argentina has been plunged into mourning by the death of arguably its most famous son — the football legend diego maradona. people have poured out onto the streets to express their grief at the loss of the star whose sublime performances secured victory in the 1986 world cup. president trump has granted a full pardon to his former national security adviser michael flynn. general flynn served three weeks in office at the start of the trump administration before pleading guilty to lying to the fbi during the investigation into russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. president—electjoe biden has used a televised address on the eve of thanksgiving to urge americans to recommit to the fight against coronavirus. mr biden said a grim season of division would give way to light and unity. americans, he said, were at war with coronavirus and not each other.

now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. the uk has the highest covid—19 death toll in europe and one of the steepest declines in economic output. opinion polls suggest prime minister boris johnson's claims of a world—beating governmental response cuts little ice with the public. my guest today isjeremy hunt, former health secretary, foreign secretary, and mrjohnson‘s rival for leadership of the conservative party. has the pandemic exposed weaknesses in the country's systems and its leader?

jeremy hunt, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. one of your current parliamentary responsibilities is to hold the government to account, to scrutinise it, hold it to account on health policy. do you think borisjohnson‘s government has a record to be proud of when it comes to covid—19? well, we're still in the middle of the pandemic, so it's probably too early to make that assessment. but we're certainly not amongst the best. and i think the interesting thing, if you look at europe, is that france, spain, italy and the uk have all had pretty terrible pandemics. germany slightly better, norway, denmark slightly better. but around the world, the real dividing line is between the east asian countries — singapore, taiwan, hong kong, japan — and europe and north america.

and somehow in east asia, they've got a whole bunch of things right that we haven't got right in europe and north america. yeah, i take that point, but even within europe, there are real differentials. i'm thinking of germany, for example, or a country like denmark. i mean, it is the same virus faced by all of these countries, and yet we have performed particularly badly. when it comes to the death toll, it's obvious. more than 55,000 people dead — much the worst total in europe. why? well, in the case of germany, i think we can see a couple of things that they did well from the outset. the first is that they had a very rigorous test and trace system. they had these things called corona detectives in germany, that were local council officials who would go round rigorously tracking who had been infected, who they had been near, and trying to get them to isolate. and our prime minister told us

that we were going to get a world—beating test, trace, and isolate system. simply hasn't happened, has it? well, it's happened in fits and starts. i think we've done better on the testing side than on the tracing side. but germany was doing this right from the start. they never stopped their community testing programme. we stopped our community testing programme in march, then we restarted it in the summer. but i think germany also benefited ‘cos they had a decentralised system, and we've gone for a centralised approach. and in the end, i think if you're doing something like contact tracing, to go in on a localised basis, if you or i were asked to stop going to work, isolate in our home for two weeks, i think we're probably far more likely to do it if we're contacted by someone in our local council than someone from a call centre 300 miles away. there are many independent scientists, some of whom, in fact, advise the government on the sage committee, who say that they are now absolutely clear that the government locked down

too late in march and that it has mishandled the second lockdown as well. do you share that feeling? well, i was one of the people who said they should have locked down earlier. but i think if you look at the scorecard of the government as a whole, you have to put other things into balance. i think the economic support that businesses have received has been some of the most effective in europe. and i think on the testing side, the expansion of testing capacity means that population testing, the sort of mass testing that we see in qingdao in china, in slovakia, in liverpool in the uk, we are probably closer to that than any major western european country. but when we consider lockdowns and what the government does in terms of the balance of public health and safety against maintaining economic activity, there is now a raging debate about christmas

and what the uk government plans to do. it seems clear they want to, over the next few weeks, create a situation where, at christmas itself, the five—day holiday period, they're going to allow people much greater freedom to socialise with their families again. there are scientists, many of them senior advisers to the government, like andrew hayward, who are saying they feel this is a mistake. what do you think? well, the virus doesn't care if it's christmas or not. and the last thing we would want to do as a country is allow people to mix freely in christmas and then end up with a rise in infections injanuary and a rise in deaths in february. so the question is, can we get the transmission rates low enough ahead of christmas so that that doesn't happen and so we can keep a lid on the rate of transmissions as we wait to distribute the vaccine? and i think what's changed between now and a few months back is that we have this easter date, which both borisjohnson and the health

secretary, matt hancock, have confirmed we could potentially vaccinate everyone vulnerable in the population by easter, and that would mean that was a real date that we could look at returning to normal. andrew hayward is very specific. he says, "my personal view is that we're putting far too much emphasis on having a near normal christmas. we know respiratory infection rates peak injanuary. we are, in effect, throwing fuel on the fire over christmas. we're on the cusp," he says, "of being able to protect elderly people we love through this vaccination," as you've just mentioned it. to him, it seems crazy that we are risking that by creating wider social bubbles, allowing maybe three households to mix over the christmas period. that's what the government's talking about. i'm asking you simply, do you believe they are wrong? well, that's not just what the government is talking about. they're actually talking about making us have a lockdown until 2 december, making us

stay in a very high degree of being locked down until just before christmas. no, with respect, they've made it clear that whatever the regional tiers arrange after 2 december, shops, for example, will be allowed to open across the country. we know from a lot of scientific research that shops and households where families mix are the two key arenas where this virus is transmitted and spread. so, i put it to you again — the government is clearly taking a risk. do you believe that is wise? i think you're mischaracterising what the government is doing. to be clear, i'm someone who's criticised the government's approach at a number of key moments. but shops actually — providing people are wearing masks — is not the highest—risk place. the highest—risk places tend to be bars and places where people are speaking loudly, or people are singing. and they are talking about not allowing bars to open unless the transmission rates come right down. so my answer to your question very directly is if we can get

the transmission rates down low enough so that christmas doesn't risk a further wave, a further spike in transmission, then i think it's the right thing to do. but i don't think anyone would want to take that risk with christmas if it meant that, in february, we had a sudden spike in deaths. i am interested in your role on the parliamentary committee that scrutinises, holds to account the government on all things public health and, of course, covid—i9 being central to that. the head of amnesty international, kate allen, she said this of the record of the government on care homes and protecting the most elderly and vulnerable in the uk community. she said, "the government has made a series of shockingly irresponsible decisions which effectively abandoned care home residents to die. discharged without being tested, thousands of older people were sent to care homes at great risk to themselves, to other residents, and to staff. the appalling death toll was entirely avoidable. it is a scandal of monumental proportions."

where is the accountability for what happened in the care homes? well, i think the government is being held to account by my select committee, but by people like kate allen, by the media. and it is very clear that there were lots of things done in other countries that we should have done here and we didn't. for example, in germany, care homes weren't allowed to receive patients from hospitals unless they could quarantine them for two weeks or, indeed, unless they were tested. in hong kong, they sealed off care homes and that meant that they didn't have a single coronavirus death in any care home in hong kong. so there are clearly lots of things that we didn't do the first time round. ithink... which cost thousands of lives. and ijust wonder, if you were health secretary and you've served in that position, you know the weight of responsibility. if you had overseen this disaster, "catastrophe", as amnesty international call

it, would you have stayed in post or would you have resigned? well, ithink, you know, when you're looking at the incredibly challenging job of being health secretary, i think you have to make these judgments in the round. and one thing i would say about matt hancock is he has been absolutely indefatigable. there's an enormous amount of pressure. and i think that the accountability in terms of people'sjobs, you don't really want that happening in the middle of a crisis. yes, at the end... well, you sort of do. if the guy at the top has overseen a policy which was so catastrophically wrong, you want him out, you want somebody else in. well, i think you also want people at the top who have learnt from what's gone wrong, who have understood and gone up that very steep learning curve about all the scientific evidence and all the judgments. and so i think, you know, someone changing their job in the middle of a crisis is not always what you want. right, the questions aren't just about care homes. you know that very well from your committee. there's a huge question

mark about procurement — the way in which the government tried, under difficult circumstances, to ratchet up the procurement of protective equipment for health service workers, and indeed for care homes, as well. it seems to have been marked by incompetence and contracts being awarded to chums, friends of the government, people with key contacts. that cannot be acceptable, can it? well, i think there are two things. there's one thing the government got wrong, and there's something else where i think the government has a more reasonable case to make. what happened in care homes, one of the things that happened in care homes — you rightly talked about them — was that they found when there was a shortage of protective equipment at the start of the crisis, the nhs — which is a huge supplier, a huge consumer of protective equipment — crowded them out of the market. so care homes suddenly found,

because all the local hospitals were trying to get ppe, they couldn't get any at all. and the lesson from that is that care homes have to be better prepared. in hong kong, they have to have three months‘ stock of ppe, and we need to learn that lesson, as i think we did for the second wave. but we haven't learned lessons, it seems. i mean, £250 million was spent on face masks which weren't safe and could never be used. and on the flip side of that, when it comes to the friends being offered contracts, we know that there were strange deals done which involved middlemen — middlemen who had contacts with the government. there was one particular spanish businessman who acted as a go—between and ended up pocketing more than £20 million himself. again, you're the head of this committee, which is supposed to hold the government's feet to the fire. what guarantee can you give the british public that this won't happen again? well, we held the health secretary's feet to the fire on that very issue this morning in the select committee, which i've just come from.

so, absolutely, we ask all those difficult questions. but all i would say is that we... well, difficult questions are one thing — sorry to interrupt — difficult questions are worthwhile, but... this is ourjob, because we are a scrutinising committee. it's what you do rather well, as well. but the public wants to know what's going to change? what has changed as a result of the exposure of this failure? well, what has changed — and let me now defend the government for a moment — is having taken on board criticism of people like me and many other people about the shortages of ppe. this time around in the second wave, people generally have the protective equipment they need, both in hospitals and in care homes. but to get there in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a global shortage of protective equipment, they had to act fast. and i think it wouldn't have been sensible or right for them to follow the normal procurement processes, because lives were at risk

and speed was at a premium. so, yes, mistakes were made, but i would rather some of those mistakes were made and the problem's solved, as i think it has now been. i now quickly want to look forward. there are two potential game—changing developments. one is that testing is becoming much quicker and it can be rolled out on a vast scale. you appear to be suggesting that, right now, you think in the uk, we should insist on mandatory regular testing for the whole population. do you seriously think that can and will happen? i've never advocated compulsory testing, no, but what i do think is we should have mass testing, population—level testing with incentives for people to participate. and perhaps the best example in europe is slovakia, where they managed to test nearly the whole population injust a weekend. now, it's a smaller country, but the result of that exercise — nearly four million people tested — is that they reduced transmission by 85%. and if we want to get back to normal, if we want people

to go back to the freedoms that matter so much to all of us, then you have to get transmission under control. so i do think population testing has got an important role to play. so you want people to do it, but you shy away from the word "compulsion". but when it comes to the vaccines — and we now know at least three, maybe more, but at least three vaccines look highly effective and could be rolled out, according to the uk government, late this year and then into the spring of next year — there is a real question of how you ensure enough people are immunised to overall change the game, normalise life, and make sure covid—i9 is a part of history, not our future. is it conceivable it should and could become compulsory to get a vaccine? i don't think so. it's not the british way and i think the danger of making it compulsory is you would have an anti—reaction, when it's actually in everyone‘s interest to get this vaccine.

but i think the key thing is not to bet all our money on the vaccine, because there are still some uncertainties. the distribution is going to be very difficult. both the health secretary and the prime minister seem to think we could get the vaccine out to all vulnerable citizens by easter — which would be an amazing accomplishment, a big step forward. but we need to make progress on the mass testing side as well, so we have a plan b. on both the mass testing and the vaccination, you're indicating you want to see people take it up, but you don't want to force them to take it up. you've introduced this notion of passporting. that is, parts of life would be open up to you if you have a passport — ie, showing you've got a negative test — and if you have another certificate or passport showing you've had the immunisation. 0ne airline in australia is going so far as to say, "no jab, no fly." now, that's not the same as a government demanding, forcing you to take the jab, but it's getting pretty close. when we set up test and trace, the great hope was that it would be successful enough for us not to have

to have a second lockdown. in the end, that didn't work out. and one of the reasons is because we didn't, through our test and trace system, have enough people complying with the request to isolate. they were worried about their income. and what we have to do is make it advantageous for people to do the right thing in terms of public health. so, yes, i do think the nhs app should record if you've had the vaccine, should record when you've had your last test. and if restaurants want to check up on that, then that is within their rights to do that. because, of course, it's not just about keeping you safe, it's about keeping the other people in that establishment safe as well. covid—i9 has done extraordinary damage to the uk and indeed the world economy, and governments are having to figure out how they can try to get close to balancing the books in a very different economic environment. the british government, it is clear, intends as one cost—saving measure to slash the foreign aid budget, to renege on its long—term promise to spend 0.7%

of national income on foreign aid every year. as a former foreign secretary, how do you feel about that? i would be very sad if that's what we ended up doing. because, yes, this has been a very tough year for the united kingdom, but the world bank say that this year, between 100—150 million more people will go into extreme poverty. that's a daily income of less than $1.90 a day. and i don't think we should ask the world's poorest to pay the price for some of these incredible challenges that we do admittedly face at home. well, should we ask the british public to continue to stump up millions of pounds for aid projects that include significant amounts of money going to countries like china, for example? no, and we are withdrawing our aid programme from both china and india for that reason. but there are other countries, particularly on the african

subcontinent, where there is desperate, crushing poverty. and throughout the whole of the last recession, the austerity period between 2010 and 2014—15, we made very painful cuts in public spending here, but we maintained our commitment to the world's poorest. and i think that is one of the reasons that britain has much more influence than other countries of similar size, because we do accept that we have global responsibilities. so i hope that's something we continue. andrew mitchell, former international development secretary, says, "it will diminish us on the world stage if we go ahead and do it." would you agree with that? and if you do agree with it, would you vote against it, if it comes to a parliamentary vote? i would find it very difficult to vote in favour of that measure. would you vote against it? well, i need to see what comes before parliament before making that decision. but i think this is something

that we can feel incredibly proud of in this country, that we blazed a trail in terms of making a very, very significant commitment to supporting the world's poorest. as a former foreign secretary, you must also be following the day—by—day brexit negotiations very closely. is it plain to you that the uk simply cannot afford a no—deal brexit? the governor of the bank of england has just warned that the cost of a no—deal would be significantly bigger in the long term than the cost of the covid—19 pandemic. in your view, can britain afford or simply not afford a no—deal brexit? well, for sure, there would be very severe short—term consequences from a no—deal... this isn't short—term, this is over ten years. well, we know that there would be long—term consequences, too, because they've been modelled, but there would be particularly severe short—term consequences. but we also have an obligation to do what the british people asked us to do in 2016, which is to implement that brexit result. and that was reaffirmed in the general election ofa yearago...

but they didn't at any time vote to make the economy smaller by up to 8% over ten years. no, but they voted to leave the european union cleanly. and if we don't do that, there will be democratic consequences that, in my judgment, would far outweigh the economic consequences of leaving without a deal in the long run, because it would send a signal to... i mean, i voted to remain in the european union, i should say, stephen, but the majority of the country did not, and those people would interpret not leaving cleanly, as they instructed politicians like me to do, as the political class riding roughshod over what ordinary people have asked for. just a quick thought on the politics of all of this. i began by asking you how you think boris johnson's government is doing. the british public take a fairly dim view of how he's handling covid. the approval ratings on that particular issue are low

for boris johnson — around 34% approval. and generally the government appears very eager to establish a reset. one of the key advisers to borisjohnson, and an arch brexiteer, dominic cummings, has left the government, and there's talk of a reset and a reshuffle. do you think this government really does need new faces and a reset? well, that's a matter for the prime minister. i'm asking you what you think. yes, but that is for the prime minister. and, you know, my view is that there will be a fresh start for the government when we put the pandemic behind us, because the pandemic is the single biggest challenge that any government has had to face in the post—war period. and it's been very tough for the government, but it's been very, very tough for people up and down the country. and a final thought — again, as a former foreign secretary. britain is now talking about going it alone. of course, we've left the european union. we have perhaps the promise of a more complicated relationship with the new american president, joe biden, who has expressed doubts about the brexit policies, expressed some doubts about borisjohnson and his leadership, as well. britain without the european union, in the words of one former british ambassador

to the us, peter westmacott, "on our own, somewhere offshore from the european union, somewhere in the mid—atlantic, trying to create something called global britain." it is not going to be easy, is it? it's not going to be easy. but, you know, ever since the days of britannia ruling the waves and us having an empire that covered a third of the globe, people have been betting against britain. and we've always bounced back and we've always maintained our influence. and the reason is because britain is associated — despite being a small country, less than 1% of the world's population — with the championing of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, free trade. these are things that britain and america — the two countries that have really championed those values throughout the world. and those are important to many, many people across the globe. and they will be even more important in the next decade

because, for the first time in our lifetimes, the largest economy in the world will not be a democracy. so i do think we have a great future ahead of us. jeremy hunt, thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you. hello. we've plenty of fine weather in the forecast for the uk for the next few days, thanks to a building ridge of high pressure. but that ridge of high pressure will bring with it an increased chance of many of us seeing frosty nights. could be some chilly days,

as well, as under the ridge of high pressure, there's an increasing chance of us seeing fog developing by night and lingering into the coming days. today perhaps not so bad, though. we will have a weather front still pushing a bit more cloud into southernmost counties of the uk first thing, a little bit of rain for kent. 0n the whole, though, the majority seeing sunshine from the get—go. but even with the sunshine, after a chilly start, our temperatures won't recover to the heights we've seen previously this week. we're looking typically at highs of 7—9, the odd spot getting up to 10 or 11. you may well notice this weather front trying to come into the north—west. these two fronts tend to try and squeeze the high through thursday and friday, but through the centre of the high, we have the greatest risk of seeing some fog as we move into the small hours of friday. and here, too, ithink, our chilliest spots, dipping down below freezing. a little bit more cloud to the far south—east and the far north—west will perhaps mean our temperatures may stay above. and through friday daytime, those fronts, as you can see, just cap either end of the uk. through the core of the uk, you may all think we're set up for a lot of sunshine. some areas will get some decent

sunshine, but some of that fog is going to really struggle to clear. there's not much breeze set to work on it, and the sunshine isn't particularly strong at this time of year. and if the fog does stick, temperatures, 2—3 degrees are possible. but as you can see, even in the best of early brightness on friday, we're looking at 6 or 7. as for the weekend, i suspect fairly similar temperatures and a fairly similar—looking picture overall. some chilly nights to come. you'll notice that our high looks a little different for saturday and sunday, it extends across us from the continent. just a chance as well on sunday that we'll see a weather front trying to push into the north—west. but the effect overall is still the same — a lot of fine weather, light winds, but that chance of some fog forming by night that lingers through the day or lifts up into low cloud, hence sunshine for many parts of the uk may well be at a premium as we head on into the weekend.

this is bbc news. i'm sally bundock with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. president trump pardons michael flynn — his former national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to lying to the fbi. people in england find out today which restrictions they face when the lockdown ends next week. we follow the exiled leader of belarus' opposition party on her mission in europe in our series, 100 women. and, argentina, and the world, say goodbye to diego maradona, one of football's all—time greats.