in north—eastern syria is continuing with more than 60,000 people now reported to be fleeing the danger. efforts are getting under way on capitol hill to introduce legislation threatening sanctions against turkey, there's been widespread international condemnation. two foreign—born men who are associates of president trump's personal lawyer, rudy giuliani, are charged with violating campaign finance laws. they are reported to have helped mr giuliani in his attempt to investigate the family of former vice president, joe biden. japan is braced for the strongest typhoon to hit the country since 1958, with the authorities warning that there could be widespread destruction, particularly over the weekend. japan airlines is set to cancel more than 90% of domestic flights to and from tokyo's main airport.

you are up—to—date on the head died. —— headlines. now on bbc news: stephen sackur speaks to brexit supporter stuart wheeler on hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. brexit represents a political gamble played for the highest of stakes. if britain leaves the eu without a deal, there will be significant economic disruption. even the most ardent brexiteers acknowledge that. but they believe the potential rewards justify the risks. it's a calculated bet on britain's future which comes naturally to my guest today — stuart wheeler, the successful businessman and lifelong gambler who backed his commitment to brexit with plenty of his own cash. has his money given him undue influence over britain's future?

stuart wheeler, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. would it be fair to characterise you as a lifelong risk taker? yes, it would. and what motivated you, from a very early age, to want to take so many risks? the first risk i took, i was very, very young, was at a point—to—point. is that a horse race? a horse race. and i backed the brighter days, second, one shilling of even money and it obliged so that was my start of gambling. how old were you? about eight or nine. eight or nine. and from that point on, it always seemed, you had, an obsession, would

you say with gambling? yes, i was interested in gambling but also in odds and probabilities as well which are very much connected with gambling, obviously. i suppose you were lucky in the sense that you were raised by a family who were sufficiently well—to—do. you always had access to money. you were well enough off to be able to indulge your appetite for risks. well, we weren't terribly well off. even people on the lowest incomes now are well enough to do a little bit of gambling, a lottery ticket or something. i wasn't so rich that i could gamble when other people couldn't, that wouldn't be fair. you mentioned lotteries. it seems your entire life has been to a certain extent has been this combination of calculated risk and chance and the greatest chance of all that you experienced was the fact that as an unwanted baby, an orphan, you were adopted by a family

who both loved you but also had the economic means to give you a life of privilege. i was actually very lucky the way i was adopted. my. div mother to be went to the adoptive home with her sister and my adoptive mother to be found a very good looking baby, obviously not me and said, how about that one? her sister said yes, but this other one who is making the real nuisance of himself might be a bit more interesting. that was me and that's how i was chosen. it was very bit bringing, wasn't it? your parents were not vastly wealthy but they were well—to—do and they also didn't really have jobs. they seemed to have, maybe not decadent, but they enjoyed their lives. yourfather, in particular, spent most of his time riding, shooting... unless you count, which is fair enough to count it, he fought

throughout the whole of the first world war, it's the onlyjob we ever had. he once said to me, i can quite see everyone should do some work for their money but i hope that doesn't happen when i'm alive. you, in your 20 and 30s, had of host ofjobs. you were a barrister, you worked in the city as a banker, couldn't really settle at any of it and throughout all of this time, your main love, your vocation, if i can put it that way, seems to have been playing cards, going to the racetrack and gambling. there is some truth in that and i was nailed barrister and a failed chap in the city as well. in the end, i couldn't get a job so when are friend of mine suggested starting ig index, ijumped at it because i had no other choice. were you an addict, do you think? a gambling addict? i don't think i was an addict in the sense that i might‘ve lost all my money ruined my life.

i like gambling but i wouldn't quite say that i was an addict, no. but you nearly did lose all your money. there were various points where you described having to go to, for example, bridge clubs as they were in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, because you needed to win money. you were very good at bridge. at one case i was so short of money, i hated having to do it, i went to a friend of mine and said, "could i have some money if i really needed?" he gave me a cheque for £1000 which was a huge amount at that time and i took it into the bridge club and i knew i would have to cash that cheque unless i won £600 which was a staggering amount to win in those days in one night. i did win it and never had to cash the cheque but i was eternally grateful to him. you've written this memoir which is full of fascinating stories of this period of your life. my autobiography, yes. winning against the 0dds, it's called. i wonder if you think very hard about how many different times you could have lost, and actually lost everything.

that's quite true. during the 1987 stock market crash, my company was in a terrible mess. we should say, your company, ig, it's based upon spread betting which was a sort of idea that you did quite a lot to make popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s. it began not being very well understood. ig took off... it did. but then, in the late 1980s and again a little later on, you had periods where ig nearly folded. we were very, very lucky in that ‘87 thing. lots of our clients, and i don't blame them, they lost more money than they thought they ever could. the dowjones index had never even fallen 100 points before and on the black monday, if you want to call it that, it fell 500 points. 0ur poor clients were in a terrible mess and solicitors would write to me to say, "our client doens‘t have to pay "you because they are gambling debts," and that would have been true but for a thing called the financial services act came to our rescue and was brought into effect in bits and the bits which made these debts enforceable had just

been brought into effect when the crash took place. let us now fast—forwa rd because you survive the financial crash of ‘87. 16 became really very successful. you, in the end, walked away with tens of millions of pounds when 16 floated and went public and you made a killing, you made a lot of money. it seems to me you then became rather bored. that's when your political instinct started to twitch and that's when you decided to use your money to wield some political influence. it's not so much that i got bored. i'm totally non—technological and i realised that i was the ceo of 16 index, i was attending meetings where technological things with the main things discussed so i couldn't understand a word so i made an instantaneous decision to retire as chief executive so then i completely

wrongly lacked confidence in my successoi’s and sold all my shares which was a huge mistake because they went up 15 times very quickly. except you still made tens of millions of pounds. that's true, but it would have been better to have made hundreds of millions of pounds. let's get to the way you use the money and politics. you became a donor to the conservative party. relatively small donations to start with. but then by 2001, you decided to make the biggest political donation in british history, £5 million. i think i may have shared that distinction with one of the gettys. ok, the point is you had become hugely influential thanks to money. you think on reflection that is a healthy thing for a democracy? do i think it's healthy quest to mark the people with wealth should have any influence? i don't mean to be rude but i think

it's absurd to think whatever the political party or charity or anything else which receives an enormous amount of money from somebody shouldn't be willing to give them more of the hearing than somebody who gave them £5. life doesn't work like that. here we are, we've discussed your personality and your predilections. you're a gambler, you develop a company which is a gambling operation. gambling, frankly, is a severe social problem in the uk today you've made a lot of money about a controversial activity and then you put your money into politics which gives you a seat at the table, gives you a significant amount of political influence and many people will say, add all of those things together and that frankly is a potentially very dangerous perversion of democracy. i'm repeating myself but you're saying people who give a lot of money

to a political party shouldn't be no more heard than a man in the street who gives them nothing or something. i don't agree with that. if somebody is concerned enough about political matters or about a charity or something to give a huge amount of money, they deserve to have their opinions heard. but you could, as an alternative strategy, if you were so concerned about getting your ideas across, you could have become a politician and put yourself up for election, you could have been held accountable by the public but you didn't do any of that. i was quite old by then, i was 65. there are politicians who are running for office as you well know in the ‘70s including leaders of the world so age wasn't really the problem, it's just you saw a shortcut, you saw that money could deliver you something, perhaps give you more power than running as an mp. it wasn't so much that i wanted to look at power, in fact, i was idiotic. and i went to see william hague because i wanted to give him £5 million, i was taken in by my friend

rodney leach, before he could opening his mouth, i told him why i was doing this and i ended up saying, if i was offered a peerage, i should reject it and further, i was stupid enough to say i want no influence at all over the cabinet or over your policies. i think you changed your mind about that over time. yes. it interests me given your background that you've said and again the book you discussed it, that your views of broadly libertarian, you are right of centre when it comes to economic policy—making. "i am right wing economically. "the critical point i suppose is that i would be in favour "of being not at all kind to those who do not have a job "unless they genuinely couldn't get one." "i would be more kind to those who have low—paying jobs. " it seems to me there is an irony in that being a pillar of your political thinking went for much of your life, albeit you made a lot of money out of gambling, but you spent much of your time at card tables and racetracks. i'm just saying that it's important to encourage people

to get a job and to work for it, if they can't get one. i have huge sympathy for those who can't work because of some physical problem or anything like that but i think people who can get a job, who are capable of getting a job, should jolly well get one and work for it. let's get to the development of your political ideas. economically, you are clearly on the libertarian right but when it came to your biggest preoccupation in politics, it wasn't in the end economics it was brexit. euroscepticism and your increasing dissatisfaction with written‘s membership of the european union. it got me expelled from the conservative party. exactly. 2009, david cameron who i dare say you had never been eye—to—eye with on europe, actually decided to fire you, expel you from the party because you'd decided to vote for ukip. and give them some money.

the way i was expelled by was eric pickles, who was the chairman, writing an email saying, "you are going to be considered for expulsion and you can "write to appeal if you want to and blah, blah, blah," and i wrote back saying, "i don't care about my rights "of appeal, i shan‘t appeal." later i was interviewed by anne mcevoy. she then asked eric pickles who said, "oh, no, i neverspoke to him, or had a long chat with him." i never spoke to him in my life. maybe that tells us something about politicians and politics but let's stick with you and your evolution to becoming one of the prime movers behind what we now know is the brexit campaign. it began with the ukip, the uk independence party. cameron, by 2016, decided to hold a referendum. you decided to become a main backer of the leave campaign. how much money, now that

you look at it, how much? several hundred thousand pounds to ukip, when i was backing them, then when the campaign got going i gave more than £1 million to vote leave which was authorised... more than 1 million? that probably makes you their biggest individual donor. i don't think i was, i think there was somebody else who gave more. but when you look at leave and that campaign in 2016, are you proud of it? you paid for quite a lot of it, are you proud of it? yes, i am and you've gotta distinguish between vote leave, which is the authorized body for backing those who wanted to leave and leave.eu which was our great rival in the contest to be the authorised body. a lot of the things that body did i did not approve of. they were arrowing in on an anti—immigration message. that was quite an interesting point.

many people think that the leave campaign, let's not get too specific about which part of it but the leave campaign unleashed feelings of xenophobia, fear of the other, of migrants, which have been very damaging to british society in the years since. my... vote leave was not part of that. dominic cummings, who i hugely admire, made a point in discussions inside vote leave, we don't want to emphasise immigration, if only because everyone is already aware of it and, your point really, it would give us a reputation for being racist which we're not. my organisation, the one i was a member of, was not doing what you are suggesting. let me quote you some words from michael gove, who one of the figurehead leader of your leave campaign, in a campaign speech in 2016, he said this — i'd just like your views on it today — he said,

"after we establish full legal independence, we can decide which eu rules and regulations we want to keep. one thing we won't change is our ability to trade freely with europe. after we leave, we will remain in europe's free trade zone and the day after we vote leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose any path we want." what's wrong with that? it's just not true, that's what's wrong with it. what is not true? the notion the uk holds all the cards. if it wants a free trade deal it can have one. i see, we can and we very likely will get one because i think the eu it has been very successful so far, for all its posturing it needs a deal far more than we do and i might be proved wrong within days but they will crack up, they will be the ones with the last minute... i have said this all along, at last minute the eu is desperate for a deal, they will give

in and make major concessions. this is where i remember you are a gambler. this is the mentality of a poker player whose hand isn't good but is convinced that his rivals hand is worse. 0ur hand is very good. patently, many of the things said in the leave campaign by leavers such as michael gove and borisjohnson the prime minster are just not true, you have to think of the campaign bus. sorry? not true. the campaign bus with that message saying that if we leave we will have £350 million a week to spend on the nhs. not true. well, it depends what you mean by not true. the money that we have could be spent on the national health service but it's highly unlikely that it all would be. since you do raise that, i was a bit worried about that because 350 million was a gross figure and not the net figure

after the rebate. i was somewhat concerned about that. so here we are more than three years after the vote, we haven't left, the country is deeply divided, we've seen yesterday one of the vote leave activist campaigns, not the one you are involved in but another one, putting up advertisements on the internet. that's exactly why we didn't want to join with them. they're doing things like that. are there racist elements in the campaign today? there might be racist elements in that section which is very definitely not our section. when you look at where we are, all the uncertainty over the next few weeks, business and you are businessman, not knowing the reality will be on the first of november, can you say that you regret nothing about what you have done? i do regret nothing that i've done.

it's going to be the same as the millennium bug. the fear of disaster or recession, nothing will happen, the millennium bug was meant to be dreadful, but absolutely nothing. it's got up by those who want to remain and are trying to frighten the voters. as a possibility of some very temporary forms but for instance, the shortage of vital medicines, do we really think our colleagues in europe who are perfectly responsible and decent people, going to let us not have the medicines we need? just a fantasy — it's rubbish. i began by perhaps suggesting that your decision to make euroscepticism and brexit a big part of a life, it wasn't so much you being the rational calculated oddsmaker but it was you being driven by emotion. and you are saying about your thinking i had too much emotion the last few minutes. i haven't really got to grips within your memoir, or even in this interview,

with why you became a eurosceptic. when britain was in the eu, he built a successful business and had a rather wonderful love, with britain inside the eu, i can't for the life of me quite understand why you became so passionately convinced that britain... britain — nothing to do with us being in the eu. got it hold you all the nation back? are trade with europe, we have a deficit. despite the fact we have free trade, no duty, we have a surplus with the rest of the world, the idea that it has been to our advantage is absolute rubbish. what was it in your early to middle life that made you personally such a profound eurosceptic? what was it?

first of all, we ran our own things since 1066 and not perfectly but rather better than before, why would do we want to be ruled by the people in europe? our economy has done better since 1973 than before. but not because of anything to do with the eu. but my point... it fascinates me, people such as yourself, very successful who have become committed, come what may, die in a ditch, brexit supporters, in the end it seems to me largely driven by emotion. it's not driven by emotion, the eu imposes for example about 10,000 regulations on businesses, 95% of which are, they do no business in europe whatsoever and have to put up with this author regulations which impede business. and why do we want to give them that why do we want to do that? there's nothing that we get from it. we just... it's going to be

hugely beneficial... you remain a gambler, you have been all your life. what are the odds you believe on getting what you want which is britain out of the european union, deal or no deal on october 31? you think it's more likely than not? 60%. would you agree with me that is perhaps the biggest gamble that britain will have taken in at least a generation? that's the wrong way of looking at. it's a british decision. i've not the slightest doubt whether it happens or not, britain is absolutely right, of the british government, the current british government to want to get out of the eu because the eu would be absolutely disastrous. do you know that the percentage of trade which the eu has with the rest of the world has something like halved over the last 20 or 30 years and is expected,

it's not even challenged, to go down much further still. why do we want to be tied to this losing organisation? just a final point, goes back to your upbringing and your privilege. does it strike you that if you are ever wrong, and it's possible that you're wrong, that britain won't thrive and succeed post brexit, if you are wrong, it's not you about the consequences, because you have a privileged, comfortable, wealthy life. it's many millions of britons who are less well off than you are. if i'm wrong, but all one can do is argue for what one thinks is best for everyone. notjust the rich, the poor, i'm convinced and this is why gave the money, no point in my giving the money otherwise. i think it is to the benefit of rich and poor that we leave the eu and that is why do it. we have to end there but thank you very much indeed for being with us. i really enjoyed it.

hello. so far 0ctober has been a very wet month for some of us. now, as you can see in this forecast, it takes us all the way through the weekend, we're not done yet. and during friday there will be more heavy rain across parts of england, wales and scotland, especially in the west with heavy showers here mostly to the north of glasgow. let's take a look at the big picture, the set—up takes us through the weekend. this weather front, hanging around parts of england and wales for much of the weekend. a feed of showers running into western parts of scotland. then we go on through into sunday, this weather front will eventually start to pull away, but we'll see more heading in from the atlantic.

yes, it is staying unsettled even into next week, as well. this is how we start friday, you can see the areas of heavy rain into parts of england and wales, further heavy showers than into western scotland. a dry start to northern ireland with some sunshine, very blustery up there as well. i just want to focus in on some of the wetter areas, greater risk of disruption and the met office has yellow weather warnings in force for rain for much of wales, the peak district into the pennines, higher totals here to higher ground, quite widely15—30 millimetres, difficult driving through that. and the showers rattling into western scotland, north of glasgow, giving fairly high rainfall totals again, especially for the higher ground, some difficult travelling conditions. giving an indication of where we're going to see some of the stronger wind gusts as well, this area of heavy rain feeding further south across england and wales, quite squally in nature as the day goes on. brightening up for some, north wales, northern england as the day goes on, sunny spells, the odd shower for northern ireland, one or two reaching into eastern scotland, it's not a washout everywhere! this is the picture friday night into saturday morning, still the cloud and some outbreaks of rain. the further south you are in england, still the chance of a shower in northern ireland, or especially in northern and western parts of scotland.

the lower temperatures will be where you do have some clear spells. now, as saturday begins, we still have this weather front close to parts of southern england, but elsewhere, there will be some sunny spells to be had, yes, there's a chance of catching one or two showers, but it's not going to be a disaster of a day. there will be lighter winds than we have had recently, temperatures mostly in the mid—teens, but it looks like later some of this rain towards south—west england, maybe south wales as well will begin to turn heavier, certainly more persistent, too. so that's how saturday is shaping up. as we go into the second half of the weekend, overnight heavy rain across parts of england and wales, rain falling into the north sea. it looks like another area of raining cloud was spreading from the western zone more of scotland wetter on sunday. some uncertainty about the detail, though, so keep on checking back if you've got weekend outdoor plans. that's your forecast.

this is the briefing. i'm ben bland. our top story: fears of a humanitarian crisis in northern syria, tens of thousands have fled their homes, now there are threats of us sanctions against turkey. two foreign businessmen with ties to rudy giulian are charged with violating campaign finance laws in the us. japan braces for one of the strongest typhoons in decades, the authorities warn of widespread destruction. the white isle and the plastic waste, we meet the volunteers tackling ibiza's growing problem. in business, we're doing very well, says president trump. hopes of a truce in the trade war, as top level talks move to the white house.