this is bbc news. the headlines: the african nation of somalia is suffering its worst drought in a0 years. it's estimated that more than half the population, nearly 8 million people, are currently living in drought—affected areas. it's growing into a full—blown famine, where households have no food and children suffer acute malnutrition. britain's new chancellorjeremy hunt has insisted the prime minister is still in charge of the government, despite a series of major u—turns. it comes as speculation grows among her fellow conservative mps on whether she can remain as leader. mr hunt has signalled possible tax rises. the authorities in nigeria say more than 600 people are now known to have died because of severe flooding across the country. the minister of humanitarian

affairs told journalists that more than 1.3 million people had been displaced in the worst floods the country had seen in a decade. now on bbc news, political thinking with nick robinson. hello and welcome to political thinking. and boy, there's quite a lot of politics to think about, isn't there? all the drama about this government mess, though, a dramatic shift in our politics. it has become the conventional wisdom overnight that labour will win the next election. the polling suggests there's been a greater swing in recent days and weeks than there was during the last worst financial crisis to hit a conservative government

— black wednesday — back in 1992. and that'll mean there will pretty soon be much greater scrutiny of what labour will do. faced with the same economic fundamentals high taxes, high borrowing, high inflation and low growth. if labour does indeed win an election, lisa nandy will be the cabinet minister with the job of delivering for what's become known as the red wall. northern industrial towns like wigan in lancashire, which she represents and which she says has changed her politics. a politics learnt at the knee of her grandfather, who was a liberal mp and a father who was who is a famous marxist academic. political thinking is a conversation with, not an interrogation of someone who shapes our political thinking. and today we're recording just down the road from wigan next door to the great city of manchester in the city of sa lfo rd. lisa nandy, welcome to political thinking.

hello. how does it feel being a political spectator in effect at this extraordinary time of political crisis? i mean, i probably shouldn't say this. it's not good to start a podcast, is it, by saying, i shouldn't say this, but, you know, in some ways it's sort of quite a relief for it not to be labour at the centre of all the drama. we've had huge amounts of political upheaval in our — on our own side, and you know, us being the party that isn't going through that, that is unified, and looking out to the country, is a a good place to be. but when you part the politics, which of course, we'll get to in a second, do you also watch open mouthed and think, my goodness, how is this happening? a bit, actually. yeah. so we've got used to lots of political drama in the last few years and it's almost become the norm. but there's something really extraordinary about what's happening to the conservative party at the moment. when borisjohnson fell, i was sitting on a bus in berlin. we'd gone over there to look at what was happening

in germany, how the spd government is starting to reconstruct the country to deliver, as you said in the intro, for those sort of what's known in britain as red wall, industrial coastal communities that have not seen that economic growth and that success in recent years, but actually also had to deliver for the whole country, because if you get things working in those places, you get the economy firing on all cylinders and everything starts to work. and we're we're sitting in this bus in berlin, sitting in traffic, and we're watching on i think it was annalisa dodds, who was our party chair, had managed to get a connection, and we were watching on her little phone, jonathan ashworth, whose work and pensions and her and myself at the back of this bus while borisjohnson resigned and the government collapsed and the tories descended into chaos. and i suppose it's a bit of a reminder that things can happen very quickly, but it's also, i think what's happened next is really unprecedented and extraordinary at the moment. the tories feel a lot like two parties within one party. i think that sort of happened

to labour a few years ago, but it's certainly happening to them now. does it affect you more directly? ina sense? you smarten up now, you know, they're going to start doing what i'vejust done in the introduction. they're going to start talking to me, not as, oh, we've got to have the opposition on, but as the next cabinet secretary for.. you've completely busted me. i walked in here and brushed down my suit and said, "i need smart myself. "we might be in government in a few weeks." but it must be very curious for you. you were born in 1979, the year that margaret thatcher came to power. so your entire childhood is with the conservatives in government. then you don't get into parliament until 2010. so the whole of that period then is spent under a labour government. and ever since you've been directly in politics as a member of parliament, at least, you're under the tories again. yeah, although that is part of the reason that i stood for parliament in 2010, because i'm from manchester originally, although towns,

towns, towns and everyone knows that i spent my teenage years in bury and i've made my home in wigan. i grew up in manchester in the 1980s in a very angry, divisive time, and i was 17, i was almost 18. i didn't get to vote, but i was 17 when i saw my first labour government, and there was this feeling during that time that progress was inevitable. and if i've learnt anything in the recent years, it's that if you want a better country you do have to go out and. fight for every day. that battle is never won. so in 2009, i came back to manchester for conservative party conference. i was working with child refugees at the time and the conservatives were here and hadn't seen lots of conservatives in manchester for a very long time. it was quite an unusual sight. they were absolutely certain they were going to win the next general election. and ijust thought, "i've got to do something about this." that sense that you've got to fight for things you believe in —

do you learn that from your dad? i mean, your dad was an activist as well as an academic. deepak gandhi, very important in the history of race relations in this country. the founder of the runnymede trust, for example. do you remember as a child the fights he had and had to have? so it's sort of the stuff of legend in our house and a lot of the stories that i think i remember, i don't remember because i was far too young, but when i was little we had the moorside riots just down the road from where i was growing up. the demonisation of a lot of people in that community, particularly young black men. and my dad was very involved, as was my mum actually, in trying to turn around the perception of what was happening. i mean, there's a story that my mum tells now. my dad occasionally tells it, but my mum normally tells it about when my dad was. he's a photographer, he said sort of amateur photographer, but he's very good at it and very into it. and he he'd gone off to take some photos of what was happening, to document it, and it stuck his nose into a police van and started taking some photos of the police who were doing some apparently fairly dodgy things.

they chased him... yeah, that's what that's that's what the legend says. and he comes chased by them, wanted to get up close because it was a better quality of photo. that is my dad all over. he does ridiculous things to get the right photo and off he went straight back to the house. my mum opens the door, he bowls through the door. the police are following. she's blocking them with me, who is a little baby, and my sister who's a toddler. but they get through the house and he's over the fence, into the neighbour's garden, over the next fence, and goes and hides in the neighbour's house till it was all over. so it was pretty close up. the action was was all around us, but it was also it — it could have been a very dispiriting time because you could have just looked at it and thought everything is rotten, everything is broken. and i suppose in some ways that's partly where i broke faith with the labour party when jeremy was leader, because i'm not in politics because i hate the tories, although my goodness,

they're making it quite easy at the moment. i'm in politics because i believe this country can be better, i know it can be better, and it only happens if every generation picks up the baton and fights for it. it's interesting you say that. are you uncomfortable with the idea that you should save your opponents? i despise them. and yeah, i am. actually, i was thinking about this. i was listening to question time the other night and there was a bit of a debate about it. i think i'm uncomfortable with it, partly because i think that dehumanising people in politics is a really, really corrosive thing. you know, one of the things my dad taught because he's an academic is that you should meet your opponents at their strongest argument and defeat it, not their weakest. and it's the arguments that matter. you get some very good people who have, in my view, some very bad ideas. and the clash of ideas matters, and you should always engage on that level. but i also just think politically it's a bit daft, isn't it? because politics is about persuading people and taking people with you. and a lot of people in this country voted for the conservatives at the last election and the one before and the one before that and the one before

that. and just writing all those people off as if they're not worthy of consideration just seems to me the wrong approach. it's interesting that you have become identified as not the spokeswoman for, but someone who cares passionately about towns and particularly northern towns. but as you said, you grew up in the city, grew up in manchester, where we're broadcasting from here. it's also the case that you lived for quite a while in london. you're a councillor in london. i went to uni in newcastle as well, which were the three best years of my life, bar none. was it actuallyjust going to become the candidate, and then the mp for wigan in lancashire, that began to change the way you saw things? i know you're writing a book at the moment, aren't you? yeah. and it starts it starts with the story about wigan and about how we saved wigan athletic. it's about the future of the country, but it starts with wigan for a very particular reason, because i am a different person than i was 12 years ago, and that is entirely

as a consequence of having made my home in wigan, raised my family in wigan, my friends, my neighbours as well as my constituents. understanding the experiences of people in places that often aren't reflected in the political debate has completely changed the way that i think about notjust the country but the world. but it's quite a thing to say you're a different person i can understand you might say "i've got different policy ideas." "it's changed my view." you're saying something more fundamental than that? yeah, i think that's right. i mean, you know, i've... i'm somebody who grew up in manchester. i come from a fairly middle class, fairly liberal, socially liberal background. i went to university, and in that i'm quite unlike, not all of my constituents, but a fair chunk of my constituents who come from a very working class background outside of a major city. many of my older constituents didn't go to university, although the younger ones now often do, no small part thanks to the last labour government, and on a lot of issues

have become really big hot button issues for labour, like immigration and social security and human rights and brexit, quite famously, and i've had to find a way of compromising and accommodating and understanding where a lot of my constituents are coming from, as they've had to sort of get used to me and understand where i'm coming from as well. and that's made me a different sort of politician, much more consensual, much more interested in negotiating my way through shared challenges. and in turn, i think that's made me a different sort of person. representative democracy is the most awesome thing. when you get elected as a representative, you almost can't quite believe that these hundreds of thousands of people that you've never even met have ticked a box to say that you can represent them. of course, they're voting for your party. they're not just voting for you, but they're trusting yourjudgement because they're not going to monitor everything that you do and say on things like going to war, you know, huge, major decisions that are going to change their lives and their family's lives. and when those people don't feel represented at all, notjust by the person who's

supposed to represent them, but by the whole political system, that is when the whole system collapses. and i still don't think to this day that most of the political, say, establishment, i don't like this sort of elites versus people because i think there's lots of normal people in the political world, but i still don't think that the political system, whether it's journalists or politicians, understand how close the whole system came to collapse during those brexit years. collapse? yeah, absolutely. what — define collapse, in what way? that people felt that the system not only had failed to represent them for a very long time, but was actively working against them and was blocking change that most people i think have started to see now was very badly needed. and that.. that wasn'tjust, forgive me, some of the issues that underlay the vote for brexit, was it? it was also the view that — and i put it in inverted

commas — that the establishment didn't want to listen to the people who'd voted leave, were actually doing everything in their power to overturn that, whether it was through parliament, whether it's through the supreme courts, whether it's through campaigns in the media, a sort of sense that we were given the vote and then people didn't want to listen to our vote because we happen to vote the wrong way. yeah, but it was much more fundamental than brexit. brexit became the catalyst for all of this, but it wasn't really about the european union. it was about a political system, an economic model that wasn't delivering for people, and a political system that told them that they were stupid, that they were dinosaurs, that they were racists, that this was progress and they either got on board or got out of the way. and ijust remember that on the day of the referendum leafleting in wigan town centre, and it was, you know, it's a pretty awful experience because we're really fleeing for a remain in a town where people had pretty much made up their minds by then, that they were definitely going to vote leave in large numbers. a third of people voted remain, but two thirds voted leave. and i remember this guy coming

up to me said it won't make any difference anyway. and i said to him, it absolutely will. i mean, this is one of the few elections where your vote really does count. and he said no, because they'll never do it. they'll never do it. whatever we say, they'll never do it. they'll do what they want to do anyway. and i said to him, you are wrong and you've got to think about this really carefully. years later, when we were still going round in circles trying to see if we could overturn the result, i couldn't stop thinking about that guy. and i thought you were right, actually. should you not have tried to overturn the result? i mean, you know, iwasn�*t in favour of the first referendum — i didn't vote for it, and i certainly wasn't in favour of having another one. i thought we got into a place as a country where we had an economic trade—off against the political trade—off. essentially, you're either going to do damage to your economic system or you're going to do damage to your political system. it was an awful place for us collectively as politicians to have got the country into. but we had and i thought that the mandate 4852 was honestly for compromise. i still think that but i think that is is now widely accepted.

i think mostly because the country wants to move on. now, what is the connection between that, where you said you begin your book, which is the rescue of wigan athletic. now we're not on football, so we're not going to get into the structures of it. thank goodness! but what i hope you're not going to tell me about your side. no, i've literally i mean, i still have no understanding — i go to the football, but i have no understanding whatsoever of what i'm watching on the pitch, and i've never pretended to. what i did have to do when we're going wigan athletic nearly collapsed was to go behind the scenes and start to understand how the system works. and i'll tell you, 12 years in elected politics, and i've never seen anything as truly frightening and rotten as some of the things that go on in the sporting world. it was incredible. but — but — but politics, if you like, should care about keeping football clubs open. yeah, because the football the football club is more than i mean, it's notjust about our pride and our purpose and our identity. it's part of people's family history.

you know, the chair of my supporters club, she used to go as a little girl with her dad as a season ticket. my stepdad was a lifelong sheikh. his family went to gigg lane, bury — bury fc, for those listeners who don't follow this sort of stuff, he went to gigg lane every week and his last words when he died a few years ago to my step brother were, "what's "the score?" these things really matter, but they matter economically too. you know, this is part of the economic and social fabric of the town. this club. no, you did rescue it or you were part of rescue, but with a foreign owner. yeah. now, some people think it's foreign ownership that is killing football because it is dissociating football's community from the people who actually own clubs. yeah. we fought really hard and we came together and we had to do some fairly extraordinary things and call in a lot of favours from some very good people in high places. but most of all, what i learnt from that experience is that the system is tilted in favour of people who want to come in and make

a quick buck. they want to take and extract and, in many instances, end up destroying — perhaps not by design — but they're quite cavalier about whether they do or not. and it's tilted away from the people who are in it for the long haul, who have skin in the game. those are the people, actually, they're the great untapped asset in our country, and we saw that when we saved the club. these are the people that will work harder and try harder and do more and think more creatively to make things work because they've got no choice, because it matters so much. and the way that it informed my politics, really, was that it made me understand that we've got to tilt the system back in favour of those people instead of rubbing up against the system. just to be clear, you're not having a conversation purely about football here. no! you're saying this is a symbol... it's far bigger than that. ..of the way the economy works? yeah, absolutely. so, you know, when you're the person who's sitting in your community watching

ropey landlords from other parts of the world or other parts of the country coming in and buying up large swathes of the housing stock and creaming off the housing benefit and running the housing stock down and treating their tenants badly and ruining the local community, the power should be in your hands, not theirs, to do something about it. is this levelling up, labour style? yeah. but it's notjust about local. so, it starts local because that's where you find people in every place in this country who are going to go out and fight for their communities and build and invest and create for the long term. but that means that the national system has to change. i mean, you know, you talked about the foreign owner of wigan athletic who is incredibly popular in the town. he's — talal, our chairman, he's over all the time from bahrain. he's become an honorary wiganer. he's always posting about pies on his twitter account. but it's more than that, he's given a commitment to the town, that he's in it for the long haul and that he cares about what happens there. and that taught me that it's not that local is good

and national or global is bad. it's that we need national government to stop doing everybody else�*s job, micromanaging millions of decisions in communities that it has no clue about. and we need it to start doing its ownjob, which is tilting the balance of power back towards those people at global, at national and at local level. what do you say to someone listening to this who might say "this is all hopelessly romantic. "it's about saving a football club. actually, what matters, whether it is, as you say, wigan or it's great yarmouth down south, it'sjust straightforward economics. the truth is there are not thejobs, there is not the wealth and labour will confront all the same fundamental problems that the tories are suddenly wrestling with at the moment — which is you've got a low—growth economy with high inflation, high taxes and high borrowing — and so, if you were put in office like that, you don't instantly have a solution to levelling up any more than they do. someone asked me this question. i went to a conference in halifax run by the tory

think tank 0nward, who did a lot of work with michael gove and andy haldane on levelling up and said, "why will "you succeed when, for 100 years, nobody has?" you know, whether you call it regeneration, localism, levelling up, regional inequality. and my answer is that this is not a regional or a local issue, this is a national issue. for 19 of the last 20 years, only two regions — london and the south east — have had the investment and the backing from the government to put more into the public purse than they take out. everybody else has effectively been put by government into a state of managed decline and the country can't succeed like that. i mean, you all know this from london that, you know, a million kids move to london every year to try and find higher wages. i was one of them, all those years ago. and you do find them, you find better opportunities and higher wages, but you also find that half of your disposable income is taken up with housing costs and that you can't get on the housing ladder and you can't get a gp appointment. we've written off the potential of people and places in every

part of this country and we just can't go on like that. now, another big question that will be asked about labour in the weeks and months to come is, to put it crudely, but it's one of the most powerful questions in politics, — whose side are you on? you did go on a picket line. you did stand with bt workers back in the summer. and yet, keir starmer seems to be saying to people like you "don't go on a picket line". look, this all got very blown up into a sort of ongoing row between labour people about picket lines. but actually, i don't think you can put a piece of paper between me and keir on this. he doesn't think that we should be out picketing. that's not our job. and i agree with him. when i went down to meet the bt workers, it was just simply to say hello, listen to what they've what they were dealing with here about the dispute, see what i could do to help. i met with the royal mail workers but we did it not on a picket line because we were able to do it in their office on a non—striking day. the point is this — is that ourjob is to understand

what is happening and then go out and solve it. in government, we would solve it by sitting down with them and negotiating our way through what is a shared challenge that, you know, especially when you're in the public sector, there isn't a lot of money around. inflation has gone through the roof and people are not being paid enough and they need a pay rise. now, that is a difficult square to circle or circle to square, but the only way you do it is by talking. crosstalk. i can see the subtlety of what you're saying. but in opposition, ourjob is notjust to go around with placards saying "this is terrible". 0urjob is to get into parliament and drag ministers to the despatch box in order to hold them to account for it. it's what i did with michael gove about local government. sure, understood. with some of the only people in the country who have the power to do that and keir�*s point, which i fundamentally agree with, is that we should be doing ourjob so that they can get back to doing theirs. now, i was reading the other day that you are ferociously competitive. no. is this true? no, absolutely not. that at your son's recent sports day, you went

for the adult sprint. giggles. well, what else are you going to go for? yeah. crossed the line with a dad who works as a professional sports trainer. yeah, i was pretty pleased with that. are you? i was out the traps much quicker than the rest of them. well, if you're in, you're in it to win it. 0therwise, why take up space? you know, i mean, but this is not my only piece of evidence — i'm told that board games are banned in lisa nandy�*s house. little bit. yeah. why? this may or may not be true. i've had to learn to tone it down a bit. i've now got a child who is of nintendo switch age and i've had to learn to just be a little bit more zen in my defence. i think there is something quite important about this. i learnt this from my mum — is that when you set your sights on something,

if you know that it's the right thing to do, you should go for it and you should be all in. and in fact that's the title of my new book, all in, because i think it's only by being all in that you actually grab hold of things and change them. and i'm not, you know, really in politics for sort of, you know, tinkering around the edges. i think we really do need to change things, and that means you've got to go for it. and when i stood to be leader of the labour party, it was always a long shot — of course it was — but we didn't do it by half measures because we felt it was so important and so much was at stake. and sometimes, i look at politics in the way that we talk about things and it's celebrated that men go out and fight for what they want and don't compromise and take no prisoners and yet, women are sort of apologetic for it. and i guess i'm sort of saying to you today — well, in fact, i am saying to you today — i'm not apologetic about it. i'm ambitious for this country. i'm ambitious for my constituents and my community, and i'm going to go out and fight for it. so we'll put you down for the next leadership contest. oh, god! in 20 years�* time when we've been in government, we've sorted all this mess out,

i'm fairly sure that i will be allowed to retire at that point and go around terrorising other kids with board games. that's my plan. one final serious question. you didn't look like you enjoyed it very much, running for the leader. it was one of the most stressful times that i've, one of most stressful decisions i've ever made, i think. why? and the reason was i felt there was so much at stake. i thought if we turned up and said, "corbyn, "ten out of ten. "brexit ten out of ten. "labour ten out of ten. "we just need to put our foot on the gas and do more." i thought we'd make a decisive break with people in every community in this country, in every region who had built this party and had lost faith with us. i didn't think there would be any way back. and so, win or not win, it felt very much like a small group of us trying to turn the ship away from the rocks. i think we did that, actually, and i think keir has really run with that over the last few years and it's been an absolute pleasure, actually, to be part of a team that is trying again not to fix the labour party, because we've done that, it's to fix the country. lisa nandy, thanks forjoining

me on political thinking. thank you. it is one of the great cliches of politics that governments lose elections and oppositions don't win them. like most cliches, there's a lot of truth in it, but not entirely. labour had to change to have a prospect of winning but they've done something else as well — quite consciously said very little about what they'll do in power, not come up with a great policy perspective. pretty soon, people will want answers to the questions we've just been exploring. if you are living in an economy with low growth and high tax and high borrowing and high inflation, how on earth will labour help the sorts of people it's committed to help? thanks for watching.

hello. monday will be a blustery day but after wet weather overnight, a lot of that clears away. for many places, the bulk of the day will be dry. early outbreaks of rain east anglia and the south, slowly pull away and it gradually brightens up. early rain in the far north of scotland spreads north through the northern isles. plenty of showers follow into scotland — lengthy ones north of the central belt. there will be a few for northern ireland, north west england, north wales, though a lot fade away into the afternoon. for many places, the afternoon will be dry with broken cloud and sunny spells. keep a few showers going in northern scotland overnight and into tuesday. there's actually a little nose of high pressure building in monday night and into tuesday, so clearing skies, lighterwinds and, for many areas, temperatures dipping away — cold enough for a touch of frost, especially in more rural spots. on tuesday, after that chilly start, a lot of fine weather to come. mayjust catch a shower towards the north—east of the uk on increasing cloud and towards the far south—west as well, where the breeze will start to pick up later. but for many places on tuesday,

it'll be dry and quite sunny, too.

welcome to bbc news. i'm simon pusey. our top stories: somalia's sorrow. we have a special report from the african nation suffering its worst drought in a0 years. we are headed for a catastrophe. this is a serious. it is really going to get worse if nothing more comes in other than what is already there. britain's new chancellor defends the prime minister, saying voters don't need the turmoil of a fresh leadership election. more than 600 dead due to severe flooding in nigeria, with weeks of torrential rain still to come. and china's president stresses the need for continued economic development, but defends his covid policy, as the communist party gathers in beijing.