voice-over: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. newscast. newscast, on the bbc. hello, it's adam in the studio. and chris in the studio. and in a bit we will be joined the children's author michael rosen, because

it is world book day when we are recording this episode. i hope you had some good costumes to hand. first of all, though, it is day two of what the daily telegraph is calling the lockdown files — all those whatsapp messages between matt hancock, the health secretary during the early stages of the covid pandemic, and borisjohnson and rishi sunak and all their advisers and their pollsters and dominic cummings and patrick vallance and chris whitty and basically everyone who had anything to do with covid. where do you think that the story has kind of got to? well, it carries bubbling along, doesn't it? so, it's not quite, i don't think, necessarily yet at the kind of, the obvious comparisons for the daily telegraph is expenses, mps' expenses the best part of 15 years ago. it is generating a lot of news, loads and loads of pick—up in lots of different news organisations but it isn't necessarily the top story everywhere, every day for days and days on end but they have got shedloads of stuff to reveal. i went into telegraph towers — the headquarters of the telegraph — today. i was shown the bunker which is how they describe this

kind of windowless room where about eight journalists, since the turn of the year, so for two months, sitting in a room not much bigger than the newscast studio, not much bigger than your average maybe bedroom in a house, where they are all sitting behind desktop computers that are not on the internet, that is where the data is. they're than having to if they are looking at a link that may have been shared in one of these whatsapps, they are having to type it out longhand in order to fire it up on their laptop — that is the data security that is going on — and they have been ploughing through it, all these different whatsapp groups with all of these different strands of stories that are coming out. and the journalist who is at the heart of that effort is isabel oakeshott, who has worked at a few newspapers but she is working with the telegraph on this. and crucially, she worked with matt hancock, helping to write his pandemic diaries book — that is how she got her hands on all these messages. you have been to speak to her in the bunker. talk us through the timeline about how you came into possession of all these whatsapp messages. because you did the book with matt hancock so when did

you first get hold of this stuff? and then, talk me through your decision to decide to do more than just write the book with him, but do what you have done with the telegraph? so, the book project was originally supposed to be six months. that is a pretty condensed time frame to write any book. i have written multiple books. six months is tough. in the event, it was extended to about a year and it was only really about halfway through that process that i began getting these files — and, frankly, i was astonished at what i was being given. and when was this? a couple of years ago? oh, no — we are talking about the summer. right. so last summer, you are beginning to look at these files and think, "oh, my goodness". absolutely. and there are 2.3 million words worth of messages here, 100,000 or more individual messages and conversations. there was absolutely no way that i or matt hancock or anyone who works for him could possibly have gone through all of that. my role at that time

was to help matt hancock write the book that he wanted, and it would have to be a true account — of course i'm not going to put my name to anything that i thought was false or misleading — but the best we could do within that time frame was draw from the critical messages that we could find easily. and i want to be fair to matt hancock — he did — lean towards disclosure. that was his essential kind of bias, i think. so, we were able to put an awful lot of this material in his book. but, of course, there was an enormous amount left over and it was only after the book was published, i discharged my responsibility to him, that i began thinking about whether there was, in fact, an overwhelming public interest in revealing more. now, he had said publicly that he had given all the material to the public inquiry. i've never asked him

what that means. you know, did he give every bit of it, all 2.3 million words? but we now know there is no prospect of anybody seeing any outcome from that anytime soon. you say that he leant towards disclosure. bluntly, when you were writing that book with him, were there things that you saw in these messages that he did not want in that book? yes. i would challenge any journalist worth the name journalist who received a cache of information like this not to think, "my goodness. "this is extraordinary"... so you knew you had struck gold whilst you were still writing the book? that you could write this book and then do all of this? actually, that wasn't the plan. it was an enormous challenge to get the book out. you know, that is a very detailed book and it has a lot of material from those whatsapps in it and, you know, it was exhausting doing it, frankly. to try to do that in parallel with earning a living was extremely tough.

i loved it, i don't want to say "poor me" but i certainly wasn-t — thinking about what came after. but you are right — you know, the journalistic instinct is to be thrilled — of course it is. you know, i would challenge any of my colleagues in the industry who had received a cache of material like that to say, "oh, well, you know, "i will use a bit of it and let's go "with what we have chosen for the book and then "i willjust kind of, you know, delete that". that is not what we are here to do asjournalists. and if that meant betraying matt hancock, that's fine? well, look... i take that seriously — of course i do — but ultimately, the public interest was overwhelming and it isn't about matt hancock. you know, this is something so much bigger. this isn't about embarrassing individuals or making individual politicians look bad — nor is it, by the way, about me, although lots of people might like to make it so. it's so much bigger than that.

it is about the entire country — and if we are going to talk about betrayal, then the way i'd see it is the betrayal of every one of us who were let down by the response to the pandemic. my responsibility is to get information to them. when did matt hancock find out about all this? well, matt hancock would've found out about this as the same time as everybody else found out about it, when the telegraph published the first expose. why not give him a chance to offer a right to reply? well, the reality is that the paper felt that the most important thing was to get this out there. what we did not want is any clever government shenanigans trying to block us from publishing — and that is always a real danger with a big expose in which people are going to be somewhat embarrassed or at least made uncomfortable... lawyers intervening because there was a non—disclosure agreement? no, no — actually there wasn't a non—disclosure agreement. there was a very standard terms of agreement between us but it wasn't actually an nba,

but that is a boring technical point. it isn't actually what would have come into play here. as you know, governments can injunct newspapers from publishing things. i think the telegraph would have had an extraordinarily powerful public interest argument and i think... but there was a risk there, you create a risk there? but there was a risk there, you feared a risk there? i think absolutely, of course. any big journalistic investigation into anyone always carries the risk of an injunction. do you ever worry that no—one will ever trust you again? chuckles. no, i don't, because i'm really good at what i do. i do stories in the public interest and i make judgements. and you know, already, in the last 24 hours, i have had people coming to me with tip—offs and a lot of e—mails from members of the public saying thank you. what about the argument that it isn't really in the public interest? because this is partial, these are whatsapp exchanges, there's a million and one other bits of testimony out there that perhaps, of course, we don't even know about and we certainly haven't seen, and that the properforum

for an analysis of that is a public inquiry? nota drip, drip, drip ina newspaper over a couple of weeks. well, we've addressed that, haven't we, about the proper forum? love the idea of a public inquiry. let's do what sweden did and wrap it up. they wrapped theirs up last year. so, yes, in an ideal world, that is the proper forum. i've got no confidence — and that is in no way a slight on the brilliantjudge, she's an incredibly respected figure. she has been given the remit, she's not set it up to have no deadline. but you can't have confidence in a public inquiry that has no deadline and a remit that big. so, as to the point about this being partial, the telegraph coverage has been very upfront about that. we are not over—claiming for it. it is what it is. where there are bits missing, we acknowledge that, and i would invite anybody who feels that they have other information that would put a different perspective on this, if they are sitting on a bunch of their own whatsapps to say,

"hang on a minute. "actually, you needed this bit of the conversation," bring it on! i would love to hear from you. what about the criticism — we have heard it from matt hancock and others — that this is about pursuing an anti—lockdown agenda? that your world view, if you like, on how the pandemic was handled is well known — perfectly respectable view in the range of the debate — but that that's the principal motivation for you? who has a pro—lockdown agenda? i mean, what is that? is that a thing? you know, what is a pro—lockdown agenda? i was very vocal during the pandemic — as were a number, a small number of other brave people — i don't mean to put myself in the brave category — but it was difficult talking out at the time. it was difficult challenging the consensus. we know that eminent public health experts, epidemiologists, scientists were utterly vilified for expressing any dissenting view, for questioning what the government wanted to do. i think that was profoundly wrong.

i think that absolutely, i want to get to the heart of whether the repeated lockdowns were the right and proportionate response to the pandemic. we now know so much more about the collateral damage. that was obvious to me. it was obvious to a lot of public health experts and scientists. you only have to look, for example, at education, what we have covered in the telegraph today. over 100,000 children were lost to education forever because of the repeated lockdowns in schools. they dropped off school registers, they never returned. now, better—off children will, of course, bounce back. kids are resilient. but it is a tragic truth that for some children, and probably quite a significant number, their life opportunities have been permanently damaged. let's talk finally about the process, thejournalistic process about what we are now reading in the daily telegraph. we are at telegraph towers,

the headquarters of the daily and sunday telegraph here. i havejust been in the room known as the bunker down the corridor — a windowless room full of computers that are not connected to the internet. i think that's right. yeah, that's right. where the cleaners haven't been in for two months and there is old takeaway forks on the floor and all the rest of it. our audience will be interested in how this has been assembled journalistically. talk us through that. the process has been extraordinarily energy intensive. the telegraph put an enormous team onto this. and it'as been very methodical. you know, when you're doing a project like this, what you don't want is ten journalists all going off in different directions, you know, making notes in different formats and getting excited about different things but not telling each other. so, the way this was managed has been utterly meticulous, extraordinarily professional, very formulaic. you know, there was a huge volume of material to go through, so that had to be carved up between different whatsapp groups. some of them are very big groups. there is one whatsapp group in particular that arrived

in a dump of about a million wordsjust in one group. that crashes most normal computers. so, it had to be carved up in a certain way. but there were so many checks and balances built into the process. so each journalist involved was asked to check every other journalist's work so that it was the case that everything could be coordinated. people could say, actually, "i have spotted this — "did you spot that?" because the telegraph used their specialists in different areas. so, that's isabel oakeshott's view from telegraph towers. what about the views of some of the people who have been caught up in all this? well, matt hancock in particular is very punchy in his response, as you might imagine — not least because of that sense of betrayal — and he says that it's outrageous and that she is pursuing an anti—lockdown agenda, as he puts it, and that it is not in the public interest, as he sees it, because the forum for that, he believes, is the public inquiry. but, of course, we have

heard her critique of that process, that sense from her that she thinks it's going to be too long—winded. now, today is world book day, as many parents will have experienced and as i have seen many parents talking about on social media today, so we managed to rope in a real—life author to come and talk to us. it is former children's laureate and broadcaster michael rosen, who is here. hello, michael! hello! so, i am an author specimen for today! well, i mean, your latest book, getting better, has a lot of medical stuff in it because there is a lot that your recovery from covid, so specimen is almost... quite appropriate! quite an appropriate word, yeah. how are you feeling these days? very good. i am very glad you're on my right hand side because i can't really see with this eye. right. and i can't really hear with that ear but with these cans on it's fine. but they got knocked out micro—bleeds in my brain as a consequence covid. because we have heard so much, haven't we, in the last few years of the classic symptoms and all the rest of it.

but that, as a lasting legacy of covid, is really quite something. yes. so, to be technical about it if we are going to medical, so when or if the covid virus gets into the bloodstream, then one of the cells that it attacks is the cells that prevent your blood from clotting, because you should only clot when you are exposed to oxygen. so if you attack those cells, you being the virus, then you start clotting and so that is why in the very early stages people were dying from heart attacks, strokes, embolisms, aneurysms and so on and further down the line these clots can go down into the capillaries. and so capillaries were bursting and in my case, in my toes as well, so when i woke up after being in an induced coma for 40 days, i looked down at my toes and there were these kind of red blobs because i had lost my toenails and lost the feeling in my toes, as well. tell us about that moment of waking up. i have cheated, actually,

because i don't really know anything about it, because i did not want to wake up. i had been in the coma for about 40 days and the medics were getting worried that i would not wake up and also my eyes were dilated, especially the left eye which stays permanently dilated, and i think they were doing things like clicking their fingers, and i was not reacting. they were getting very worried because somebody who has been in a coma for that long, sometimes people don't wake up, or wake up really damaged. and so professor hugh montgomery, the consultant, had a great idea, he thought he would bring my wife in, emma, so this is during lockdown, of course, so they had to wheel me out of the intensive care ward onto the fourth floor atrium of the whittington hospital overlooking london. emma sat next to me, and i know nothing about this, she held my hand and played

recordings of my children, our children and my older ones, in my ear, and apparently i waved my arm, i think when one of them said, "hi, dad," orwords to that effect. 0r "wake up, dad." "you have been asleep for a long time, dad." that sort of thing. i waved my arm and according to hugh, when they wheeled me into the lift, i did not stop talking. so there's a surprise, you are getting a flavour of not stopping talking now. what were you saying? i'm not sure. hugh has not told me but he has said that they were worried that i was brain dead, that is the way he put it, doctors do quite like nailing it, don't they? he said, "we were worried you were brain dead," and i said, "why didn't you tell me at the time?" he said, "well, because we thought you were brain dead." anyway... when you were conscious again and conscious that you were conscious, if you see what i mean, was there a feeling of elation, were you frightened? to tell you the truth,

i had no idea what had happened to me because either emma or doctors or nurses told me i had been in intensive care, and excuse my ignorance, but at the time i thought that meant that was somewhere where they cared for me intensively. i did not know it was this place where they, where you sit there, and the chances are that they filled you full of, in theirterms, drugs to knock you out, drugs to paralyse you, and in my case, also intubated with a tube down my throat. ijust thought i had been looked after rather well and i did not know that time had passed. i'm not blaming anybody but it wasn't actually made clear to me, and it was only really i think about two or three months later that i fully realised that because my last memory is of a doctor saying, "will you please sign this piece of paper to put you to sleep?" and i said, "will i wake up?" and he said, "you have got a 50—50 chance." i said, "and if i don't sign?" he said, "zero." so, ithought, "well, i'll probably sign then."

at the time, i don't know if i was already high on something they were giving me, but i rememberthinking, "50—50, not so bad." but then i did also have a much sadder thing in my mind, a flash, it was that my son eddie died of meningococcal septicaemia. and that means that the meningitis bacterium invades your body, and i remembertalking to a doctor about it, and i was concerned that he knew that he was ill, that he knew that he was dying, or that he was in pain, so i said this to the doctor and he said no, he was asleep, and also, that the effect of that bacterium in the body meant that he didn't know, he just went into unconsciousness, and he then added, all his body turned to mush inside, because it erodes the membranes around every cell. i actually remember a sort of flash at that very moment when he said that, 50—50, and will i wake up, well, you may or may not,

and i thought, if i don't wake up, it won't matter much because i won't know about it and that will be like eddie. and in that split second i thought that. how has it changed your outlook on life, given that it was the toss of a coin, a 50—50 chance, and it worked, it happened, you survived, you are here? over time, is there a reversion to how things were and revelling in how things were or are you different in how you approach day—to—day life? i think i always believed in seize the day, seize the time, i think i always did believe that. my very clever daughter told me that i'm an optimistic nihilist. and i said, "oh, right, am i?" she said, "yes, you are a nihilist because you don't believe in a deity and you don't believe in the afterlife, and you are optimistic, because you take every day and you make of it what you can." well, i was like that before

i got ill and i guess i'm now super seize the day, whatever that would be in latin, "carpe super diem," which would be over—the—top, as well, and it is a bit 0tt. anyway, yes, yes, i would say that i believe very much, make every day a good day. does it make you think, "gosh, if i can survive these moments, i can survive anything" or does it make you aware of your vulnerability? yeah, i don't think i'm superman, so it is the other, yes. i'm very aware of my vulnerability. of course, i knew vulnerability, if only through eddie, the fact that i put him to bed and went in in the morning and said, "eddie, eddie, i'mjust going off to work now," and he was dead. so you can't get a more acute sense of vulnerability than that. i was fully aware of that but of course it is slightly different when it is you. a big part of your life has been going into schools

—— children's books have been in the news in a big way in the last few weeks because of the controversy around roald dahl�*s back catalogue and the version of the books that was going to be on the shelves which took out harmful words like fat and horrible and evil and things like that. ugly. yeah. except, then the publishers decided there is now going to be a compromise and there will be new versions with those words taken out but you can still buy the classic ones with some of the words still in. did they decide or was that the plan right from the start? i have no idea, don't ask me. i'm not that side of the business. i wonder what your hunch is on words like fat and ugly and mad? should they have a place in children's books in 2023? they are punchy words and they are instantly understood words but they are also words that some don't like. i'm not going to be a commissar on this myself. i will be a commissar on me and say that i will avoid them. iwill avoid mad because people have said to me mad is very pejorative, it connects with mental illness. if you say, "you are mad."

and of course we do say it in speech, "you must be mad to say that. " and we don't really mean anything to do with mental illness. no, but if you put it in a book it sort of fossilises it in a way, and if you say, "this mad woman came in," if you said, "she went mad," maybe that is not quite so bad, but if you say, there was a woman or a man who is mad or a child who is mad, and you think that is also being used in the playground against people, you mightjust hesitate to put it, so a lot of self—censorship goes on when we write books. you know, again, if you say somebody is ugly, which is one of the words they took out, well, what does that mean? we know beauty is in the eye of the beholder. there is no objective thing called ugliness and these days we do tend to believe that no matter what people look like, they can be beautiful on the inside, all these things. and so you think about these things when you write. and we make mistakes. there are books of mine you can find from the past and somebody could say, "why did you do that?" and i would say, "well, let's change it, then."

are they going through your back catalogue? michael laughs i don't think so. there have been re—editions of things where we have changed odd bits and pieces. i think i had one, you will like this, i had a poem aboutjumping up and down on drain covers, and the word i used for that when i was a kid was bonking. bonking on the drains. so we agreed that probably we would take that one out. so the poem, a lovely poem, i really like it, "we are bonking, we are bonking, we are bonking on the drains." it is not in the latest edition of that book. what is the new word? no, the whole poem came out. michael, what are you reading on this world book day? i am reading a wonderful book called i'm black so you don't have to be. it's by a former colleague of mine, and yours, colin grant, who was the son of two jamaicans, and he is writing about his family. this is a beautiful, wonderful book, and he has used a wonderful device, each person in his family has a separate chapter, so you see the world through the eyes of that person in his family. great book.

chris? the power of geography by tim marshall. very on brand. former sky news diplomatic editor, i think he was, foreign affairs editor. i must admit, doing thisjob, i can see how laura k liked a bit of trashy literature at the end of long days because i love tim marshall but it is a bit heavy going after a 17 hour day. and is geography powerful? i think it is. we are both geographers. oh, well. my brother is a geologist, palaeontologist, so he knows where things are, as well. mine is super on brand because i'm reading an introduction to political philosophy for students and politicians. for a little project i'm working on. you are going to write one yourself? potentially, yeah. stay tuned. makes the power of geography seem like light reading! michael, thank you very much for coming in. thanks for having me.

and thank you too for watching and listening and being part of this episode of newscast. we will be back with another one very soon. goodbye. bye. hello again. the main difference in the weather we had on thursday from place to place was around how much cloud we saw. the best of the day sunshine was across wales, the midlands, east anglia and southern counties of england. really was a glorious day. but further north we had extensive cloud coming in off the north sea, the thickest cloud for eastern scotland and north east england. and that brought us notjust grey skies, but actually outbreaks of light rain on and off. for much of the day, it turned out to be quite damp. now, over recent hours, we've been detecting some of this light rain still affecting parts of southern scotland, north—east england, but i think there's a tendency for the weather to become a bit drier here over the next few

hours as that damp weather works its way westwards across northern ireland. elsewhere, a lot of cloud, and where we keep the cloudy skies overnight, temperatures frost free. the frost limited to the clearest spots, west wales, south west england and into the north west of scotland. now, as we start friday, there will be a lot of cloud around, a damp start for northern ireland, for example. the cloud coming through across south east england, very thin, it's only 300 metres thick, so it might thin and break to give some sunny spells. there's a lot of cloud set to come through across northern england. so, if you see some sunshine here, it's going to be quite late in the afternoon. should see some breaks for western wales, parts of south—west england and north—west scotland with some sunny spells from time to time. now, through the weekend we'll start to get some thicker cloud coming in across the country, and with that we're looking at some patches of light rain developing. here's the weather picture for saturday, it's an east—west split. eastern areas having the thickest cloud, you might get a few spots of rain falling from that, particularly close to the north sea coast,

but in western areas it's dry with the best of the cloud breaks and some sunny spells. temperatures not changing too much and we'll still have that fairly cool breeze with us. the second half of the weekend, on sunday, the cloud certainly thickens up significantly and we'll start to see patchy outbreaks of rain developing quite widely across the country, but nothing particularly heavy. now into next week, we've got a big change in the weather patterns on the way. northerly winds are set to dive southwards from the north pole, dragging with it much colder air, a return to widespread frost, and for some of us, the snow on the way as well. now, the first place to see potentially disruptive snow monday will be across northern scotland, where the snow, combined with strong winds, will bring drifting and pretty poor conditions over higher routes. through the rest of the week the risk of snow extends southwards.

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