this is bbc news, the headlines. ukraine's president zelensky is in berlin on his first visit to germany since the start of the war. the german government has announced it will supply weapons worth around $3 billion to kyiv. the most powerful cyclone to affect the bay of bengal for more than ten years — has made landfall on coastal areas in bangladesh and myanmar — bringing record levels of flooding. turkey's leaders have cast their votes — in one of the most pivotal elections in the country's modern history. recep erdogan is trying to retain the presidency — after twenty years in power. the swedish act loreen has won this year's eurovision song contest in liverpool, after surviving a last—minute surge

in votes for finland. the singer made history as the first woman to win twice. now on bbc news political thinking with nick robinson. who was the star of the coronation? apart, that is, from their majesties the king and queen. the answer, most watching would surely agree, is the bearer of the sword of state, all 8lb of it, held aloft for a muscle— straining 51 minutes. my guest on political thinking, a conversation with, rather than interrogation of, someone who shapes our political thinking. it was a feat performed

by the first woman to do the job at a coronation, penny mordaunt, and it won the admiration of people who are normally her political foes. she did it as lord president of the council. her dayjob is leader of the house of commons, and that performance led to the bookies cutting the odds on her becoming the next leader of the conservative party. worth remembering, she came mighty close to getting the job and becoming our prime minister last summer after borisjohnson was forced out of number 10. penny mordaunt, welcome to political thinking. hi. you had to have your entire focus on a few square feet inside the abbey. when did you first realise that you had become one of the stars of the show? i was separated from social media for quite some time and a little bit of time afterwards because i didn't have my phone with me,

and i was just so glad to get through it and that it all went according to plan. you rehearse and rehearse and know all the things that can go wrong and i wanted the king to be in the right moment and to be still and centred and have the spiritual experience which he should have in that moment. it was just a great relief, and then afterwards i was reunited with my phone and found i had become a meme! which was your favourite? the poundland branding was an early adopted meme, i was holding various things, a kebab. the penny is mightier than the sword. i say well done to the great british public for all their efforts, all appreciated. you never seemed to have a bead

of sweat on you but you must have been thinking about those things. the most obvious thing that might have happened as you might have run out of muscle power to hold it up. that was never going to happen. i was all right, and if there was a highly emotional time it was the thursday when we ran through it twice with lots of standing around in between and at the end of it i was quite tired, but having done it i knew i could do the service and i knew what everyone else was doing and we were all there as a team making sure everything went according to plan. it was great and i was able to enjoy it and just to be part of it and sing my heart out on the way out. how much pumping of iron was there before you picked up the sword? this story has developed and run away with itself, i was not in the gym for six months before it. six days?

you want to make sure you are in good nick and i took a couple of painkillers beforehand just to make sure i was going to be all right, but it is fine. it is all good and we got through it and it is only half of the ceremony i had to carry the sword of state, which is really heavy, and then i traded it in for the very exquisite jewelled sword of offering. for the really heavy one, what are the tips, if god help us, in a few years�* time someone else has to do the job. what are the tricks to holding that sword? it is practice, like anything you are preparing for, don't leave anything to chance. have a good breakfast, wear comfortable shoes. i had a great team with me, because the chaps who got no plaudits at all are the former defence chief standing with the other swords in the ceremony, we were all there supporting each other and we had obviously been

talking under our breath at each other in rehearsals keeping each other going. striking that you were the first women to perform the role and also for the dress. you have been described variously as a cross between an egyptian goddess and an air stewardess, a modern—day brunnhilde or princess leia. i am not sure that is the look i was going for, but what my predecessor would have worn is the formal court dress of the privy council which is black, which was not permitted to be worn at the coronation. and it was very old—fashioned. i had the sense of what kind of coronation was trying to be created and it was a modern one but with those historic references and i thought i would wear a modern—day dress,

the address and the hat, anyone can go online and buy those designs, and the embroidery on it was the nod to the past, so i found out who did the embroidery for the privy council uniforms and i said, could you feminise the motif and put it on this dress? a company called hand and locke did the job and the rest is now history. and the reason for the motif is yourjob title, lord president of the council. although it is one of the great offices of state, most people you meet i suspect, say, come again, what is the lord president of the council? i am the chair of the king's privy council which back in the day used to be the executive for the king. it still meets and carries out business. we never televise the privy council.

the closest people will have seen is the accession council which is another duty i performed in this role. the first duty you performed just days after the job after the death of her majesty the queen. that was just an incredible week, and just a huge privilege for me to be there at that time and to do my bit to help the royal family and the nation through that very turbulent and uncertain time. did you find that at the accession council when you had to make that extraordinarily poignant announcement, my lords, it is my sad duty to inform you that our gracious majesty queen elizabeth ii has passed away, however much you are prepared and thought about that, it must be quite hard to say it without, i think you are gulping now. it is an incredible moment and you are very conscious that how

well you do in that role is going to have an impact on an enormous number of people, notjust in our country but around the world, who are grieving, who felt, even if they did not know her personally, that they knew her, and that she was almost part of their family. as i said in my tribute, she felt like part of their family because she had shared her family with us. and do you think your background and the services, royal navy reserves and you represent portsmouth, a navy town, your father was a paratrooper, was that preparation both mental for what you are doing, and to a certain extent physical as well? absolutely, both. i have to say the training you receive, in my experience in the navy but actually in any service, is second to none.

and it is about service. it is about enduring horrible things sometimes, it is about thinking of others and putting other people before yourself, all of those things, and keeping your morale up and others�* morale, while you are going about it. your father was a paratrooper. did you grow up in a very disciplined house? was it quite an austere house? no, it wasn't austere at all. my parents were absolutely wonderful, growing up in a house full of love and laughter, and we had structure, both my parents were teachers, so they would set as extra homework and things like that, but it was a wonderful childhood. until the awful illness of your parents. my mother got her diagnosis when i was 13 and she died when i was 15. a diagnosis of cancer.

so she died of a secondary brain cancer, and so from 13 onwards i was really caring for the family. your two brothers? yes, one of my brothers was my twin and a younger brother as well, but we were running the household. my father had a lot on his plate and had to work very hard to keep things going, so we did all the cooking and laundry and kept the house going, and i don't want to get the violins out, because actually this happens to a lot of people, but what it does, again, teach you, it is about resilience, it is about taking care of people, and i think those experiences although they are tough at the time, they help me every day,

and they help me when i see people in my surgery who are going through similar things and are exhausted and stressed out about things and need support and encouragement, and it has helped me be empathetic i think to people in those circumstances. did you as a carer in your teens lose your normal teenage years? i think i did a bit. i was never one of the cool kids who was always invited to lots of parties. i was never that person. i worked, as soon as i could. i was earning money. including as a magician�*s assistant. i thought that would make you quite cool to have a at a party. on friday and saturday nights i was not at the disco, i was touring the country and being sawn in half.

will ayling, the magician, a very famous illusionist, and his signature trick, i was sawn into three pieces and then put back together again. but it was great, and when i first went to party conference which at the time was in bournemouth, i knew all the hotels because i had been sawn in half and most of them over the course of a few years. tell us the secret, how does it work? if i was to tell you terrible things would happen so i can't, i'm afraid. and you have been a performer for a while because you were at theatre school. my twin and i did that, it was a hobby, i was a dancer as well, i was trained in ballet, and i love music and i love dance and the arts.

it seems to me, looking at your career, that you have often used this ability to perform, this ability to connect with people, whether it is with that speech you had to give at the house of commons. a forfeit for misdemeanour in the navy? humour is important and it is not everything and should never get in the way of kindness but humour does help. was the speech formally, technically about poultry? a minor misdemeanour at a mess dinner and i was fined and i paid my dues. and you had to say the word how many times? that was the easy part. there were two parts, i fully recognise why people focus on one part but i also had to get all the officers�* names into the speech as well, which is actually the thing that was the most difficult, but i survived that, and i got re—elected.

it clearly was accepted. in the job you do now, and the dayjob really, is leader of the house of commons, in charge of the business you gave a speech about trust and the importance of restoring trust, now you have already explained that you believe rhetorically politicians have to form a connection with people. why has it gone, trust? i think there are a whole raft of reasons why and in the book i wrote, which in part looked at modernising every aspect of our life, but it focused on parliament. i think there are a whole variety of reasons why people lose faith in those institutions.

i set out what i called the timeline of trust decay, which was a whole series of scandals which when you write them all down is incredible, so partly it is about... mps expenses... all of that but across every walk of life, leadership is failing in all walks of life. don�*t you have to say that the way the tory party has behaved over the last year, endless changes of leadership, borisjohnson�*s behaviour over covid, liz truss�* behaviour ignoring civil servants and advisers on the running of the economy, those have also contributed, but not the only reason, to the decay in trust? i think that is the case and i have apologised for it previously. the world we live in now moves at an incredibly fast pace, it is incredibly complicated with all kinds of emerging

threats that people don�*t know how to deal with, and people want things they can rely on and depend upon, and i think the prime minister really does recognise that, and when he was setting out at the beginning of the year his priorities that he is focusing on he also spoke about restoring that trust and i know that is what he wants me to do in this role. you have referred to his agenda, the conservative party clearly in a very deep electoral hole. some people think the way to get out of it is to be anti—woke. to ta ke to take on what they see as the metropolitan liberal chattering classes. is that a route to success in your mind? to draws back to where we started,

we have just had a weekend where we have remembered what we all have in common, we have these incredible moments in our history, where we come together, where we are either standing again something, which is why i think they make so many films about wartime effort, and we are all pulling together, but you have choices to make in politics and the choice i choose to make is to remind us all what we have in common. is it possible to do that in divided times like this? part of our role is to bring people together, and we have enough things to worry about than starting spats twitter and so forth. or culture wars. there are serious and complex social issues, but actually when the public have been left to get on with these things themselves, they develop solutions, they develop norms, and most people in this country care about other people and their ability to lead their lives, so that is always the view i have taken and that is one reason why i am in politics.

it is a view you paid a heavy price for because when you ran for a leader, the daily mail in particular ran a whole series of stories designed to discredit you, to derail your leadership, some say the telegraph did it too, really about the stand you had taken, i think are rooted in your own experience with your brotherjames who is gay. you spoke in the commons and you said back in the 1980s, we saw the homophobia that gay men faced at the time, and you said that same scenario is happening now to the trans community, and thus began, really, a path for you that politically has been very difficult. i think people will conflate all sorts of things, so my own views have always been very clear on this and they were very clear throughout

the whole leadership contest. i see no incompatibility with being kind and understanding and protecting the ability for trans people to go around and live their lives with protecting my rights as a woman to privacy and dignity and all of that. you are incredibly close to your twin brother, you said you looked after him and he looked after you when you were growing up. for him it has gone too far and he has tweeted at times about this. he says if you are a member of the conservative party, part of this homophobic, trans phobic government, you are complicit, he said at one stage. is thatjust one of those examples where the political and the personal clash in a way that is very awkward? it is not awkward. people have different views,

members of my family have different views, and that is democracy. there will be people that say that that makes us weak as a society, brexit to being another issue of great division. it doesn�*t, these things make us strong. you will hope there is not, i am sure, another leadership contest for a little while at least. did you pause for a moment and reflect on one of my favourite memes of your performance at the coronation, where it says you have been holding the sword for longer than liz truss was prime minister. poor liz, i think she has obviously been through a pretty awful time, but my thoughts have always been

with the country and pulling them through what was an incredibly turbulent time. there is an irony that she gave this job to give you a low profile because she was worried about your popular appeal. i can speculate as to the reasons but if that was the planet has not worked out well. she will be thinking again about that. going back to that summer when you run for the leadership, only last summer, can you believe it was that recently, do you think there was a conspiracy to keep you out of the last two because they all knew the members would choose you? i think you can think about these things and speculate about all these things. my view in politics is you will have

opportunities, you have to make the most of those opportunities and do your best and make sure you�*re doing things for the right reasons and you have to stick to your principles on things, and if you are not successful, you move on, and you make use of the next opportunity. when i got in in 2010 it was not the first time i had run in my seat, and i served in liz truss�*s government, i am serving an rishi sunak�*s government, i hope if you ask them they would both say they felt really supported by me. i wonder, like many watching, if it made you pause for thought at the coronation, but five ex— conservative prime ministers lining up to go into the abbey, five over seven years, does it make you pause

for thought and think, "am i really right for thatjob?" because it is a job you clearly want. i think you have to think why you are motivated to do particular things. i would not have put myself forward for that role if i were not prepared to do it and have wanted to do it, but i also think you need to recognise what it is that you are bringing to that role, what it is you are trying to achieve, and i think the people who are happiest in politics, whatever level they are serving at, are people who have a clear view about what they want to achieve and why they are doing it. it is interesting you say that because you took flak, not just for alleged changes in your position, but for not being up for it, to be crude about it. iain dale, a conservative commentator and pretty sympathetic said, that one thing that dogs penny is the number of people who seem to think she is not up to the job intellectually, it is always men who make the suggestion, the fact she appears

on the tv show in a swimsuit appears to count against her. does it feel that way sometimes? i am a 50—year—old woman, these attitudes are not news to me, and i think most women have had that said about them at some point in their careers. what is important is you know what you are about. there is a famous statistic that when there is a meeting to encourage people to run for office, the average time it takes for a man to put in their cv from the preliminary meeting is about a week and for women it is over a year. we tend to think about all the things that we need to do and improve, and generally, it is a generalisation, women prepare really well for what they are about to do, coronation sword holding included. penny mordaunt, president of the council, bearer

of the sword of state, thank you for being on political thinking. penny had no choice whether to do this job or not but she had a choice about how she did it. and what is clear is that the girl who was the magician�*s assistant who went to theatre school and performed on the telly in a tv diving show, believes in the power of performance, believes in the significance of connecting with people, believes that the key test of political leadership is character. she wasn�*t crude enough to say so, but if she runs to be tory leader again, expect to make just that point and expect to see that image, with that sword in that dress, again, again and again. thanks for watching.

hello there. so far this morning, it�*s been rather misty and murky across central and eastern areas of england, but things should improve here. there�*ll be some sunny spells developing throughout this afternoon, and that�*s where we�*ll also find the warmest of the weather today. but further north and west, we�*ve got some outbreaks of rain, and that rain has been steadily moving its way through scotland, northern ireland. there�*ll be some sunny spells developing later in the day here. a few showers cropping up across central areas. but on the whole, towards central, eastern, south—eastern areas, the cloud will burn back towards the coasts, there�*ll be some sunshine, and those temperatures getting up to about 20 or 21 degrees. but it will be cooler in the north—west. here, yesterday, 20 or 21 celsius. today, we�*re looking at about 1a or 15 degrees. now, through tonight, the area of rain will continue to spread into the south—east. it will stay relatively mild here. temperatures down

to about 10 degrees. but elsewhere, with the clear skies, we�*ll see those temperatures getting down to about 3 or 4 celsius, so a little bit of a chilly start first thing on monday morning across central scotland. now, we�*ve got high pressure situated to the west, and around an area of high pressure, the air travels in that direction. so it means for the uk, we�*re going to see that north—westerly wind bringing some showers in across western scotland, northern ireland and wales through the morning. by the afternoon, those showers perhaps more concentrated towards northern and eastern areas of the uk. it will be a little bit drier the further west you are but for many of us, there will be sunny spells and that cooler air will have made its way to the south—east of england. temperatures here dropping down by a few degrees compared to today. for tuesday, more of the same. dry for most with sunny spells, one or two showers around scotland, northern ireland and the far north of england. temperatures will start to come up a little bit as we go

through the rest of the week. 15,16 celsius, a bit nippy in the far north, north—east of scotland. the high pressure broadly dominating through most of this week, with a few weather fronts brushing past towards the end of the week. that will bring one or two showers in the forecast. broadly speaking, sunny spells for many and temperatures will continue to rise. by thursday and friday, we will see temperatures going up to 18 or 19 celsius. feeling pleasant in the sunshine. that�*s all from me. goodbye.

live from london — this is bbc news. ukraine�*s president zelensky visits berlin — as germany pledges its largest weapons package yet for kyiv. the most powerful cyclone to affect the bay of bengal for more than ten years makes landfall — bringing record levels of flooding. turkey�*s leader cast their votes along with the people — turkey�*s leaders cast their votes along with the people — in one of the most pivotal elections in the country�*s modern history. the swedish act, loreen, wins the eurovision song contest — becomimg the first woman to triumph twice.