of the imagination. that, i suspect to you, must be exciting. it is, and i actually find that in dickens' essay, night walks, when he describes walking at night, roaming the city, coming across all kinds of strange characters, pausing to chat to them. that is the dickens i love. when did you start this business of wandering around london at night? when i was very young, i came to london when i was 21, after university. and ijust began to wander the streets. and of course, for women, there is a sexual double standard. if you're always told, it's dangerous, you mustn't do it, a woman who wanders the streets is called a streetwalker which means a prostitute, a man who wanders the streets is called a psycho geographer, or a flaneur.

but i always thought, i'm not going to let anyone take my freedom away. i have always walked around the streets. so you discovered a parallel universe of your own? i have, because as a reader, i've thought a lot about women writers who love the city like i do. so every time i'm in the city of london, i'll think of charlotte bronte coming to the coffee house before setting sail for brussels. or as i move up towards hampstead, i think of elizabeth gaskell, walking from harley street to hampstead, for an evening picnic. people like that. and many people will associate that with the walworth beauty, when they pick up your novel. michele roberts, thank you very much. thank you very much, jim. good evening. you may have heard it is about to get colder again and we are talking about snow in april. it has been so mild. very few frosts in march. i think it will be quite a shock to the system. the payoff will

be some beautiful spells of sunshine at times. we should see sunshine this weekend and a lot of dry weather. across north somerset the cloud bubbled up during the day and there was more clout than this morning. we are chasing the cloud, if you like. it should be clout that does not bring much rain. this is how the satellite picture looked earlier. the cloud in the north, we are starting to see the clouds break. the chilly air is filtering its way southwards. by morning, north of england and scotland, most of the areas are at risk of rural ground frost. not as cold as in the south. where we have the holes in the cloud, a bit of ground frost and mist and fog. there will be sunshine first thing. in the north, remnants of the week weather front in the south. that could give the odd, light shower. actually, the southwest might get away with it. sunshine breaking through. by the

afternoon we will see more brightness coming through. predominantly, probably try and bright as opposed to dry and sunny. similar across the north. the south of scotla nd similar across the north. the south of scotland should fare well. the north pestered by showers. sleazy and snowy over the hills. a sign of things to come. overnight tomorrow night, a cold night in the south with ground frost. still the risk of ground frost in the north. if you are heading out for the london marathon, if you're running or spectating, mixed fortunes. a bit chilly and cloudy. concern about the afternoon when the sun comes out. we could get to 16, 17 degrees. sunday looks like a decent day. sunshine and brightness coming through. in the warmth, 15 or 16. the strength of the sunshine is equivalent to august. in the cold air we have high

pressure and light winds. as that clears away, it is behind the cold weather front that we allow the blast of arctic air right away across the country and giving * of wintry showers, even at lower levels and even in the south. next week if you have plans, stay tuned. this is bbc world news today. the headlines from... the man who shot dead a policeman in paris on thursday, carrying shoes he had for the these convictions. officials have given details of his time in prison. melo during his imprisonment, or 1a years, prison. melo during his imprisonment, or“; years, during that entire period he did not show any signs of radicalisation. security forces mobilised head of the french presidential elections. the prime minister says everything will be done to make the election goes smoothly. as theresa may campaigns for the upcoming election here in the uk, there are

suggestions of a possible softening of her government's promise not to raise taxes. police investigating the bomb attack