and it have protected theresa may and it was nothing like her. the way we operate is not quite like this character, who seems to be operating independently. so independently he's good and has an affair with the home secretary. —— he even has an affair. anyone who crosses that line would not last very long and might not last very long within the police service. the met police wants to capitalise on the popularity of the bodyguard, there's been a surge of interest injoining the bodyguard, there's been a surge of interest in joining the force, it wa nts to interest in joining the force, it wants to recruit detectors and technology experts. it is about encouraging people to have an ambition, dream big, and actually, sunday, you could be protecting the queen or the home secretary. but at some day. but you won't get that instantaneously. one feature of the programme is the large number of seniorfemale police programme is the large number of senior female police officers and detectives from black and minority ethnic groups. the reality is different, they're in a minority as this asian counterterrorism

detective told me. she does not want to be identified because of the sensitive nature of role. women and be any officers are in every rank of the police service, in every specialism, so it's not a rare thing. —— woman and bme officer. we do have senior female and bme office rs do have senior female and bme officers but we do still need more diversity at, without a shadow of a doubt. the character of david makes great italian may inspire some potential recruits but he is no substitute for a real close protection officer. paloschi makes great telephone stop they have to stay in the shadow. let's ta ke let's take a look at the weather forecast. good afternoon. there's been plenty of drama in our weather over the last week or so. very wet and windy. things are coming down into the start of the new week. it's looking mostly dry, quite cool, and

the nights would be especially chilly. we have some rain to get rid of this afternoon. heavy rain with some wind behind it. a breezy afternoon with sunshine and she was. those temperatures will dip further as we go through this evening and tonight, largely clear skies overhead with most of the showers feeding away. we are looking at two, three or 4 degrees. they will be places that get down to freezing or below. a touch of frost tomorrow morning, essentially looking like a beautiful day with blue skies and sunshine for the most part. a bit of extra cloud, if you showers to come but not as many as there have been today. temperatures are still struggling a little better. highs of 14 to 15 struggling a little better. highs of 111 to 15 degrees. hello, this is bbc news. the headlines: labour leadership say they would be ready to back another eu referendum — if party members want one. sky shareholders are urged to accept us media giant comcast‘s

takeover offer of more than £30 billion for the tv broadcaster. and an increase in fraud. a bbc investigation reveals almost 50,000 older people were victims of scams in the last year. now on bbc news it's time for talking books. hello and welcome to talking books, here at the man booker 50 festival at the southbank centre in london. we've come to talk to dame hilary mantel, the only woman to have won the man booker prize for fiction twice, for her bestselling historical novels, wolf hall and bring up the bodies. her otherfiction may take you by surprise,

with books about ghosts, the supernatural, and the french revolution. the world, of course, eagerly awaits the final instalment of her hugely successful thomas cromwell trilogy, the mirror and the light. hilary mantel, welcome to talking books. we will come to the mirror and the light in due course, but i want to start with the books that you have written. i2 novels, short stories, a memoir, and i was very struck how very different they are — from 800 pages on the french revolution to performing psychics in suburbia, your subjects are unpredictable. how deliberate is that? it's not really deliberate, it's just i don't know how people manage to write the same book over and over again, because you grow,

you change, your interests change. although to me, there are subterranean threads that connect them, however disparate the subject matter may seem to be. i do wonder, though, by resisting categorisation, if you like, did that possibly prevent you building more of an audience earlier in your career? i think possibly it did. it's tempting for publishers and readers to want to put an author into a category. and to that extent, they want to be served the mixture as before. and as you say, you couldn't really predict what i was going to come up with next, and there's a mixture of the contemporary and the historical, which is probably quite unusual, i agree. success, when it came in the form of international recognition, fame, money, i presume, came relatively late in your career. did you feel you'd been ignored up till then? i'd always had a good press, but i hadn't had many sales.

and that changed. as soon as wolf hall was published, actually, even before the prize shortlistings. and i felt i hadn't pushed out my talent to find where it might go. so i still felt like a work in progress. so, as you yourself said, in many ways, wolf hall was the turning point. career—wise, yes, it was a huge turning point. not only the domestic sales, but translations, i think, had gone into 36, 37 languages, and it's just amazing to think that people on the four corners of the earth are reading about henry viii and his wives. well, what you did was follow up with another man booker winner in 2012, didn't you, with bring up the bodies? yes. i did wonder, how did people's attitudes towards you change after those two victories?

do you know, a lot of people thought they were my first books. and lovely, well—meaning people — women mainly — would rush up to me and say, how wonderful you did all this in your 50s! and i'd feel a little bit sulky, because i'd think, do you know i've been writing since i was 22? i wrote for 12 years before i was published. and that is a more typical career. but people love the idea of an overnight success. wolf hall and bring up the bodies — these two books cover what must be one of the most famous periods in english history, the most talked—about, the most written—about. i think indeed you said to me once it's the british national soap opera, isn't it? yes, it is. what did you think you could add that was new? cromwell is vital to understanding the crucial ten years of henry's reign.

and if you stand where he is standing, then this familiar material defamiliarises itself and it becomes a much more complex and rich story than the one that we're used to from our schooldays. it's the most remarkable career, and it's the arc of it. you know, the son of the brewer blacksmith from putney, rising to become earl of essex. you have to ask yourself, how is that done? "thomas cromwell," people say, "that's an ingenious man. "do you know he has the whole of the new testament by heart? "he is the very man if an argument about god breaks out. "he's the very man for telling your tenants 12 good reasons

"why their rents are fair. "he's the man to cut through some legal entanglement that's ensnared "you for three generations. "0r talk your sniffling little daughter into the marriage "she swears she will never make. "with animals, women, and timid litigants, "his manner is gentle and easy. "but he makes your creditors weep. "he can converse with you about the caesars, "or get you venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate. "nobody can out—talk him... if he wants to talk. "nobody can better keep their head when markets are falling and weeping "men are standing on the street tearing up letters of credit. " ‘liz‘ he says to his wife, one night, ‘i believe in a year or two, we'll be rich.' " thank you. in the novels, you challenge

the traditional view of cromwell. he was always depicted as a villain, and you make a much more sympathetic character, dare i say it, even quite beguiling. so what was it that you discovered to contradict that traditional view? well, i discovered a lot of rubbish, really. errors and prejudices just being kicked along from one generation of historians to the next. in many ways, he deserves his reputation. he was ambitious and unscrupulous. he was hard—headed. he was ruthless. but i think no more so than the typical courtier of his time. but he was a lot smarter. yes. so it is your view that the historians have got it wrong? not all of them. and it's interesting sometimes to see what a novelist gets or takes away from a simple piece of documentation that a historian may not notice.

but how historically accurate do you feel you have to be? i think you have to be absolutely accurate as far as the record extends. but of course you have to be challenging the record, and you have to be saying, "who wrote this down, and what was his source of information?" so in that sense, you're getting behind the record. but i think in cromwell‘s case, certainly, you have to be very suspicious of secondary sources. you see, to the elizabethans, cromwell was a hero. by the time we got to the victorians, he was a villain. so something happened at some stage in between, and he is a reflection, like most historical figures, of the times. we are not looking at him, we are looking in a mirror. you explain that very well. i think that's a very

interesting point. how and when did you become interested in him? because you'd wanted to write about him since the start of your career, hadn't you? i began work on a historical novel when i was very young, 22, not long out of university. and i really saw myself as a historical novelist, and i thought, right, first i will do the french revolution and then i'll turn my mind to thomas cromwell. and of course it doesn't work like that. no—one‘s career is that smooth. and just as well, because i could write about the french revolution then — it was made by young men and women. i was even younger than they were. mostly they were dead by their mid—30s. you were 22, were you? i was in my 20s and 30s when i was working on the book. and i could recognise their spirit and their hope, and their commitment and energy.

i couldn't write that book now. but i can write about a man in his 50s building up and accumulating his life's experience. so i think, you know, the time when you get an idea for a book, that isn't necessarily the time to execute it. sometimes you have to wait a couple of decades and then pick your moment to strike. 2003, and your memoir, giving up the ghost, in which you write about your childhood, growing up in the 19505 in northern england, but you also explain how you came to be a writer. because that wasn't the original plan. you were going to be a politician and a lawyer. so what happened ? yes, never under—ambitious! ithink... it's difficult, you know?

a woman from a working—class background with no connections, trying to get into law at that time. i wasn't even interested in being a solicitor, i wanted to be a barrister. i wanted to come to london and the centre of things. but with no connections and no money... it was very difficult in those days. but also i had health problems. i had an undiagnosed illness. but i was told that i was imagining it all. but by the time i was 21, i really had a sensation of doors closing on me and a feeling that i wasn't going to be able to make a professional career, that my health was in my way, and so i thought, well, i better have something that i'm in charge of. and i still had to work, of course. i still had a job, but i began writing in the evenings, on weekends, and i set my stall out for a big novel that i knew would take many years.

but that's the beauty of being 22, because the time just stretches ahead of you. and i still had no connections, and i didn't know anybody who was a writer. but what do you need? well, you need a piece of paper and a pencil and you're ready to go. so are you telling me that if you hadn't been ill, you wouldn't have become a writer? i certainly wouldn't have taken the decision at that precise time. i think possibly i would have made my way back to writing when i was living abroad, during which time i didn't have any meaningful career, so i think perhaps i would have come to writing at a later stage. but then it wouldn't have been the same book, because i would have been a different self. and of course you drew on those experiences in botswana and later

in saudi arabia in novels that you did write. yes, that's right. in a change of climate i wrote about southern africa. although at an earlier era — i wrote about it in the 19505. so that was a historical novel of a kind. and then i wrote eight months 0n ghazzah street, set in saudi arabia, reflecting my four years there. we've touched upon your illness, and as you say, it was undiagnosed for many years, and eventually you were diagnosed with endometriosis. that rendered you infertile. i was very struck by a line in giving up the ghost. you wrote, "i miss the child i never had — "what's to be done but to write them into being?" is it fair to say you've created the children you never had in your fiction? it would be fair to say i've created lives. they're more like a great tribe of brothers and sisters, i think. your people, your world.

you realise you only have one life to live and you want to try on for size all the other lives. and you want to move into different eras and you want to live in a man's body for a while, and all these things writing enables you to do. you mention this french revolution book — this epic 800—page novel, which was finally published, a place of greater safety, although it was previously rejected by publishers, wasn't, and that must have been difficult — was it? it seemed that someone who would write such a book must be someone of tremendous authority, someone we had heard of from oxford or cambridge. and it wasjust little me. and i don't think people could get their heads round it. they didn't know what it was.

and thankfully, what i did, instead of turning around every publisher in london with it, ijust said, stop, this isn't the time, go away, write another book, do the best you can, but make it completely different. which was every day is mother's day. yes, i thought, a contemporary novel, short, funny. if that doesn't take, i would've thought i was deluding myself and stopped. but fortunately it did take. so the first decade, 12 years of my writing, was very rocky. i mean, morale sank sometimes. i needed a lot of self—belief to keep going. but once every day is mother's day hit the right desk, and that was the desk of the literary agent who still looks after me, everything went swimmingly, comparatively. yes.

and finally, a place of greater safety was published. it was, and it won the sunday express book of the year prize. and i felt vindicated, in a sense. i mean, you start a huge epic about the french revolution. where does one start? well, manchester was my only choice. between the central reference library and the university, there was a very good collection of material and i simply read everything i could get my hands on. i was short on primary sources, but what i got were armfuls of gossipy victorian biographies. victorian—era biographies. which provide all the colour, the anecdotes, the personalities, and i built up from there. i've seen the binders

and the folders of research notes that you have, labelled "people", "places", "customs", "manners". at what point as a writer do you say, "i've done enough research now, i need to start writing?" well, to me, the two things are entwined. you know... you start them together, you run them together, and until you come into a particular scene you may not know what you need to know. or it may be that some little piece of information that comes your way, and it need not be information — you might see a picture or hear some music — starts you off on a new trail. so you think, right, this is the background music to this scene. i will quote the song and henry will sing it, and you change the mood, you know? or you decide to describe an event through describing

a painting, and it cuts through the complexities. and so you are always looking, not just for information from the historical record, but for a cultural context that will help you frame a scene. and i think that never stops. then, a little later, came another completely different novel, beyond black. you mentioned at the very beginning that there are themes you return to in your books, and this theme of the supernatural is one of those. so where did this interest in a world beyond ours come from? probably from being brought up as a roman catholic. as a child, you're quite convinced that there is another unseen reality that is more potent than this one.

and that this world is actually the illusion, something in which you are transitory, and doesn't really matter. what really matters is the world where the dead people are. and that was powerfully true to me as a small child. i think i lost sense of it as i grew up and moved away from the church. but that sense of another reality, sitting on your shoulder where your guardian angel is supposed to be, that's very powerful in my life. i really feel the dead are only a whisper away. do you believe in ghosts? i know about ghosts. i have to believe in ghosts. beyond black, which is a contemporary novel, and takes place mostly

within the m25, is actually a kind of work—up for the tudor novels, because it's all about the dead who won't lie down. the dead are on every page of that book, nattering away about all sorts of banal topics. and the whole theme of talking to the dead and being available to them, i was actually setting the schedule for my next 15 years of work, but i didn't know it at the time. yes. which brings us very neatly to the mirror and the light, the eagerly anticipated final instalment in your thomas cromwell trilogy. so how is it going? it's going well. it's just suddenly taken a leap forward, and just last week i could email my editor and say, since i emailed you last week, i have done 12,000 words, and they are good words.

12,000 words is nothing, but you suddenly think, now, this project, it's pulling away from its moorings, you know? it really wants to be written. and i think i'm probably entering into the most frenzied but also, in a way, the most pleasurable phase of the writing, where it seems to have taken charge and it's doing it itself. can you envisage a writing life beyond thomas cromwell now? there's so much i want to do. and notjust in prose but maybe in the theatre as well. and it'sjust a question of, how much stamina have i got, what time have i got left? each project takes years to realise. so i have to have a long think.

there are short stories i want to get going on, i have ideas for two or three more novels, and i'm going to have to make some hard choices, i think. hilary mantel, thank you so much. thank you. good afternoon. after a week that brought us more than our fair share of wet and windy weather, things are beginning to calm down a little bit over the next few days. this is the satellite picture for the last few days, you can see that stripe of cloud that brought various bouts of wind and rain. it's now developed a gap allowing high pressure to ease its way in. this will be with us for the start of the new week. many places looking dry through the week ahead, there will be some pretty

chilly nights, and the further north you are, there is the potentialfor wind and rain at times. this is the radar picture. seven areas have had the wettest weather so far, but at long last but rain is clearing away. then we go through this evening and tonight, most of the showers fade away, areas are left dry with clear spells, and the starry skies it's going to turn decidedly chilly. not just in the north, further south temperatures dip close to freezing. three or 4 degrees in the towns and cities. order touch below. there could be a touch of frost tomorrow morning, the odd missed patch as well. tomorrow looks like a stunning day with lots of sunshine and patchy cloud in the north—west. the odd shower, but not nearly as many as we had today. temperatures nudging up a little bit, 1a had today. temperatures nudging up a little bit, 14 to 16 had today. temperatures nudging up a little bit, 1a to 16 degrees. high—pressure sticks with most of us

into tuesday, another chilly start, but frontal systems gather up to the north—west, it bit of a change to come across parts of northern ireland anne western scotland. more in the way of cloud. outbreaks of rain, the wind will strengthen as well. come further south and east, lighter winds, more sunshine, well. come further south and east, lighterwinds, more sunshine, and with aircoming lighterwinds, more sunshine, and with air coming from the south—west temperatures start to creep up. 1a to 17 degrees. that doesn't mean we won't have another cold night, we will on tuesday, further north is not as cold because of the extra cloud. more of a breeze and outbreaks of rain. it is those northern areas that keep hold of the cloud, as we head into wednesday and thursday, further south sees some spells of sunshine. it starts to turn warmer. this is bbc news. the headlines at three. labour's leadership team say they ‘would back members' on another brexit vote.

i'm there elected as the leader of this party. the leader in order to bring greater democracy to this party. there will be a clear vote in conference, i don't know what's going to come out of all the meetings that are going on. could the brexit talks lead to a snap election this autumn? reports that plans are being drawn up. meanwhile the brexit secretary says he won't let the eu dictate negotiations. this is a bump in the road. we will hold our nerve. we will keep our cool and will keep negotiating in good faith. i think we need to keep these negotiations going. us media giant comcast wins a bidding war to take control of tv—broadcaster sky. shareholders are urged to accept the offer.