also on the front pages. rees mogg, also on the front page. he is making nice money from a financial firm which is set up in 2007. he gets about £1 million a year.. 2007. he gets about £1 million a year. . . why 2007. he gets about £1 million a year. .. why is that a story? exactly. six months ago may not have been interesting. the big personality, the breakthrough guy, who could lead to their party, all these ridiculous words and people... what people are attracted to about rees mogg is that he owns being a toff. he is unashamedly posh... don't hold back. this is all theatre and it is also silly season theatre. lam and it is also silly season theatre. i am saying that momentum is theatre and you can read tory mps saying quite openly that if this guy is

made leader of the party, we are out of here. he is on the right and he represents a direction.. the doctors that can e—mail you now. i think it is happening already. there have been trials. the express. they e—mail you. this morning i was reading in the future your doctor will not be a human, but an ai doctor that checks in with the every day. yeah, but, i know... statistically, we hate going to the doctor. not many of us have time to doctor. not many of us have time to do that. e—mails are good enough. doctor. not many of us have time to do that. e—mails are good enoughm that not a way that the middle—class and people good at expressing in an e—mail will benefit? and people good at expressing in an

e-mail will benefit? people want to be mobile. it helps them. thinking about the american medical system, what is good you still is you can have personal contact. not only that, having a relationship. they can tell you things and get on the phone to you still. they know your first name. forget that in the united states. i hate going to the doctor with a stronghold. why is that? -- doctor with a stronghold. why is that? —— strong cold. you should go if you feel bad. a farewell to sir bruce. i am learning more about him. being in the theatre, this guy was a total phenomenon. left him. somebody eve ryo ne total phenomenon. left him. somebody everyone seemed total phenomenon. left him. somebody everyone seemed to love. —— bless him. the music is rolling. that

means we have to shut up. thank you for watching. coming up next, we have meet the author. thank you for watching. readers of alanjudd's spy stories first met charles thoroughgood when he was in the army, then when he was a trainee in the secret service, but now a few years on, he's become chief of m16. he's top dog, but whitehall doesn't work quite like that. in deep blue, thoroughgood spends almost as much time fighting the bureaucracy around him and his rivals as the people who are trying to steal something important and dangerous. welcome. it might be thought by some people that when you reach the top

of the tree in the secret world, you know everything, you're in charge. but in this book, charles, your hero, discovers that many of the battles he's fighting aren't with the other side or some terrorist group or something, but with people around him. yes. i think that's not peculiar to the secret world either. i think most organisations, maybe even the bbc, you might find you devote a lot of your energies to internecine warfare, or to problems within the organisation which stop you doing what it's there to do. so that is part of charles' dilemma and i think it's in a way easier to write a spy novel if you have things going on on the home front than if you're just fighting, as it were, the war abroad. and that's life particularly in that kind of world because there's so much you can't say, even to fairly close colleagues. i mean that might also be true in the bbc, who knows? i couldn't possibly comment, but that is the way that it works, isn't it?

yes, there's a necessary compartmentalisation. of people in secret organisations tend not to talk about their secrets to other people in the organisation who have different secrets. one of the things about deep blue, and i'm not going to go into the plot because it would ruin it for anyone who hasn't read the book. one of the things about it is that there's a kind of old—fashioned quality to it in a sense that the crises, the threats, the panic doesn't really change with the ages. i mean, there might be different technology. you might be intercepting phone calls in a contemporary way that you couldn't have done before, but the fundamentals are exactly the same. they don't change. no, i think the fundamentals to spying don't change. it's often said to the second oldest profession and essentially, you're dealing with intelligence, with people telling other people secrets, or not telling them secrets, trying to stop them. and there are various ways in which the telling can happen. it can be technical, it can be person to person,

or it could be whatever you like, but essentially, you're dealing with the same things. and, of course, what is not said is often as important as what is said. indeed. what makes charles thoroughgood, your central character, whom we met originally in legacy when he was training to be an officer in m16, what makes him good at hisjob? why did he reach the top? well, i think he, erm, well i'm not always sure he is good at hisjob and it's a bit of an accident, he's reached the top. he never expected to and it was only because of treachery within the higher circles that he did. i think he's good at his job because he's determined to get to the truth of something. i think that's what marks him out and he's not too committed to it. he doesn't live only for that. he is, i hope, a human being. that's a very interesting observation. he's not too committed to it. do you mean that the people who are sometimes best at that kind of thing are people

who despite perhaps moments of excitement, moments of, you know, important action, nonetheless keep it in perspective and make it only as part of their lives? i think the best people do because after all, you're dealing with human beings and if you're not much of a human being yourself, you don't understand other human beings very well. so you need that kind of perspective, or ought to have it anyway. i suspect that anyone reading this book or its predecessors who doesn't know anything about you and perhaps reads a biography that says, a biographical note that says, former soldier and diplomat, might suspect that you have some experience of labouring in the secret vineyards, and you have, haven't you? i've heard that, too. people have said that about me in print and to my face. it's quite interesting that you should raise it. and you've never denied it? i don't think so. in that case, let's talk about the people that you may have reason to know something about and how they behave because you've talked about thoroughgood not letting this dominate his life.

why is that a good thing? well, i think you've got to have a life outside what you do, or you ought to have anyway. if your life is wholly in what you do, you become confined within it and especially if you're working in the secret world, which is, you know, cut off from most other parts of humanity, it's a good idea to have an idea of what the rest of humanity's doing and to see that you are actually only part of a bigger picture. you're not the whole picture. you say cut off from the rest of humanity, which of course is an interesting observation because it is inevitable, and we see this in your novel to the person of thoroughgood and his friends, that you are engaged inevitably in deceit. perhaps benign deceit of family and friends as well as, you know, the other side, whatever it may be at any particular moment.

i think, yes. the question of deceit is really very interesting because in a way, you have to be honest. i think for many people in the intelligence professions, honesty is the most important quality and they need to be rigorously honest in their deceit. you deceive the people you should deceive for the right reasons. you don't deceive just promiscuously or for the wrong reasons, and you have to be very honest with yourself about who you're deceiving and why. promiscuous deceit must be a hazard of the trade though? i imagine it is. i mean, people learn techniques of deceit that could carry over elsewhere if they were dishonest. and perhaps enjoy it a little bit too much. that's a problem, too, isn't it? indeed. i think we all enjoy knowing a secret and it's a form of power and we also enjoy sharing a secret. so it is a hazard, yes. somebody once said to me, i think who's got reason to know about these things, that dealing in the secret world as thoroughgood does, having reached the top particularly, what you're dealing with in the end is the riddle of power. what you're dealing with is trying to work out why someone is doing something, how they're using the power they have and perhaps how to stop them.

yes. i can see what is meant in that. if you apply it to the british system, the british intelligence agencies, for example, do not have a great deal of power in the british state, unlike many other countries where they're much more powerful. the british intelligence agencies essentially advise. they provide information and governments make the decision. so real power lies with whitehall governance, but of course within any organisation there are power structures and of course there's power play within that. why do you enjoy writing about this world ? you write about other things. you've been celebrated for a series of remarkable short novels, some of them almost novellas, and yet you return to this theme. what does it allow you to do as a writer that you enjoy? i think it allows for an element of humour, which i quite like injecting.

i mean, not to make them very funny books, so you could do entirely humorous books about the secret world, but whenever people are trying to be secret, things go wrong. i mean if you arrange to a man with red hair, six foot seven in the nearest bar to the bbc here tonight at six o'clock, you go into that bar and there'd be four them. it's just the nature of things. that is the way life is. yes, so one can bring that out. all carrying the daily telegraph under their left arm. exactly, yes. yeah. yesterday's. what's next? thoroughgood's reached the top. does he survive at the top? can you tell us? well, i haven't decided because each of the thoroughgood spy novels

was never written with a successor in mind, so i've always had to juggle what happens to him. i would never have made him chief early on if i thought i was going to go on writing them. and that, of course, is power by another name. yes. yeah, that is power by another name. alanjudd, author of deep blue out in paperback, thank you very much. thank you. today has been a day of sunshine and showers. the heaviest showers and the north—west of the country. tomorrow's weather will be influenced by this, hurricane gert, which a few days ago was on the eastern seaboard of the united states. the moisture left over from this hasjoined a states. the moisture left over from this has joined a weather system racing towards our shores from across the atlantic. sunday will be across the atlantic. sunday will be a decent day. plenty of morning sunshine. fewer showers in scotland than today. more settled. cloudier in the west. later on, the cloud will start to bring outbreaks of

light rain and drizzle. turning murky as well in the hills and coasts. heavy rain pushing to northern ireland and southern counties of england. early in the week ahead, warm air wafting into parts of the uk in the south. given decent cloud breaks, temperatures pushing up into the upper 20s. it looks like a long time coming, but we have some warn august weather on the way. this is bbc news. our top stories: spain's government says the terror cell behind last week's attacks — has been dismantled — as the hunt continues for a key suspect several members of thejihadist cell came from this small town in the pyrenees. residents there are still trying to work out how they became radicalised tens of thousands of people take to the streets of boston, to protest against a far

right rally in the city. at least 23 people are killed and more than 60 injured after a train derails in the indian state of uttar pradesh. and a beautiful diversion from some grim reality. wejoin the man united fan club in baghdad.