this is bbc news. the headlines... 41 people — most of them students — are killed in an attack on a school in western uganda. six pupils have been abducted. officials are blaming rebels linked to the islamic state group. the un has called it an "appalling act". a new ceasefire in sudan — the warring generals agree to stop fighting for 72 hours from sunday morning. it comes as sudan's health minister says more than three thousand people have been killed since a war broke out in april. vladimir putin has rejected calls by african leaders to negiotate a ceasefire with ukraine during a meeting in st petersburg. the russian president interrupted the opening presentations of a peace plan by the leaders by insisting the war was the fault of kyiv and the west. teachers in england announce two more days of strike action as part of a long—running pay dispute.

members of the national education union will walk out on the 5th and 7th ofjuly. the government says the strikes will cause "real damage" to pupils. now on bbc news — political thinking with nick robinson. rishi sunak is talking rubbish, at least that's what boris johnson says, as a bitter row between the two men that have been simmering for weeks burst into the open. it's just the latest episode of tory infighting that dates back notjust to the fall ofjohnson, but arguably to the fall of margaret thatcher decades ago. my guest on political thinking this weekjoined the conservative party back then, in the early 1990s, he's been close to or an adviser to five of the last seven conservative leaders from john major

to rishi sunak. and for much of that time, daniel finkelstein, lord finkelstein has been a columnist for the times newspaper, chronicling the ups and downs of british politics, drawing on his experience of that politics, but also drawing on his family's extraordinary story. his mother, escaped the nazis having been an inmate in the bergen—belsen concentration camp. his father escaped the gulag, having been sent there by the soviet union. danny finkelstein, welcome to political thinking. as a columnist, as an adviser as well, you've argued in defense of what you always call moderation. we might come to what "moderation" is in a second, but i sense in your recent writing, you fear that that is under threat in a way you never thought it was before. yeah, i think i do. you know, i have always been so confident about this country. my parents came here as refugees, as you said.

and i'vde felt that. . .they certainly felt completely relaxed about the idea that the rule of law and the kind of tranquility of the suburbs and the rule of truth would not be disturbed. and my father was, you know, felt it so strongly, he always discouraged me, even from doing such breaking of the law as taping music from the radio or giving people, people's intellectual property rights to other people. i wouldn't say i've reached the point where i think that is all in imminent danger, but i certainly don't feel as secure in it as i did. a number of things have happened, one being actually donald trump rather than anything in this country. just watching how republicans that i'd worked with, or talked to, or, you know, think tanks i'd been involved in had moved with donald trump into a total fantasy, which involves conspiracy theory

and really quite dangerous ideas about democracy. and then seeing — not the same thing — but an echo of that in conservative politics in this country and certainly in conservative media online. you've begun to see the rise of conspiracy theories. and these are all things that when my grandfather came back from war in 1919, he saw as a great danger tojews and to german democracy. and we're not in the same position, when you read him, you think, that's not what we've got here, but you certainly do just worryjust a tiny bit. and the change you spell out in the introduction to your new book is that a speech you gave at your 50th birthday, you're now 60, you couldn't give now. now declaration of interest, we've known each other for years, i was at that party, i remember that speech. remind us what you said and why you couldn't say it now. i gave a toast to the to the group that was there. obviously, you know, all the things that you normally do, toasting my wife and my friends and thanking people

for coming in their presence. and then then i said thank you to this country, and i gave a toast to brent cross shopping centre and the sunrise cafe round the corner from my house and to the local park. lots of things that people may regard or take for granted, and i felt those were the things that meant that we in this country did not have to worry, as my parents did, about the knock on the door after midnight, or the idea that our children would be sent to fight in some foreign war, or that we ourselves would lose our citizenship and be arrested. i wouldn't say that those. . .that you couldn't make, as you phrased it, tjat you couldn't make that speech now. but i would feel a bit uncomfortable about it. i would feel that it was worth toasting the rule of law and the suburbs, but not stating so confidently what happened before could not happen again. what's happened then? other than trump, but what's

the underlying cause of something that makes you think that if you were to give that toast now, you would sound, what, complacent? well, i've been talking about liberal democracy and liberal capitalism with my son. he always says, you know, you're trying to give young people an argument about the advantages of liberal capitalism. what they really want is a house, not an argument. and i think that one of the reasons why there's been a rise of populism, there's been somewhat something of a rebellion against existing institutions, has been the failure to deliver for everybody. when the economy doesn't grow, then people are rowing over who gets what. and you can't give everybody... ..a part of the pie without taking it from someone else. and that is the problem. when the economy has got low growth and we've had a long period of much lower growth, and i think that is that underpins it. but that has gone along with other developments, including social media and including political entrepreneurship. let's take, for example, dominic cummings. i think dominic cummings worked out

correctly that people aren't following lots of political detail, and he therefore decided that quite a lot of that didn't matter. you know, i think it's sort of almost amounted to believing that almost nothing that happens in parliament mattered at all because no one was paying any attention to it. i understand the kind of political thinking behind that. if you look at donald trump, you can see that it's quite successful, but it's quite dangerous as well. you recently wrote there's a gap in the market here in britain for a populist, what i imagine you think rather like donald trump. why so? i think that politics is beginning to change, so the demographic groups involved in politics are beginning to change. the conservative party has understood that a culturally conservative message can have some appeal to a group that previously didn't vote for them. those people were traditionally labour and they wouldn't vote conservative. but the missing bit

for the conservatives is that conservative party is still economically right wing, and those people are not economically right wing. so what i was trying to say in that article is politics is changing. and at the moment, there's no political figure that appeals completely to the potential populist audience that is both culturally conservative and quite economically left wing. what about boris johnson? some people would say, actually, in a way, the fall ofjohnson, notjust from being prime minister, but now being forced out, as he puts it, or quitting before he was thrown out of parliament, is a sign that that populism doesn't actually work. well, you know, you said we've known each other since our early 20s, i've also known boris johnson since then. and when i first knew him, he was always a liberal conservative. indeed, i remember saying, you know, because i always thought, actually, you know, looked elsewhere for leaders of the conservative party, let's put it that way. i said, let's not attack borisjohnson. we might need him one day. in other words, i felt that he might

be a great hope for liberal centrist conservatism because that's where his politics were. i remember when david cameron was running for the leadership of the party, getting a telephone call, my children who were, like two or three, and they were running around pc world while i was trying to do some shopping there, i got a telephone call. it was michael gove and he told me david cameron's running for the leadership and was i supportive? which i was. and then they said, and then i said, "who else have you got?" and he said, "well, not very many people at all, we only have boris." now, when you look, boris is given his honours list, you know, nadine dorries is obviously furious for not being on it, but andrea jenkins was on it, jacob rees—mogg was on it. he's completely shifted his position. so could borisjohnson be the person that exploits a position which he doesn't hold cos he's neither economically left wing in terms of tax rising, he is in terms of spending, of course. nor is he culturally conservative. he absolutely could, because this is a person who's moved his position completely in the a0 years that i've known him.

now, you could have been in parliament with all these guys. you did run for brent south... east. east! against ken livingstone. you did, of course, have a politicaljob. you worked forjohn major right at the end of his premiership, at the end of the tories time in office. you know, the old joke at the time was a ratjoining a sinking ship. did it feel, as you went into number ten back then that you werejoining a sinking ship? yes, i sort of knew the conservative party was going to lose the �*97 general election. i didn't anticipate how big a loss it would be, but i already appreciated it was very unlikely he would win. but it was an opportunity to work for two things. one, a prime minister and somebody, secondly, somebody i profoundly respected. dis people around you, as you entered downing street, did they say, or didn't it need to be said, "we're going to lose? "i mean, we're clearly going to lose

the next election to tony blair." pretty much. i remember standing outside the cabinet room with andrew robb, who was from a liberal...the liberal party of australia, and he'd done some polling, and he was going to go in to see john and tell him what the political situation was. and i pressed him. i wanted to know before he went in. and he used the word that douglas murray, you called it "mucked". he said, "you're mucked". that was it. it was over. you wrote recently that that can be liberating to admit defeat. well, i had this conversation with a man called jim pinkerton, who'd worked for george bush, the elder george bush. and had also worked with a lot of democrats on sort of government reform. and i was working for a think tank. i got him to come over here, and he looked at the political situation and came back, sort of reported back to me and he said, "are you going to lose the election?" and i said, "yes." and he said, "and what will you do if you lose the election?"

so i went through some of the things that you would end up doing. you'd change the leader, you'd change the policies. you know, you'd apologise for things you've done in the past and draw a line under them. and he goes, "well, are you going to lose?" "yes." "what are you going to do if you lose? "what are you waiting for?" it was a pretty good argument. is it an argument rishi sunak should listen to now? well, yeah, ithink that...i think it is. and one of the key things that he should do is he should stop thinking that he's ever going to bring borisjohnson around to something that's in anybody else's interests other than boris johnson. and as he hasn't got much that's in borisjohnson�*s interest to offer him, he may as well make the only arguments he can make, which was that he resigned on borisjohnson and stood up to him. and i think... to find himself in opposition to borisjohnson. i think a lot of people will have a problem with it, because obviously... and therefore they'll have a problem landing that argument. but he has to make some sort of argument. this is the best and most genuine one that he can.

and in all the times i ever, one of the ways i've kind of dealt with the issue of, you know, commenting on issues, and i'm also providing advice to people, is i always try and say the same thing. it's simpler, and i try to tell people and start with your real argument. think what you actually think. think what you think is right. if an argument has convinced you, it might convince other people, and use that. now, one of the jobs you've done for all these leaders is write speeches, but you've also helped them prepare for prime minister's questions, whether as leader of the opposition or as prime minister, what's the key to it? well, you know, actually, my first point that i made to them all is if an argument has persuaded you, it might stand a chance of persuading other people. so if you have come to a particular view and you're being asked a question by the leader of the opposition, and obviously i worked for william hague when he was leader of the opposition, so i did it the other way as well. the best first answer is the thing that persuaded you to take that position.

there may be people think i don't get arguments at all. and the explanation for that is people probably don't realise how hard is somebody coming at you. you've got 500 people, you know, in the chamber, they're all shouting, you feel you've got to come up with some instant reply. so one of the things i think got borisjohnson into a lot of trouble is i always used to joke... who we should emphasise was one of the leaders, along with liz truss, who did not invite you to advise him. he didn't. and one of the things that i used to joke was thatjeremy corbyn would always ask the question he should have given, he should have asked last week, and it was quite difficult to guess what he was going to ask because he often asked them at completely the wrong moment. theresa may always had the answer her fingertips. borisjohnson would often give the answer from last year's line to take, because it was what he could remember.

when you say borisjohnson, as it were, made it up as he went along and remembered something from the past, is that how you think he can explain to himself if he believes it, that he didn't lie to the house of commons? i'm not sure. you know, i'm not...i don't have a medical qualification, so i don't know what the reasons. . . he'll tell himself. but i do think that he is...that not preparing properly for these occasions was crucial. he basically didn't mind what he said, therefore didn't prepare for it properly. and you are under a lot of pressure, so you will say the things that are convenient. and did he not care, as you wrote at one stage, because his whole career was based on it not mattering, that he didn't care what he said? yes. look, his experience was it didn't matter. so when you asked me earlier about my concern about modern politics, one aspect of it is an increased understanding of what people do and don't follow. and it's been one of the things that i have understood myself so much better than i did

when i worked in politics. and i'm almost embarrassed now the things that i thought made a big difference. i remember getting into a big row at the �*97 general election because tony blair had promised to match tory spending plans and i worked out that meant he had to match tory privatisation receipts and that meant that he had to privatise the national air traffic control service, even though he said he wasn't going to. and there were a number of things that were interesting about that, one of which was that the moment he found that out, he just dumped the policy because he was sufficiently ruthless and just said, "yes, we will do that." but the second thing was my view that that was actually going to move the dial. i was really pleased with the issue that we'd raised. i thought it was really strong. he clearly had made an error. they were on the back foot. they had said one thing, then they were saying something else. i was so thrilled, and it turned out, of course, it was absolutely irrelevant. it turns out you can't be too clever by half. which is irrelevant to most people. did you learn this

at the kitchen table? i mean, when you were with your mum and dad, did you have these sorts of debates, these sorts of discussions about politics? politics mattered to my family, right? because politics stole everything that we had. and, you know, my grandfather lost his citizenship, and many members of the family lost their lives to to to political ideologues of different kinds. and all three of, you know, my parents children, have gone into public life in different ways. and it does it of course, it matters to all of us. i remember going into a restaurant and on the television was a football match. and my friend who was with me said to the woman behind the counter, you know, "danny writes a football column." and so we began to have this conversation. the woman was really interested. and then it turned out i wrote about politics. she said that i am really interested in. so then we had a conversation about politics. and at no point during this whole conversation did she notice that my friend was the chancellor of the exchequer because people just don't follow even quite big things. you're there with george osborne and she doesn't know.

that's correct. now, your parents were not conservatives. indeed. they, i imagine, would have been quite uncomfortable in conservative company. well, that's interesting. so my parents, my dad liked harold wilson. you know, don't forget, my parents are refugees to this country, both came here in �*47. they got married in fifties in 57. so they're refugees to the country. my father was a scientist. he liked the idea of planning and thought that would work for the economy because after all, that's what he was a systems engineer and it worked for him. but actually they always had a thing that held them back from the left, which was that my grandfather had been in the gulag, my father had been exported to soviet collective farm. so they thought that socialism was a really bad idea and they were very concerned about people on the left who were against...who might sort of favour that system.

which brings us on to this family memoir that you produced. hitler, stalin, mum and dad, which you produced after both had died. was there a sense that like many survivors, your mum, camp, to bergen—belsen, a survivor of being sent to a nazi concentration camp, to bergen—belsen, your father, the survivor, as you say, of being sent by stalin, in effect, to the gulag. was there a sense from them that this was not something you talked a great deal about? no, i was very lucky. they did talk to me quite a lot about it. and to be honest, the reason i didn't write it until after they died was reallyjust because it was more to do with me and whether i could get around to doing it and do a good job of it. but your mother only spoke about her experiences when she was quite late in life when she asked an extraordinary question. she was about to give a school talk. yes. she asked me whether people would be interested in the fact that she knew anne frank, which was an amazing question, because she was a dutchjew. she'd ended up in belgium with anne frank. yes.

and crucially, she was actually originally german. and so therefore, the german refugees in holland, they were they were together a lot and they were in a synagogue together. and that's why they knew the frank family. my aunt ruth was in school with margot, so. yeah, they talked very openly to us about it. the reason why my mum didn't talk about it was because no one asked her. she didn't want to bore anyone else. as you can tell from that question about anne frank, she was worried that maybe people wouldn't be that interested, but people didn't ask her. then people did begin to ask my mum, but they never asked my dad. so my mum did schools. she, you know, george osborne invited her to number 11 to talk to him. she did all those things during which my father was never asked. any questions by anybody about his experiences. no, they were very open to talking about them, and i'm sure they would have been really happy to see them published. did the failure of people to ask your father about what stalin did to him and his family, what the soviet union had done in the name

of an ideology of state communism? did it...? does it now have consequences? yeah, absolutely. i think that one of the reasons why you can read, you can hear in the news of bombs falling on lviv, lvov, where my father was born. it's not in the sort of front line, obviously, because it's in different parts of poland, but different part of ukraine. just for people who don't know, lvov in poland, that's where your father was from, where your grandfather was prosperous, became part of the soviet union, and then later now in ukraine. absolutely. so, i think that one of the reasons for that is because the soviets were on the winning side and never had to ask themselves any questions. you know, one of the first documents that came out of the first personal folder that i picked up on my desk when i began this book was my grandfather, alfred, who was involved in the nuremberg trials, had a copy of the indictment of the nuremberg defendants. as you can imagine, that's quite a powerful document, to hold in your hands.

and when i began to read it, i realised that everything that they were accused of and convicted of, every single crime was a crime that the soviets had committed as well. and the reason why nobody ever talks about that is because they were on the winning side, as a result of which it's possible for them to reassert stalin's greatness, to begin to do very similar things to the things that stalin did to the population of ukraine for very similar reasons. they never had to revisit it. you've always said that you believe in moderation. of course, people have different ideas of what moderation is, but faced by the challenges that we face now, albeit you said when we began our conversation, different from the ones in the 1930s, there are some who argue moderation just isn't nearly enough. you'll lose if you have that argument with people who are willing to lie, who are willing to promote fake news, who are willing to cheat. look, you have to fight hard

to maintain a system that allows moderation, pluralism and the rule of law. that is definitely the lesson. but the use of that phrase was designed to stress the importance in all things of trying to show a sense of proportion, accepting that there do need to be compromises with other people because not everyone will agree with everyone else. one of my problems with populism is i think it does not accept that either people or policies can be contradictory. it believes that there's a national will, for example, that you can appeal to that. you know, i remember nigel farage after the brexit referendum said it was a victory for real people, and what that suggested is that there were some people who weren't real. and i think that's a very dangerous thought. the row that i began with between borisjohnson and rishi sunak is in part, only in part, about honours.

of course, you benefited from one, you're in the house of lords. should these kind of favours to friends go? or is that a naive conclusion from what we've seen? so i think we do have to have another method of choosing. if we're going to have an unelected second chamber, we do have to other than another method of of determining peerages. and actually we do have to have a stronger house of lords appointments commission. we can have, if people think that's a good idea, an elected second chamber. personally i think you'll either end up with a with a chamber that does everything the government wants or nothing, and therefore it wouldn't work if we don't have a written constitution. so i don't favour doing that. there's a there's another question which was obviously borisjohnson�*s behaviour himself. this isn't a row about honours by the way, it's a row about the fact that boris johnson misled parliament, and for the first time in 300 years, a prime minister has had to resign for doing that. and we talked earlier about the importance of truth. you know, i think if you let that slide and you start to get into an argument,

some of which was really unseemly about nadine dorries peerage or nigel adams�*s peerage, and you're diverted from this pretty important constitutional development, a prime minister of the country not telling the truth. i think you're losing your way. and rishi sunak should be clear about that. should perhaps say borisjohnson wants to come back. no, never. i think that i personally i don't know what the what the downside of doing that at this point. does he think that borisjohnson is going to ever do anything that borisjohnson doesn't think is directly in his interests because he thinks it will be in the interests of the government or the conservative party? he absolutely won't. so if rishi...if a good government and a reasonable argument goes through having to break with borisjohnson, and i believe it does, he should certainly do that. danny finkelstein, lord finkelstein, thank you forjoining me on political thinking. thank you for having me, nick. it was borisjohnson himself

who once said there are no disasters, only opportunities. so it's interesting to hear a friend of rishi sunak�*s say that the prime minister should seize what looks like this disastrous rift with borisjohnson and turn it into an opportunity to be shot of him altogether. there are problems with that, though. firstly, it's not been in rishi sunak�*s character, his political personality to have those sorts of roles. ——his political personality to have those sorts of rows. the other reason it's a problem is summed up in the rest of that borisjohnson quote, what he said in full only opportunities..." and wait for it, "..opportunities forfresh disasters." thanks for watching. hello. it's fairly quiet on the weather front right now, but quite a wild

day on the way for some of us on sunday with thunderstorms forecast. some of them could be severe, bringing hail, gusty winds and a lot of rainfall in a short space of time, leading to flash flooding. butjust down the road, you might miss the storms and it'll end up being fairly dry and bright. low pressure is close by to the uk. you can see it on the satellite picture here. this vortex and this low pressure will help to spawn some of these storms over the next day or two. now, there's already a lot of cloud across the uk. skies have been quite hazy in places and we've had some showers as well, drifting from south, moving northwards. quite a muggy air mass. so that means that tonight will be quite close for many of us. a generally dry night, but not completely. there will be some showers around. the temperatures early in the morning will be around about 15—16 celsius in the warmest spots. but in the fresher areas there, newcastle, hull closer to ten celsius.

so when will these storms start forming? well, from late morning onwards into the afternoon, i think the risk of thunder increases across england and wales in particular. a big range in the rainfall forecast. locally, 30mm of rain in an hour is possible later in the afternoon, perhaps even 80mm in a few hours from central southern england through central england, all the way to the north. but i think the really widespread heavy showers will start to form later in the afternoon and into the evening hours. and it does look as though it's these more eastern and northern areas that are at risk from these big downpours, gusty winds, hail and, of course, flash flooding, the met office warns. on monday early, we could see still some stormy weather across parts of eastern scotland. but then again, that weather front moves northwards quickly and then, behind it, it's a case of sunny spells and just a scattering of showers. and again, 1—2 thunderstorms as well. so if you miss the storms on sunday, you might actually catch one

on monday or even tuesday. now, it stays on the warm side and, into next week, it does look as though those temperatures will start to pick up again. but you can see from the weather icons, it does look a little mixed. bye— bye.

live from london, this is bbc news. 41 people are killed — most of them students — and several abducted as militants attack a school in uganda if they are telling us the borders are secured, security is tight,