gaza as cross—border attacks between israel and hezbollah intensify. arriving back at the white house president biden has said the us is doing everything it can to prevent a wider war. in germany — latest projections suggest a narrow victory for the party of chancellor olaf scholz over the far right afd — in a regional election in his home state. sri lanka's presidential election has been won by a left—wing anti—corruption candidate in a political shift for the nation. the election on saturday was the first to be held since mass protests unseated the country's leader in 2022 and russia's chess team is to remain banned from international competitions after a vote on the issue was held at a meeting of the international chess federation, currently under way in budapest. now on bbc news...newscast

paddy, are you there? icertainly am. there's probably a delay because liverpool to london by modern tech means you'll sound like you're in space. henry, are you there? i am, and i am also in liverpool, but about 20 minutes away from laura, so i don't know whether that means a slightly shorter delay. well, we're not in space, but we are together for sunday's edition of newscast. and there's a lot of news around, isn't there? it's the first proper full day, i suppose, of the labour party conference, and it's getting going. but more stories this morning about donations and holidays and dresses and awkward, embarrassing things that the labour party really wishes would just go away. but will they? so let's get under way with the sunday episode of newscast. newscast. newscast from the bbc. hello. it's paddy in

the studio in london. and it's laura in a beautiful set by the river mersey in liverpool. and it's henry in a portacabin round the back of the men's toilets at the liverpool, uh, venue forthe labour party conference. 0k, well, i know we like detail. i know we like detail. what a vision. so you two are there. obviously, this is a reminder, the first time that labour has met as a party of government in 15 years. but there's been some noises of, "you had your first tv interview on a sunday with the deputy prime minister, angela rayner". um, why do you think she's been absent from the screen? and how did it go this morning? i don't know. i always wondered we always, you know, as we would with every prominent member of the shadow cabinet as they were, we would say, "we'd love to have you on the programme. "do you want to come on the programme"? and whether it was she didn't want to do it because she was busy doing other things on a sunday, or whether it was because the labour

leadership didn't100% trust what she might say on the telly. i don't know, i never got quite to the bottom of it, but we were very pleased to have her this morning. and at such a time when, notjust that, there is, as you say, a momentous week for labour back in government and lots of the big things they are doing are on her desk, but also — uncomfortably for her — she's one of the people about whom stories have emerged this week about her taking donations and free outfits, and there were some more detail this morning about a holiday accommodation that she accepted when she went to manhattan. and the embarrassment for her about that this morning, she told us very strongly she doesn't think she broke any rules. she was going on a holiday and she declared that she was taking accommodation from a friend of hers who happens to be a wealthy labour donor. but i thought, henry, that she was pretty unrepentant and sort of saying, "well, people have always taken donations and gifts and we declared it, and so what"? i think she was mostly unrepentant, as you say, she had this eye catching line that she said she'd been overly

transparent, and that wasn't her complaining that she'd been too transparent, but she was saying essentially, ithink, look, the reason that she, and perhaps she meant some of her colleagues as well, are facing so many questions here is because the facts are all there in the public domain for people to see, because they've declared them all. i did think, though, at other points there was a note of contrition. she said she she understood why people were upset. she understood why people were angry. and i think that phrase struck me because that wasn't the posture of the labour party, that wasn't the posture of keir starmer when questions were asked about him even earlier this week. and i think that shows that there has been — arguably a bit slow, but there has been an awakening at the top of the labour party that all these stories could actually do them some quite serious political damage. and i think that's what angela rayner was trying to at least acknowledge, and then perhaps begin to stem in her interview

with you this morning. let's have a listen. well, first of all, mp5 i have accepted donations and gifts for years. all mps do it. and what we talked about is| making sure that we're open and transparent about that. and that was why the - prime minister made sure that he corrected the record when he was advised - that he needed to do that. he actively pursued that and took that advice. i and i think that's- the right thing to do. and we want to make sure that i the government are transparent. and, henry, there was a trip to new york. that's right. so we knew that angela rayner had gone on holiday to new york and that while she was there, she'd stayed in a flat owned by waheed alli, lord alli, that man again. the sunday times this morning reporting that she was joined, at least in part on that trip by sam tarry, who at that point was also a labour mp, though he no longer is after the general election. and there are some questions over whether that meant that she should have declared that. ultimately the parliamentary

commissioner for standards is going to take a view on that, potentially. and so that is potential trouble down the line, though angela rayner absolutely adamant with laura that she doesn't believe she broke any rules. ijust pick up on one thing in that clip we just heard there, though. angela rayner's defence was politicians take, uh, have been taking these gifts for years. politicians of all stripes. i think it is really striking that less than three months into this government, you have the deputy prime minister essentially making an argument that all politicians are the same, at least on this front. i cannot think of anything further from the case that labour pressed against the conservatives for the last three or four years. their whole argument was that no, things can be different, not all politicians are the same, and that suggestion that they might have not only failed to draw a line under some of the sort of allegations about previous conservative governments, but embroiled themselves in them — i think it's really damaging. and speaking to senior labour advisers around this conference

yesterday and this morning, i think there is this growing feeling that they've got themselves into more of a mess here than they initially realised. i think that's right, henry, and there's a lot of frustration as well. i was picking up that how long it has taken some people around keir starmer to realise that this was an issue. so there are people in other bits of government sort of around the place i've been speaking to who kind of think, "why did it take so long for the penny to drop"? and even though, as angela rayner told us again this morning, they don't think they've broken any rules, they don't really think they've done anything wrong. it's not necessarily a very convincing defence for members of the public who are just scratching their head thinking, "why do politicians get free stuff anyway"? this was how she defended herself. i don't believe i i broke any rules. i had the use of the apartment and i disclosed that i had - the use of the apartment. in fact, i think i was overlyl transparent because i think it was important despite it - being a personal small holiday because that person, i

as a friend, had already donated to me in the past. for my deputy leadership... so, you're not sorry for doing that? well over on the radio, we had the education secretary, bridget phillipson. now she has declared £14,000, part of which was used for a function around the time of her 40th birthday. and she told me what kind of event it was and why she felt it was appropriate that this would come from a donation, which was of course, declared. in the case of the donations i received, i appreciate - it is a considerable sum of money. - i appreciate it's a privilege to be able to receive - those kinds of donations, . to use them to host events. primarily, the donationsl were used to hire venues which in central london, - where, you know, journalists, education people often work, you know, it is expensive - to hire such venues. 0k. i wonder if we should talk about policy, because actually there's this massive budget coming.

and also bridget phillipson herself was talking about, "young people should be persuaded to consider trades as much as they do degrees". so do you think that they will be able to break out some policies, laura? you're obviously watching the week ahead, so it seems funny to ask you to get a crystal ball out when we're talking about today's news. but will policy break out at the conference? i think they will definitely be hoping that it does. and, you know, we did also talk to angela rayner this morning about her very big plans for housing. they obviously want to do what previous administrations failed to and actually start getting houses built in significant number. that's a challenge for them because although they're doing all sorts of different things to try to change the planning rules and to try to speed things up, they're not prepared to do what governments did in days gone by, which is actually get diggers in the ground and build houses themselves. so she says she wants the biggest wave of council housing ever in modern history. but actually, she's hoping to create the conditions

for local authorities and builders to get on with that rather than government actually doing it themselves. so that's one of the big things that they will really want to talk about this afternoon. she's on the platform this afternoon also talking about improving standards in rental flats. you had bridget phillipson talking about the difference between vocational and academic, higher education this week. what i don't think we're going to get though is tonnes and tonnes of new shiny stuff, not because they don't necessarily want to or because they haven't got other plans that they want to put forward, but because they're just hard off a general election, which had a manifesto that was absolutely stuffed full of plans that they had carefully worked out. so sometimes when governments have been in charge for a while, it's kind of the normal routine. you know, they give you a policy to feed the journalists pack on a sunday, and then another policy to feed the journalists pack on a monday. and so they go through the week. but because they're just out of a general election campaign, they're not really going to do that. so i think the tone of what we're going to hear from the politicians is largely going to be rhetorical. it's largely going to be

political storytelling rather than any new giant plans that they've been keeping under wraps until this moment. henry, bridget phillipson told me to expect a lot of hope from the podium. yes, i think that is what will be new this week. i agree with laura. i'm sure there will be some new policy, and i've picked up a hint — though i haven't quite managed to land it — that keir starmer might be focusing on education in his speech as well. so let's see if there's an announcement there. but i don't think um, i don't think there'll be bundles of new policy. i do think that there will be a new kind of message, um, even before the sort of arguably chaos in the sort of government grid of this week, of all the talk about sue gray and of, um, gifts and so on. even before that, there was a bit of unease in some corners of the labour party heading into this conference, because there was a view taking hold that the party, the government, had been too gloomy. that in what everyone in the labour party believes

was the necessary task of identifying the flaws in what they've inherited from the conservatives. they perhaps have gone too far in depressing people, essentially. not just the country generally, but there's also been reports about, you know, some of that messaging essentially depressing business confidence and potentially even investment. and so talking to people around the leadership, what they see as the task for this week is not just laying out again that there are going to have to be tough choices, although i'm sure we will hear keir starmer and especially rachel reeves do that, but actually beginning to do more of talking about what the dividends will be from making those tough choices. and i think you'll hear that running through all the big cabinet speakers is a sense of where things are going to, as well as how tough it might be on the road to get there. yes, because obviously growth is a big part of this government's promise. so, you know, if you get growth, you get you get more jobs, you get a rise

in living standards. that's the idea. so obviously they've got to be some kind of shining city on the hill. the other thing that dawns on me is that it is still the case that injuly, which is not that long ago, the voters delivered a knockout punch to the conservatives. it's like the public did say very recently that they wanted to punish the conservative party. and liz truss did, in her 49 days, take the country onto skid row. and we were accused of being a submerging market by larry summers, the former us treasury secretary. so all that is true, and i wonder, in a way, do you both think, expert as you are, that this frenzy over freebies is actually going to be dwarfed by the economy, the budget, the meat and potatoes of what a government actually does? that's certainly what the leadership hopes. and perhaps also, you know, some people listening and watching this might think that's what they hope, too, because of course,

in the big picture, what's been going on around donations and dresses is nowhere near as important to whether or not people can put food on the table, whether or not people have a job, whether angela rayner does get her dream of having 1.5 million homes being built by the end of their time in parliament. and i think at the moment we just don't know, really, the answer to the question, which is this is this farce, the kind of growing pains of a group of people who suddenly find themselves in power and they work terribly hard to get there. and actually they find it's really, really difficult. or is this mess actually a sort of canary in the coal mine of an operation that actually maybe isn't going to be that good? we talked about it yesterday, paddy. that's the thing that's sort of been whispered in labour circles, particularly actually by some, shall i say kindly, of the older generation, people who were around in the blair and brown years who sort of looking at this and scratching their heads and going, "why have they allowed this to happen?

what is going on"? and the thing about politics is it can be small things that set off big reactions. and if you think about sue gray, the chief of staff, for example, and of course, lots of people will say, "oh, this is a story about personnel. "who cares who it is? "it's somebody i've never heard of," and this and that and the other. but it's really, really important that downing street runs properly. it's really, really important that people at the top of government are able to work well together. and at the moment, that is in lots of ways not happening. so yes, i think maybe lots of newscasters and people will want them to get on with the big things. we all want to hear more about the big things, and we are nerdy enough that we will promise we will talk about policy in those big things, too. but if the politics is not working very well and they're all grumpy and it's misfiring, then the bigger stuff can be squeezed out, notjust byjournalists, but also in their day to day, in their day to day life. if they're having to sort out rows and nobody�*s working well together, that is a problem. and also, he told the observer, keir starmer, that he wanted

to stop the leaks. harriet harman told me in the week that leakers should be sacked. so is there action coming, do you think, henry? i think it's clear that keir starmer needs to find a way to stem this leaking. i'm just not sure he knows what he wants to do about that and how he wants to do it. i mean, i'm sure he'd be very happy to sack whoever it is, if he could find the sort of initial source for chris and my story on sue gray salary this week or whatever, but he's not going to. so, you know, there is a question there about, uh, you know, identity and how he can identify this. i mean, you know, without speaking specifically about the story chris, and i did this week, i canjust say there is an incredibly broad coalition of officials, advisers, ministers who don't think downing street is operating in the way that it should be at the moment. and that is a problem. i mean, i think one of the things about this week and some of the difficulties that the government has got

itself into is it is very plausible that, in fact, likely that in four years' time, whenever the next general election rolls around, you know, you come to look back on this as sort of ephemeral, and it's one of those rows which we don't quite remember. but i do think one thing we're going to find out in the next few weeks is how much of a reservoir of goodwill this new government has or doesn't have to fall back upon, because generally, you would expect a new government swept into office on a landslide to be able to say to the general public, "look, you know, there is this row which you would have thought very dimly of previous governments about, but, you know, come on, you've only just installed us in office. you know, trust us". but it doesn't quite feel certainly from some of the polling in the newspapers today — again, early days polling wasn't great at the general election and so on, usual caveats, but some of the polling in the newspapers today for keir starmer and for this government is little short of disastrous. and i do wonder if we're starting to see the extent to which his victory was a negative proposition. his victory was about

people not wanting the conservatives to continue. let's see — it's early days in terms of assessing public opinion and so on — but i do think that's something being looked at very closely at the top of the labour party. and i have to say from our inbox on the programme, most people who've got in touch, which is not a scientific process, i absolutely would be clear about that — it's not a scientific thing — but we have had a very strong response from people who watch and listen to our show on sundays about this. and it started when david lammy appeared on the show last week and said, "oh well, in america, first lady's get loads of money for clothes", which actually they don't. but at that point this response started and some people are very, very cross about it. we had jack diack got in touch this morning, just to give you a flavour of one, to say, "this issue shows it's a case of them and us all over again. "why do they pretend they live in the same world as the rest of us"? and i think, however big or small, the actual offence. and it's not an offence, i'm using that metaphorically.

however big or small it is, the problem with with this is it is perception. and it's like you put a kind of drop of ink into a pint of water. you can't take it out. you know, once that little perception is in there and it has been seeded — to appallingly mix my metaphors, it's very difficult to get rid of that. but, you know, as henry says, it may well be that in six months this is all completely forgotten, they get a grip, everybody shakes down, they look themselves in the mirror and go, "for goodness�* sake, we're not going to stuff this up this early on". um, but we just don't know if that's going to happen or not. there is an example from history, isn't there? there was a big row in 1997 when tony blair first took over, and we compared the �*97 with the 2024 because it was things can only get better. and then it was, you know, things are going to get worse in 202a. but there was this row over the influence of bernie ecclestone. um, and also in this case, what labour is saying is that lord alli, who's been giving

the money, was already a labour peer. so it's not as if he can access privilege. he's already got access to the labour party. he's a successful business person from the left. so if the system has worked that successful business people from the right can give money, viewers who are voters should be also knowing that that's been happening all the way through our system, it has been that people are allowed to give money — that is the system. and the other way of doing it is you stop that and then the public pays the money. so you can actually pay the prime minister more if you want to, but there seems to be very little appetite to actually do that. and every time it's argued how much money mps should get, the public are very sort of anxious that they don't keep getting more money. so it is, there's a very british story here as well, it seems to me, henry, as well, that, you know, we do want people in public life to sort of suffer a bit for being in public life. look, there's all sorts of arguments you can have about whether politicians ought to have different allowances, ought to be paid more,

and so on and so on. the problem for the government, as you two discussed yesterday, is that this is a government, i think, distinctively compared to previous ones, that was clearly elected on a platform to be above this sort of stuff. keir starmer used to say to his shadow cabinet for ages in the run up to the general election, that they had two opponents in the general election, the conservative party, and the idea that nobody could make a difference any more, that no politicians could be different. and that is what they're risking here. by the way, i hope i'm not mangling my history, but you mentioned the bernie ecclestone thing. was that not the one where in in response to it, tony blair went out and said, "look, i think most people understand that i'm a pretty straight sort of guy". i think it was and i think, you know, keir starmer, the challenge for him is whether he can do that sort of thing. i'm not saying that it's necessarily the same level of issue or whatever, bu — or that any wrongdoing is being committed — but whether he can make an argument like that and carry

the country with him on a wave of goodwill in a way that tony blair did. because my understanding of the relative approval ratings is that keir starmer begins, as many politicians do these days, because it seems that the public isjust more fed up with politics and less willing to give them the benefit of the doubt than in previous eras. you know, whether keir starmer can find a way to carry people with him in the same way. and that talks to something that we've talked about a lot, is whether keir starmer, as a leader, has the sort of quicksilver and the nimbleness to be able to turn a difficult situation into something that feels like it doesn't matter, or the ability to make quick decisions to move on from a difficult decision. and i think there always have been and still are question marks about those kinds of things, those attributes that people have never been 100% sure that he has, that kind of you know, i was going to say, i don't know, that kind ofjust that ability to think incredibly quickly, to be nimble when he is in what is a political pickle.

because prime ministers are always in political pickles, and they need to be good at getting ways out of them, whether they're fair or not. and politics isn't fair. shall we talk about something else? because we had something really special on the programme this morning that i want to share a bit with both of you. please. yes, i was just about to say that one of the points i've made on our newscast is we have a flawed system. it's called democracy. and we argue and we hold our leaders to account. and it can be very upsetting for people who love a political party, who loved the tory party and still do, to see what happened over partygate and for the labour voters to see this problem. but that's our system. it's a kind of carnivorous system, and it's open to criticism. and the other systems around the world which are getting together in alliances are dictatorships which crush all public conversation and where opponents of the leaders are killed. now, this is the point i was trying to make, and i'm not trying to just be smug and interrupt you. there's a very good distinction about the people you've been

speaking to this morning, laura, because, yes, we're going to keep arguing. and that's great because that is what the system is. it keeps us all in a job, let's face it. so on friday, ifeel really honoured to have met vladimir kara—murza and his wife evgenia kara—murza. now, listeners might remember, we spoke to her a couple of times in the last year while he, her husband, was locked up in a russian prison. he's one of putin's critics. he's an opposition politician, and he was in a grim cell for more than two years in solitary confinement, and he believed that he might die injail. and she spoke very movingly to us about how she was trying to campaign to get him out. her fears that he would suffer the same fate as alexei navalny. of course, the russian opposition leader who was killed not so long ago. but vladimir then, all of a sudden in the summer, was one of more than 20

prisoners who were part of the biggest prisoner exchange since the cold war. and now he's free. and i was lucky enough to meet them on friday. and he told me about the, you know, incredible series of events. and here's just a snippet of him talking about the morning that he was woken up at 3am by prison guards, which was the beginning of his release from captivity. but he didn't know that then. i was asleep when suddenly the doors to my prison celli burst open and a group- of prison officers barged in. i was woken up. i saw that it was dark. i asked what time it was. they said sam, and they told me to get up and get - ready in ten minutes. and at that moment, . i was absolutely certain that i was being led out to be executed. - but instead of the nearby wood, they took me to the airport, - handcuffed, with a prison - convoy, boarded me on a plane and flew me to moscow. now, not long after that,

evgenia was reunited with him by telephone from the oval office. and there's amazing footage of the moment that happened and that phone call where their children are able to speak to their father, knowing that he was free. i asked them about that moment and what it was like for them in real life. here's what evgenia had to say. honestly, i think i couldn't believe this was happening, and i was... i felt as if i was seeing it all through the eyes of our kids. so that footage where i see our kids, when i hear tears ofjoy... in their voices, that will forever make me cry, i think. newscast. newscast from the bbc. hello there.

big thunderstorms are on the way for monday and that brings the threat of some significant flash flooding. the storms that we had on sunday were heavy enough but didn't affect everyone. western scotland, the skies have been like this for days in the highlands. another still day, you'll be wondering what all the fuss is about, i'm sure. but further southwards, the radar picture showed some intense storms, particularly going through the south midlands. and in woburn in bedfordshire, we recorded over the space of two hours 59mm of rain. that's more than the average for the entirety of september. and over the 2a hour period, the same site had 102mm of rain, so nearly double the monthly average rainfall. and nearby in dunstable, well, there was some severe flooding with the high street underwater at one point. now looking at the picture at the moment, lots of showers across england and wales again with some thunderstorms — quieter weather further northwards. but the met office have got an amber weather warning out in force for monday. some communities could see around 80mm—i20mm of rain,

and it could well be that this risk of extreme rainfall extends into central, southern england as well. so through the day, some torrential thundery downpours focussed across parts of england, some communities having a high risk of flash flooding, probably some river flooding, some disruption. it's one of those days where you want to check on travel conditions before heading out. northern ireland, west scotland, bright with some sunny spells. east scotland continues to be rather cloudy with mist. north scotland, we're seeing a weather front move in, bringing outbreaks of rain and ultimately cooler weather conditions. on into tuesday, well, the thundery rain is clearing out of the way across england and wales, so in that respect, it's a drier kind of day. in scotland, we get this cold front continuing to push its way southwards, really dumping the temperatures here — just ten degrees in aberdeen and 12 for glasgow. still relatively mild, i suppose for northern ireland, england and wales. middle part of the week sees active areas of low pressure bringing further heavy rain, particularly focussed again on england and wales. and once those systems have pushed through,

well, then we get chilly northwesterly winds diving southwards, and so through the week it is going to stay unsettled, and through the week it is going to turn a lot cooler as well, with temperatures across the board well below average. but for monday, it's that risk of flash flooding we really need to pay attention to. stay in touch with the latest forecast, please.

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