five of the uk's leading business groups have called on the government to act now to support consumers facing spiralling energy bills. arnold schwarzenegger has escaped unscathed from a multi—vehicle pile—up on friday afternoon. one person is in hospital but it is not thought that their injuries are life—threatening. now on bbc news it's time for dateline london. hello, and welcome to the programme which brings together some of the uk's leading columnists,

bbc specialists, and the foreign correspondents who write, blog and broadcast to their audiences back home, from the dateline london. this week, borisjohnson�*s stay of execution, the uk's inflation problem and whyjoe biden has a problem keeping nato allies on side over ukraine. to discuss all that, we are joined by marc roche, a columnist and correspondent with the french news magazine le point and isabel hilton, who is distinguished as a foreign correspondent, and this has been followed by founding china dialogue, improving the understanding of china's environmental challenges. here in the studio, the bbc�*s business editor, simonjack. welcome to all of you, good to have you all with us this weekend. now, it is official, everything in the uk is going up. the number of conservative mps demanding a vote on whether to replace the prime minister, the number of labour mps, after this week's defection and the odds on borisjohnson surviving in office. none of that can be blamed on inflation, at least, which has hit a near 30 year high. more on that later. the perilous state of mrjohnson�*s

fortunes was laid bare in two appearances this week. challenged repeatedly in a tv interview about parties in downing street during covid lockdowns, the prime minister said no one had told him they were against the rules his government had imposed. a day later, despairing of that response, a veteran mp repeated to the prime minister's face the words used to dispatch one of his more hapless predecessors, 80 years ago, you have sat there too long for all the good you have done. in the name of god, go. marc, how are you explaining borisjohnson�*s plight to your readers, the people who look at le point? there is enormous interest, of course, in borisjohnson for french readers, because of his personality, he speaks french, because of brexit and because he has been a terrible partner in the post brexit negotiations and, so, i am trying to explain to french readers first the role

of parliament and how important it is in the uk, compared to france, where it is less important and i am trying also to explain the feeling of entitlement, of the upper classes in this country, where there is a role for some and a rule for others and the final thing that i am trying to explain is the booze culture, where you have top civil servants going to the supermarket to buy cheap rose and cheap cheese and boozing the whole evening together. in france, that would never happen, because you take wine with a meal and good wine, that is what civil servants would do in france. so, it is appalling on every level, as far as your readers are concerned. yes, and of course, as far as my readers are concerned, as soon as borisjohnson goes, the best it is for the eu and the uk.

is there not some advantage in having a prime minister like him for france? no, there is none, because, you know, you want a good relationship back on rail and you want a good relationship with britain, because of all the terrible challenges we all now face. isabel, that quotation i mentioned, by david davis, the words of leo amery, who was an ally of winston churchill, aimed at neville chamberlain, who was gone very soon after, that must have really hurt, mustn't it, for a prime minister who deified churchill? well, indeed, and david davis, i am sure, knew that it would hurt, because he said, before he delivered this line, that this would be a quotation with which boris johnson was familiar. boris johnson then pretended that he did not know what he was talking about, which rather raises the question, did boris johnson actually write the biography of churchill that carries his name,

because if he did, there is no way that he could avoid knowing that quotation, which was in turn a quotation, of course, from oliver cromwell, when he dismissed the parliament in 1653. oliver cromwell is a fabulous source of quotations. he does rather put our current parliamentarians to shame and it is worth browsing through them. one of them, and i think perhaps boris johnson might think about this, he did say to, i think the scottish prime minister, in the name of god, consider you might be wrong! laughter. that would be very good advice for all politicians perhaps, it is on the level, i think, simon, with the figure that one roman emperor used to have going behind him and as he was greeted by the crowds, he would be going, you're not a god, you're not a god, you're mortal, you are mortal, which is a good reminder for any politician. that is a great civil service job. absolutely. the prime minister's sort

of conscience, one might even call it. the prime minister must be feeling a lot less like a roman emperor, a lot less like a french president, a lot less like oliver cromwell right now. what are the communities that in like previous prime ministers have always been a reliable source of support in the business community? i wonder in your dealings with the business community and i know that it represents lots of different businesses, in different areas and so on, is there a sort of view about this government and has it got a defined relationship? oddly, for a conservative prime minister, he has . actually got quite a fractious. relationship with the business community. a lot of that started _ with obviously brexit, they were | not sure about the direction, theyj did not like uncertainty, and there was plenty of that, . when they expressed their concerns, there was _ the famous four letter epithet he sent in their direction about their i concerns, so that kind of set a tonel and you have got to remember, also, that also the business community have seenj a massive increase in _ taxes, which is going to kick in in april. . they have whacked corporation

tax up, from 19 to 25% - undoing, in a stroke, - what the previous conservative | policy, in trying to get taxes low, | and the other thing i think, is that | he genuinely, borisjohnson, i havej seen plenty of speeches that he has given to business, he finds business people quite tedious, i think. - i think that he thinks that- their world of risk analysis and spreadsheets and, you know, - financial commitment and whatever, you know, boring at best and almost cowardly - at worst and actually he _ likes to say, come on, with a fair- wind and the kind of booster that we talked about, why can't we alljust get on side? having said that, they don't like uncertainty, deliveringl an 80 seat majority, . i think people thought, at least this is over for a _ while. it will be a stable period. even if we do not like everything about it, there will be some - political stability, _ and that is why this has thrown that into sharp relief and i think there are two _ things going on here. there is the one which is boris johnson and l

parliament and his own mps, - remember we have got local elections coming up in may when he will have to face _ the country and then we really will know l whether all this stuff that_ marc has been writing about. and others is actually a political liability or not. the unusual thing i suppose about scandals these days, isabel, is that they are notjust a case of allegations and he said, she said and the other side denies it. there is evidence and there is durable evidence and technology is coming into play in this story in a way that presumably explains why we are having the sue gray enquiry that everyone is waiting for before delivering their verdict on whether or not the prime minister knew about parties or lied about parties. indeed, and the guardian is excitedly reporting an e—mail that was sent warning boris johnson not to hold this party, warning him against the party in question, and that has been made available to sue gray and so much of what happened now, the _ factions and the plots, happens on whatsapp

groups and it happens on signal and it happens through e—mail. the difficulty is, though, that sue gray has no powers to call for evidence, so she is rather dependent on people forwarding her evidence and this is being done rather selectively, it seems to me. one of these notorious parties was given in honour of the departure of a head of communications who went on to be deputy editor of the sun, where you would assume a key news sense would prevail, but unaccountably it has not reported or indeed published any of the e—mails connected with his own farewell party. so, yes there is evidence, but getting hold of it, unless you are the police or have judicial authority is not a given. the police have famously said that they will only investigate if the cabinet office, in other words, a branch of government tells them that they should investigate. presumably the police are waiting for sue gray's report as well. marc roche, do you have any hope that the affair

johnson will be resolved in the coming week? well, no, because i think, as isabel said, that this official report will be a whitewash. i think all these stories about bullying byjohnson of hostile conservative mps have fizzled out, but the fact is that boris johnson, whether, if he has not lied to parliament, because then he will have to go, will survive this, but he will be a lame—duck prime minister, like theresa may, john major and to a certain extent, thatcher, in the last year of her mandate. and that means that none of his big policies, especially equality between regions, can really be successful. marc, thank you very much. now, in december, inflation rose to 5.4%, up from 5.1% the previous month, that is a 12 month

comparison, so 5.1 in the year until november and 5.4 in the year to december. that 5.it% figure is the highest since march 1992. food, clothing and household goods also rose, the bank of england indicates inflation hitting 6% by april. that is also the month in which the energy cap will be revised to reflect the spike in wholesale gas prices. simon, how painful is this going to get, do you think? it is awful, actually. i think that for all this i political chicanery we are seeing, there is nothing more - difficult for a government when its i citizens are actually getting a bit. poorer every day, because the cost of living is going up - faster than their wages. there is no evidence that i have seen, from talking to a - lot of industry, that this has got any short—term fix. - the sharp end of this- is a massive rise in wholesale gas prices, europe approach this i season with low reserves, you have got the world economy waking up from out of their— covid related comas, and you _ have got asian economies, j

like china and a part of this is to do with moving to net zero. everyone in the world has decided that gas is their. transitional fuel to - get there, at the same time, and that means that_ everyone is going, - there is a dash for gas. this is absolutely crucial, - lots of countries which rely on gas to make electricity are seeing this, the government here is under- enormous pressure to try and figure out what to do about this. _ there have been different measures, france, i think they have been- giving out 100 euros tokens - and in spain they have removed vat. all of these options - are out there, including some sort of bailout for— the industry to try and smooth i the spike over time, but i think actually this is in many ways more of a political emergency and an i international one, because it is not unconnected to what is going on in| ukraine or certainly the things that people are talking about is not - unconnected to the relationship with russia at this time and perhaps we i can discuss that. this is a really, really serious issue at the moment. - we will discuss that in a minute. marc, you are an economist, what

levers exist that allow government to, in some ways, mitigate the effects of inflation and is there any sign that they work these days, because a lot of people say, interest rates are so low, that you can incrementally raise them, but it has very little effect in dampening inflation? well, government has limited room of manoeuvre, as simon said, because they can give a bit of money, they can put taxes on the winners in covid, like pharmaceutical companies, like a windfall tax, on utilities and food companies like supermarkets, but that won't help. it might help short—term, but really france giving 100 euros, you should give 500 pounds or £1000. i think the only solution, in a way, is the central

bank, because the central bank is really responsible also of the inflationary mess that we are in, because they undervalue inflation. they continue to print money, because they want to support the relaunch of plans and it came to light by increasing interest rates. interest rates are the only thing that will work, if you increase them drastically, which is very difficult politically, so what you need is a real interest rate increase, not 0.1% or 25%, but something like one or 2%, alleviated by short—term help from the government. it is the only way we might get out of that, but there are problems of supply and energy and food. isabel, we only have to look

to turkey to see the damage that can be done when political motives control central bank and decisions. in this country we at least have a central bank that is, we are told, independent, it was made independent 25 years or so ago by the then incoming labour government, when gordon brown was chancellor. presumably there is an opportunity here for the governor and his colleagues to say, let us hit inflation and let others hit it hard and do so, whatever the focus is in number 10 downing street or whatever the treasury thinks? well, there is, but then you have a problem of covid recovery, if you _ raise interest rates, which is one way to hit inflation, you make it much harder for an already weakened economy to recover and certainly, you know, any government and indeed the opposition would not be too happy if the recession that we are likely to see is deepened by that, so there is a reluctance, i think, on the part of central banks in general to do that, but ijust

wanted to pick up on something that simon said, and how households in britain are going to hurt and they are going to hurt, they are going to hurt, in some ways, worse than other households because of our particular dependence on gas. more british homes are heated by gas than in the rest of europe and we use gas to generate electricity, so a tripling in the wholesale price of gas is going to hit british households very hard and particularly hard, because — if you remember in 2013, there was a memorable sun headline, which said cut the green crap and there is a relationship between net zero and what is happening now, but it is a negative one. cutting the green crap, which cameron and osborne did, they cut energy efficiency measures, they cut the investment which would have helped households to transition to other forms of energy and they cut

all the energy saving measures and as a result, british households are _ paying 2.5 billion more on their energy bills than they would have done had those programmes remained in place. so, you know, these short—term measures have long—term effects and we are really exposed to fluctuations in the wholesale price of energy in a way that many— countries are simply less exposed to. isabel makes a very good point, we have a long—standing problem about energy storage. we do not have much in the way of gas storage, so we have to buy and pay a premium price as a result, because we are almost buying to use it, butjust picking up on this question of inflation, i was talking to the food writer, jack munro, on thursday, on this channel, and she was saying, the inflation measure doesn't reveal the full story, because it is a basket of the average person's goods, it does not, it hides the fact that for some households,

particularly on low incomes, they are being affected much more steeply. so, a basket that has champagne in it, does not deal with the family who does not drink champagne, just has to buy basic food and basic food stuffs like rice and pasta have gone up massively in the last six months. well, i am not enough _ of an economics expert to take that basket and analyse it bit by bit and i_ notice that chris giles in _ the financial times, the economics editor there, had a bit of a two- and fro with jack munro about this, but there is no doubt that, for |example, if you consider heating| your home as a necessity, then it makes... which most people would. yeah, and this is why i do not understand l that in economics, some people say, i if gas is cheaper, you buy more of. it. do you? really? i think you will heat _ the house the way you usually do and what you need to do and that i clearly things like that are a much. bigger component of people's - disposable income than the person who has champagne in their basket, or international travel or what have i you. for those people on limited incomes,

for example pensioners or— those on benefits, this - is an absolutely excruciating horror show, actually, and it is going to get. really, really bad. we will find out, - to the government's credit in a way, they have had this energy price cap, - which has protected a lot of people, i retailers, it has bankrupted all thei suppliers, well 25 of them, - but it has protected some of them, but that protection will lapse when the new _ energy price cap is set on february the 7th, l it comes into effect on _ april the 1st and there is intense pressure, i got a letter this- afternoon from a bunch of business groups saying, you need to act - urgently. i think it is the story, - the number one political and economic consideration, notjust in the uk, - probably in western europe. good, we will be talking a lot more about it on this programme in the coming weeks and months. simon, we are talking about the cost of living, let us talk about something that is about the costs that may have to be borne to prevent a lot of people dying. that is measures to discourage

or to punish russia if it invades ukraine or crosses into any part of ukrainian territory. there is a lot of talk about forcing russia out of the banking system. can you explain what that plan is, if such a plan exists and what might be the effects of it? i can explain what the plan is, i am very doubtful- that it will actually happen. this would be something called the swift - system, which connects around 11,000 banks around the world and it - facilitates cross—border payments. you could take russia out of thatj system, the us has an enormous amount of control over that, it is| based in belgium, but the us can force the issue. they did that with iran, | so there is a precedent, however iran is one - thing, taking russia out of the banking system is quite another and as we have just i been discussing, it supplies one i third of all europe's natural gas, it is one of the eu's biggest- trading partners, so anything that did that would have an enormous| amount of collateral damage. this is the main - objection, in my view, which is that they have got an alternative system - which they have developed, so has china and i think-

that at a moment when the presumed supremacy of the dollar banking - system looks like itj could be fracturing, if you were to do this and create a further fracture, you _ might well be playing into china's hands - and i think that the us would _ not really want to do that. i think that this whole dollar —based order. is up for grabs and this i would be an acceleration down the path that the _ us might not like. that is a telling criticism, mark, of the idea of the plan and in a sense it underlines the problem that the west faces. it was unintentionally exposed byjoe biden�*s speech on wednesday where he more or less admitted that short of a full—scale invasion, which all the european allies would seek to oppose and would act against, anything less, which let's face it, is more likely, there would be disagreement, there would not be a united front. i thought that cnn called it very well, when it described it as an uncomfortable truth, at a dangerous moment. well, for europe, putin has

all the trumps, he has all the cards in his hands, because president macron said to the european parliament this week, because it is a french presidency, to russia, let us negotiate directly, the eu and russia and of course, putin refused, because of security and military, europe is a dwarf and the only two armies that are of any consequence or the british, they are not in the eu any more and they are helping are the british, they are not in the eu any more and they are helping ukraine anyway and the french, who are not going to die for ukraine three months before a presidential election, so all this, you have also forgot to say that there is a very strong, not pro—russian, but sympathy to russia, lobbying the eu, with germany, which has refused a british playing to fly over to bring arms to ukraine and refused to meet joe biden and you have greece and cyprus and others, so it does not

look good and i think mr putin is winning at the moment. isobel, only one of the meetings that took place in that flurry of diplomacy a week ago actually directly involved ukraine itself, the meeting at the osce, which some people might say was the least important of the forums in truth, of the kind of potential for military conflict, do you think the west is in danger of making a mistake it has made in the past, of talking about a rather than with countries? up to a point, although it rather depends what russia is looking for here and what the most promising diplomatic forum is. there are multiple diplomatic forums. ukraine has been involved with the european union in long—standing efforts to get some kind of settlement and to defuse tensions and i think the eu has found ukraine

a rather unhelpful ih _ many respects, but i agree, you know, i think there is very little likelihood that anyone is going to want to have, put soldiers into ukraine. the united states is not going to want people to die in ukraine either. actually, putin does not need to invade ukraine in order to get, to some extent, to get what he wants, but it is not always clear what russia does want and there is a fairly well—established sense, certainly amongst american strategists, that if russia is making a big noise in one corner, you should look in the other corner to see what is actually being prepared and so we are not really clear. it is a bit of a head scratch actually what this is about. and that presumably creates challenges, in the sense, that nobody knows what would be the kind of face

saving offer that the west could make, that would allow vladimir putin to stand down without looking like he has stood down. i think he would certainly declare victory if there was some kind of commitment to at least you have a moratorium on nato enlargement. there have been several rounds of nato enlargement since putin has been president and i think he feels that the last stand is the _ ukraine. ukraine has kind of been offered membership of nato but without a timetable and i think it is relatively easy to say, it is not off the table, but it is a bit like turkey and the european union, how long has not been on the table? i mean, we can play this game over very long time, he might also, you _ know, wish to have some reassurance that there would be no missiles or bases in ukraine and so on, but i think there are things that could be offered.

it is just remembering, of course, taking us back to where we started, that leo amery quote, in gods name go. it was delivered to a prime minister, neville chamberlain who had been bowled in efforts to prevent russia invading countries in europe. that is dateline london. goodbye. hello there. it is a quiet weather story to tell at the moment, with high—pressure controlling things. yes, we did see some clear skies and it was a frosty start across much of the of england. this was scunthorpe earlier on, but certainly more cloud out to the west and as we go through the day, the cloud will continue to develop. high pressure controlling the story at the moment, is still a bit more of a breeze

across the far north west and with that south—westerly flow driving in a little more moisture. here is where we will see the mildest weather, but may be picking up a spot or two of drizzle. more cloud are generally out to the west and it will push its way east through the afternoon and the sunshine turning somewhat hazy and if you have already seen some this morning, maybe passing over to cloudy skies for the end of the day. temperatures across england and wales are likely to pick up between seven and nine celsius and double figures into scotland. now, as we go through the evening, we will see some breaks in the cloud from time to time and when that happens temperatures will fall away and we will see mist and fog forming, but still the emphasis with cloudy skies, not quite as cold as previous nights, but where we do get some breaks, we will see temperatures getting close to freezing. we start on sunday again acquired a feeling of weather and the real cold air is sitting in eastern europe, with that high—pressure dominating and the wind is spiralling in a clockwise direction, we still have that south—westerly feed driving in more cloud from the atlantic but keeping

things largely fine and quiet. it is a great story on sunday, a lot of cloud around, but a dry and quiet theme of weather and still those temperatures peaking at between five and 9 degrees across much of the country. the winds will strengthen in the far north west by the end of the day and we could see a little bit of patchy rain arriving and that will be sitting across the western isles and the northern isles and into the far north of scotland during the day. again, quite a lot of cloud around, some breaks, particularly to the east of the pennines and temperatures here may struggle, five or 6 degrees but the highest values out to the west of eight or nine celsius. as we move towards the middle part of the way, we are likely to see weather fronts pushing in across the top of the high as it syncs that little bit further south and there will be some rain around, but it will weaken as it bumps into the higher pressure and moves further south. so, this is the story as we move through the week ahead,

in the north, quieter elsewhere.

this is bbc news — these are the latest headlines in the uk and around the world. the first shipment of us military aid arrives in ukraine overnight following frank talks over russia troop build—up at the border. a british conservative mp has accused downing street of trying to blackmail politicians seeking to oust the prime minister is to meet police to discuss his allegations. a week after tonga was devastated by a volcanic eruption and tsunami humanitarian aid begins to reach the tens of thousands of people affected. impact of rising energy prices and an urgent call for the uk government to intervene to help

business and households manage spiralling bills. arnold