the british prime minister has defended his top advisor, dominic cummings, amid a row over the aide‘s travel during lockdown. boris johnson says mr cummings "followed the instincts of every parent" and "acted with integrity" in seeking childcare with family members after his wife had developed symptoms of the virus. in hong kong, thousands of people have been taking part in protests against china's plans to impose a new security law on the territory. more than 100 people have been arrested. beijing says the legislation will improve people's lives, but campaigners warn fundamental freedoms are being eroded. and as brazil's coronavirus death toll continues to rise steadily, the us has imposed travel restrictions on foreign nationals who have been to the country in the last 1a days.

now on bbc news — hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. no sector of the global economy has been hit harder by the covid—19 pandemic than the travel and hospitality industry. posh hotels like this one behind me are empty. millions of workers dependent on travel and tourism have been laid off. well, my guest today is sir rocco forte, who is the owner of a string of luxury hotels, and a powerful voice in an industry chafing under strict lockdown and social distancing rules. is there a future for a business that relies on social mobility and public confidence? sir rocco forte, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you very much for asking me to join you. it is a pleasure to have you on the show, and you, like everybody else, have lived through the most extraordinary three months of this covid—19 pandemic. i wonder what impact it has had on you, both personally and professionally, in terms of your business? well, i mean, i have had the virus and recovered from it, so... i'm back to full health now. i never — i was never hospitalised, or anything like that, and it was really like a very, very bad flu. but the thing is that it leaves you very weak afterwards, and it takes about a couple of weeks

to really get back to full fitness after the symptoms have gone. as far as my business is concerned, like the rest of the tourist industry, it's as if a nuclear bomb has gone off. i have never known a business, never run a business, with no income before, and in fact, i never dreamt of having to run a business with no income before. but, as the current situation, it's created complete havoc in the industry, an industry which is so important to the world economy. over 10% of the workforce in the world is employed in the tourism industry in one way or another, and in some countries, of course, it's a lot more than that. so there are a lot of livelihoods at stake and lives at stake. millions of people, in fact,

and their families are suffering at the moment, in that many of them are in furlough and therefore not earning their normal level of income. and they have the prospect of, if this thing goes on for much longer, of not being able to return to jobs that will no longer be there for them at the end of it. what about the differences you have noticed across your hotel business? because, as you say, you've got hotels in germany, you've got quite a number of hotels in italy, i believe you've got one in st petersburg, russia, and the two in london. now, all of those countries have responded in their own ways to the pandemic, with their own lockdown regimes, some of which are now being eased, some of which are still in place. have you learned any lessons from the ways different national governments have handled this crisis? well, i think certain governments have been more efficient than others in dealing with it, and have reacted

much more quickly than others. i think, in this country, the chancellor's introduction of a furlough scheme and then paying the money in three weeks to the companies who had applied for it is quite sensational. in germany they've been very quick too. in italy, the process has been a lot slower, but you have a coalition government there, which makes it more difficult for decisions to be made and action to be taken. let me ask you a very simple question. i have looked at some of your public statements since the crisis began and your hotels were effectively robbed of revenues, and i have to say, you sound like a businessman who, in terms of priorities, is putting his own bottom line in front of the collective public health.

you seem to be saying to the government in the uk and other governments that their first and overwhelming priority ought to be to save the economy. in my business, my people are very important to me. i know a lot of them, i go round my hotels all the time, i know a lot of them individually. they are relying on me and looking to me for support, andiam... my biggest nightmare is, if this goes on for much longer, i'm going to have to make people redundant, not through any fault of their own or any fault of mine, and that's a terrible thing. a lot of livelihoods at stake here, and... i understand that, sir rocco... and they're not helping the health of their nation by getting poorer, and we're facing possibly a massive depression. i understand your — i understand your concern for your workers and for the state

of the overall economy. but when you said just a short time ago the lockdown is an expensive and potentially deadly overreaction, which should be brought to an end as soon as possible, i'm inclined to think, what on earth are you doing intervening in what is surely a debate to be had between epidemiologists, biologists, scientists and politicians? i mean, do you really believe that you have the knowledge to say that the lockdown is an overreaction? you know, obviously i'm not a scientist and i'm not an expert, although the scientists seem to disagree quite considerably, and views have changed since the beginning of the crisis. it is... the virus, it now seems, is not as deadly as people thought. and a lot of studies, particularly the stanford university study, which is a very accurate one and is based on the experiences in new york, says quite clearly that the risk to individuals of dying of this disease is very low

indeed, and they're talking about between 0.1% and 0.2%, and that as far as young people in good health are concerned, there is hardly any risk at all. hang on, if i... and of course premature deaths are a tragedy, but... but let us just take the data from a host of different independent scientific analysis which suggests that, for example, had the uk and the us imposed lockdown, which you say is an overreaction, had they imposed lockdown a week or ten days earlier, it would have saved up to three quarters of the many tens of thousands of lives lost. does that not matter to you? well, of course it matters to me.

i don't want to see people dying unnecessarily. but a lot of people are going to die in the future if we carry on the way we are — unless economies open up, people are allowed to get back to work, and they're not left unemployed for a long time into the future, which will be the result if the lockdown isn't lifted quickly and the extreme measures related to it aren't lifted. there was the excuse at the beginning that the hospitals couldn't cope, the national health service couldn't cope, and that may have been a reason to impose the lockdown, but that is no longer the case. but sir rocco... our intensive care units have a huge amount of capacity. the nightingale hospitals up and down the country have been mothballed. so that original reason is not there. but let me come back, if i may... and it's not scientific, it's not about science. it's about models that have been created with false assumptions, and initially this 500,000 deaths

scenario, which frightened the government into moving as it did. and, since then, all the predictions that have come out on the various models have all been wrong. well, the uk government... so why should we believe them? the uk government is quite clear that it is following the advice of the scientists, led by the chief scientific advisor to the uk government. but i also — i'm very mindful of your role as a boss, and the head of a very big hotel operation. how would you feel if you got your way, the lockdown were ended, your hotels all opened up, and then in very short order both guests and members of your staff, whether it be in the busy bars or the busy kitchens, ended up getting infected with a second surge of covid—i9? how would you feel about that? well, i mean, i don't think that is necessarily — that is necessarily an option.

and the second surge is another sort of scare story, in my mind. there is no proof of that. it's another model which has been extrapolated from some assumptions, and the past assumptions that have been used have been wrong. why should these be any better? we're in touch with — i am in touch with my employees now, and have been since lockdown, some directly, obviously not all, and some indirectly. because i've called general managers. in weekly contact with them, they're all longing to get back to work. i am not — we're going to take all the necessary precautions. whatever government says we have to do, we will do. and we have our own protocols which we have developed, 15 pages of them, which significantly change the processes of disinfecting and sanitising the hotel, and keeping surfaces clean, both in public areas and in the bedrooms.

when we open, normally a bedroom in a luxury hotel takes half an hour to clean properly. it's going to take an hour to do it, instead. so what do you say — what do you say to the, for example, the senior consultant in birmingham, dr ron daniels, who when he was asked about whether it was time to ease the lockdown said the reality is that the effect of a potential second wave is just so unknown that it is too risky, in most health professionals' view, to relax lockdown now? are you dismissing that sort of testimony from inside the health service? well, i don't know. i mean, you know, i've — i obviously avidly read everything that's in the newspapers every day and on internet about the virus, and i hear a lot of different views. i mean, you know, isaw your very good interview with the swedish

epidemiologist anders tegnell, and he has a very strong view of how this should be handled. but if i may say so, sir rocco — i'm glad you saw that interview, because what we have seen in the last week, with the latest week of coronavirus data from around the world, is that experts believe that in the past week sweden has had the highest per capita infection rate in the world. sweden, of course, being the country which decided against imposing a lockdown. doesn't that give you pause for thought? i don't know. i haven't seen those figures, so it's very difficult for me to comment on them. but i mean, the head

of the space agency in israel, who is a general and mathematics professor, carried out a survey across the world, and he found that the virus followed the same course whatever actions government had taken. it sort of tended to peak around a0 days and then tail off between 70 and 90 days. so we're at a stage now, across europe, where the infection rate is at a very low level, where deaths have, thank god, moved to very low levels, as well. and i think there's an opportunity to open up economies properly. if you carry on... the reality with this virus, it's going to be with us a long time, until there's a vaccine, and we've got to learn to live with it. in relation to other viruses and diseases that are around, which we've learned live with, it's not that dramatically different. influenza, in a bad year, reaches 28,000, 30,000 deaths in this country. let me pick up if i may... 14,000 people a year die of pneumonia. that doesn't mean we

lock the country down. let me pick up, if i may, on that point of yours about — we have to learn to live with this. one thing that you are living with right now is the reality that you are receiving, or your workforce — you and then your workforce — are receiving millions and millions of pounds a month from the government in terms of furlough payments. you've laid off a substantial part of your workforce and they're still being paid, but 80% of their wage is now coming from the government, and according to one newspaper, that's cutting your monthly wage bill from over £7.5 million to £1.5 million. you are a conservative party donor, i think you're somebody whose long been identified with wanting to see a small estate and lower taxation,

and yet you are now taking vast amounts of public money on behalf of your workers. that will stick in some people's throats, do you understand that? that figure of course applies to the whole of my business and only a small proportion of that applies to the uk. but the reality of that — if...i still have 5 million a month going out of the window despite all of that, and so, by the end of this, it will have cost my business some 50 million. it's money which would have gone into investment in new hotels, into training and development of our people, and also into new development. i'll have to find some way to replace that at the end of this. but the worst thing is that if it

hadn't been for that, i'd have had to not only lay off, but actually dismiss a lot of my people, which would have been tragic. but you are a very wealthy man. i mean, do you think there is any case for the public saying, for somebody like you, very successful businessman who's made a lot of money, maybe you should be digging a bit deeper into your own pocket to help you workforce rather than relying on the government. i'm not a wealthy man, i'm not a billionaire, i'm not someone like that. i have — all my wealth is tied to my business. i have no assets outside of my business except for the house i live in. this was a start—up a few years, 20 years ago, and it's been developed into something which is worthwhile, it's something i'm proud of, and i'm proud of it most of all because of the culture and ethos we've created because the people who work in it

feel they belong to something worthwhile and are fully committed to our approach and philosophy in the care we give to our customers, and of course the care we give to our staff ourselves. the reality — no—one has 50 million, even some of the richest people in the world don't have 50 million in their pocket. if i had it, i'd put it in. i don't unfortunately. the value of my business is going to deteriorate as a result of this. so i'm suffering as much as anybody else. you say the value of the business is going to deteriorate. when you look at the medium to longer term, notjust the next few weeks, but looking ahead years, is there any realistic probability, do you believe, that your business can return to the sort of revenues and profitability that you had before covid—i9? i'm thinking of the fact that we're now looking at a world where quarantine it seems is going to become a new fact of life, the uk government says travellers coming back to the uk are going to face a 14—day

quarantine, other countries are doing the same thing. your business is... other countries aren't doing the same thing. european countries are opening up their borders to foreign travel. italy is doing so onjune 3, certainly to european travel within europe, and the uk is included in the list of countries that can travel to italy. so it's the uk government bringing in a measure very late in the day, which other countries have had before and are now lifting, and it doesn't make any sense at all. london is an international city. it depends on people coming to it and visiting it — notjust the tourism industry, but the whole of the london economy is dependent on international trade and commerce and the ability of people to come to london. quarantine is going to stop people doing that. it's not really good for the economy, and it's not really good for britain or britain's future.

but it's not even just a question of quarantine. it's also a question of public attitudes, public caution post covid—i9. even if we get the pandemic under control in most countries, it looks as though, according to public surveys, people are going to be very cautious about resuming their old behaviours when it comes to travel. the aviation industry is saying it expects several years before passenger demand returns to 2019 levels if it ever does. so, again, for a business like yours, which depends upon mobility and travel, you may be looking at a very, very much more difficult and reduced future. yes, well, of course i understand that, and when we reopen, we'll probably open our hotels in september, most of our hotels, with the exception of our two italian resorts — one in sicily, verdura, and torre maizza, puglia, where, of course, the incidence of the virus were very low indeed, which they have big, open spaces and, therefore,

they lend themselves to people going on holiday, even with some level of social distancing, which in italy, has been reduced to one metre by the way, because operating at two metres of social distancing makes it almost impossible for a hotel or restaurant to operate. people have been terrified. the success of the government propaganda has been that it's terrified people, it's cowered them, in so far as people spy on their neighbours and report them to the police for some minor infringement. if you pass someone in the street three metres away from him, they shout at you, when of course there's no real chance of any infection passing at that distance. it's terrifying. but i was rather heartened actually by the photographs i saw in the papers this morning of the beaches, various beaches on the south coast, which are filled with people and sunbathers. ..

crosstalk. but sir rocco, many people find those pictures deeply disturbing, and just i wonder, again, when you are running a business based upon luxury experience, the idea that you go to one of your hotels and you have a great time and you kick back and relax, the reality now is that many top—class hotels are talking about introducing mandatory temperature checks on all guests as they enter, they are talking about guests having to wear gloves, special surveillance cameras in all guests and staff areas, masks being made available to all staff and guests. is this really an environment in which the luxury hotel stay is going to be viable? no, of course it isn't, and i don't want to be served by someone wearing a mask. i mean, the whole point of the interaction that you want between staff and customers can't happen in that way. so, what are you going to do?

but, i mean, we'll have to live with it for as long as we can. what are you trying to say? that i should give up? close shop and get the hell out of it? well, i'm not trying to say that, sir rocco! i just want to end with this thought, which you are leading me towards, which is — what about the future? you've just told me that your family money is heavily invested in the hotel business. i know that you had expansion plans, you wanted to open a new hotel in china and a couple more in europe and you were very... going back a year, you were very optimistic about the future. has all that changed ? is your vision of expansion now on hold? and, really, if you're honest, do you have faith that you're in a sector that has much of a future? yes, of course i do. i mean, i've been through some difficult times in my life, as you probably know. the granada takeover, the business my fatherfounded,

the financial crisis found me in a very difficult situation and i've got through, i survived both those and moved forward again, and this is another crisis we're facing, we're facing it in an intelligent way and we'll get through it and things will return. i think that by the spring of next year, things will look very different. i think things look different from one week to the next actually. the prime minister, according to today's papers, seems to be changing his mind already about the extent of the lockdown and talking about easing it even further in ten days' time. so i don't think, you know, the doom and gloomsters are always around and, i suppose, the left would be very pleased to see luxury hotels disappear. but i don't think that's a reality, and i think we will come back and be very successful again.

sir rocco, we have to end there, but i do thank you very much indeed forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you. thank you very much. thank you. hello there. we saw a top temperature of 23 celsius in the london area on sunday afternoon. bank holiday monday today looks warmer still further south, we could make close to mid—20s celsius across parts of the south—east. but generally, much of the country will be dry and sunny thanks to the influence of this area of high pressure. but through the day, these weather fronts will start to play a part in the weather across the north—west of the uk

to bring outbreaks of rain and stronger winds. a fairly fresh start to the day today. we had temperatures in single figures in places, a little bit of early mist and fog across western areas, which will tend to burn away quickly through the morning. many places will be dry and sunny, england and wales, eastern scotland, but then western scotland, lots of northern ireland will stay windy and cloudy and wetter later in the day. that will impact the temperatures — around the mid—teens in the north—west, closer to the low—20s and the mid—20s in the south—east. now, that band of cloud and rain across the north—west moves its way south—eastwards during monday night, tending to fizzle out, though, as it reaches parts of england and wales, just a few showers along it. but with more cloud cover generally, i think it should be a little less chilly with temperatures in double figures for most. now, as we move into tuesday, we've got high pressure with us once again. this area of cloud associated with that weather front will straddle central areas and push its way south—eastwards through the day, so i think england and wales could see more cloud around generally. a bit more sunshine, though, for scotland and northern ireland, but slightly fresher air mass

here with temperatures into the low— to mid—teens. but again, despite the cloud across england and wales, the air is quite warm here, so still 20 to 25 or 26 degrees will be the high. high pressure still with us on into wednesday, we've got this feature which will bring thicker cloud, perhaps some patchy rain to northern ireland and in towards central and western scotland. but to the north of it, dry, a little bit cooler with some sunshine to the south of it, plenty of sunshine for england and wales and, again, another warm day, 25 or 26 will be the high, closer to the mid—teens in the north. but that fresher air in the north gets pushed away northwards as high pressure changes its position, moves to the east of the uk and starts to draw up this warm, southerly wind from the near continent. that'll drive the warmth northwards into scotland and northern ireland as we reach the end of the week, and it'll be very warm for england and wales with plenty of sunshine.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. i'm maryam moshiri. boris johnson faces mounting pressure to fire his senior aide amid a row over dominic cummings's travel during lockdown. divisions in brazil over how to deal with the coronavirus as the number of cases continues to rise sharply. does the answer to why some people become more ill from coronavirus than others lies in our blood? a team of scientists is trying to find out. after a ramadan marked by lockdowns and social distancing, muslims around the world begin celebrating eid al—fitr.