us presidentjoe biden said it appears israel only struck military targets in iran. israeli forces withdraw from a hospital in northern gaza a day after storming it. the world health organisation head warns of a catastrophic situation at gaza's medical facilities. the uk's chancellor is set to increase the national insurance rate for employers to boost funding for public services. rachel reeves is also expected to use wednesday's budget to lower the threshold for when employers start paying the tax. a video has emerged appearing to show labour mp mike amesbury shouting and swearing at a man who is lying on the pavement during an apparent disturbance in cheshire. michelle obama campaigns with kamala harris as donald trump tells americans to dream big, with ten days to go until the us presidential election.

now, a reminder the clocks go back at hour at 2am. now on bbc news, political thinking with nick robinson. hello. welcome to political thinking, a conversation with, rather than a newsy interrogation of, someone who shapes our political thinking about what has shaped theirs. my guest this week is trying to follow in the footsteps of the woman she says inspired her to go into politics, margaret thatcher. what makes kemi badenoch's story so remarkable is that

throughout the thatcher years, she was living not here in britain but in nigeria, where she was brought up until the age of 16. if the former conservative business secretary does win the tory leadership, if, in other words, she beats robertjenrick, who i interviewed on political thinking a few weeks ago, she will, like thatcher, make political history. she'll be the first black woman to lead any party in this country. kemi badenoch, welcome to political thinking. thank you, nick. it is four years since we talked and we focus then a lot on your personal story. and i asked you at the end of that interview if you thought you would ever see a black prime minister in your lifetime. and you said to me, why not? have you now concluded, there will be one and it will be you? well, i have concluded there could be one and it could be me, but that depends if the conservative party

members decide that i am their person. but if they do so, they won't be doing it on the basis of the colour of my skin. they'll be doing it because of the values and principles which we share. yeah, and a lot of what i want to do in this interview is talk about those values and principles. but for people who don't know your story, let's just begin with that. you told me back then that you were. then that you were, and it's an interesting phrase, british by fate. what did you mean? so i say british by fate, in the sense that we didn't know that i was even a british citizen until i was about i was born into a well—to—do family and they could afford to do that. this is the oil boom in nigeria. lots of, you know, the rich african princes era. and so my mother came here, went to a private hospital, dealt with the obstetric issue, and i was born. and a couple of weeks later she went back as it happened, her brother lived here.

so we did have some some family here and some links here. but the idea of living in the uk and moving to the uk was not really something that was at the forefront. just to be clear, she didn't come to britain to give birth because she wanted you to be british. no, in fact she didn't even know you would be british. so this is an interesting thing. i often see there's a very unpleasant sort of ethno nationalist anti—kemi wing. and they, they call me an anchor baby. and i read these things. you realise that a lot of people don't know what the immigration rules back then were back then. they don't understand what the commonwealth was. they don't realise that you didn't need to give to have a child here, to have citizenship and so on. the commonwealth was open. a lot of people think that we have american immigration rules. there's no such thing as an anchor baby. it doesn't make sense. tell us that phrase. anchor baby.

oh, it is something that americans use to describe people who give birth to their children in the us so that the child can acquire citizenship and then, uh, get the parents over on the basis of bringing family in. but you would never have needed anything like that, because the legacy of empire is something that is being forgotten. this chance fascinates me because there's another chance involved. you actually wanted to be a doctor in the united states. that was your original ambition. so again, you might not have been british. mhm. um, that was something my dad wanted me. my dad wanted me to be like him. he was a doctor. and of course, i was going to be a doctor. and i said, i want to be a plastic surgeon. and he said, no, no, you're going to be a gynaecologist or an obstetrician, because that's what, you know, girl doctors do. and that's what would be good. and a lot of the things that we do in life are actually shaped very much by our parents. and that's why i talk about family so much. i won a scholarship to stanford, a premed, and it

wasn't a full scholarship. we couldn't afford the fees for that university. stanford in california. by that time, my family was not as well—to—do as it had been when i was born. it was a very, very difficult time in the 90s, and one of the reasons why i had to leave nigeria, but that was what i thought i would end up doing. and when i started at an fe college, i was going to college part time and i told them i wanted to be a doctor. and they looked at me and said, well, why don't you want to be a nurse? why are you stretching yourself like this? you could be a perfectly good nurse and things will be fine. and that was my first, uh, interaction with what i call the poverty of low expectations. yeah. and that is something that you've rejected all your life. now, you didn't become a nurse. you became a computer engineer. and that word engineer keeps coming up again and again in this conservative leadership contest. why do you think telling people "i'm an engineer" qualifies you for the job to lead a political party? well, it is not a qualification in and of itself, but i think it is what is needed for the problems of ourage and ourtime.

i think the system is broken. this is my fundamental analysis, and we keep trying to tinker and tweak when the whole machine is not working. it's like having a car where the engine has conked out and people are trying to change the tyre or paint the car. and i'm saying what you need is a mechanic who knows how to how to fix this. being an engineer, i think is a good thing. i think is a good thing now at a time when politics is mostly people who are or lawyers or studied politics at university. having somebody who thinks differently that bringing that cognitive diversity in is important. let's discuss that idea then. you said a second ago that the whole thing is broken effectively. before we talk about that in a bit more detail, is that another part of your nigerian heritage? you grew up in a country where yourfamily, above all, the country went from being rich to being broken after the oil

boom in the early 80s. is there a bit of you that looks at where britain might be, not where it is now that says get it wrong, we go that direction? yes, i do think that that is a factor. i don't take what we have in this country for granted. i think this country is amazing, but i meet a lot of people who assume that things are good here because things are good here, and they always will be. they don't realise just how much work and sacrifice was required in order to get that. how important institutions are. how important meritocracy is. you know, if you grow up in a place where people hire based on ethnicity, hire based on who's related to who, clanism or, you know, clannish behaviour, nepotism, all of that creates problems. but the reason why i am a net zero sceptic and not a climate change sceptic, but i am a net zero sceptic, is because i grew up somewhere where the lights didn't come on, where we ran out of fuel frequently.

despite being an oil producing country, there was often petrol scarcity. that is when a system is broken. now, one thing i learned about you preparing for this interview is you're a keen poker player. iam. is that right? now, you are turning this into a principal. maybe you're just keeping your cards close to your chest. you know exactly what you think. you know, the policies you want to implement. you are just the poker player saying, i'm not showing my hand now. maybe. well, yes or no? well, let me put it this way. i have seen what happens when a leader says this is what we're doing. everybody shut up and get behind me. i actually want everyone, and by that i mean notjust mps or peers, but the members to have a say on what a policy framework could look like. they know where my principles are. they know i'm a net zero sceptic. they know i believe in the importance of education. they know i believe in family.

but let us design these policies together. we have time now. we don't need to rush out policies. we are not fighting a general election. but your rival robert jenrick says it's disrespectful to the people who are still voting in this election to ask them to vote without them knowing where you stand, whereas he's saying i stand here, here, here, giving all sorts of policy. yeah, but he doesn't know where he's going to be standing in four years�* time. so he uses the word disrespectful. i would not use a word like that about any of the candidates who have have stood. everyone�*s got their own campaign approach. own way of doing things. if this was a general election, yes, it would be wrong to be standing with no policies. this is not a general election. and if you are going to solve a problem, you need to make sure that you know what the question you're being asked is. he thinks the question that is being asked is, what are the right policies to win a general election? i think the question being asked is why should we trust the conservative party? so, kemi badenoch, let's begin with, i think, possibly the biggest

question — the state. you told me when we spoke four years ago that you loved margaret thatcher, notjust admired. yes, i do. and you use language quite similar to her about the state. people you said recently are hooked on the idea of the state fixing the majority of problems. principles. why is that a problem? because the state simply cannot, as much as we would love it to do so. but government is doing more now than it ever used to, and people are still complaining. that is because government works well when it does a few things that only government can do brilliantly and gives people personal responsibility. that is another of my principles. when government is trying to do everything — who's smoking in a pub garden? let's get a football regulator and so on and so forth. it actually starts to break down. the law of diminishing returns applies to everything, including government.

it doesn't mean that government should provide fewer public services. a lot of what government is doing at the moment is not public services. it is activity. it is activity, t�*s not action. in other countries, in fact, most other countries people pay something towards their own health care. sometimes they get some of it back, other times they don't. is there any reason to object to that in principle? in principle, no, because it works for those other countries. we have a different system here. i think free at the point of service, free at the point of care is important, but that doesn't mean... it's not how it works in ireland, france, the netherlands, germany. that's true. but i think that we have a culture here that has got used to that. and in terms of what needs fixing, i am not certain, i might be wrong, but i am not certain that that is where the problem is. when i speak to dentists in particular, they would like people to pay for missed appointments, not pay for appointments, that the people

who don't turn up create even more problems than the number of people who are turning up. you have a nice catchphrase you use a lot in this conservative party leadership election. you say we talked right, but we governed left? yes. i'm going to say you're talking right, but talking a bit vague? i talked about the nhs and i said that it needs reform. that's like me saying i want a six pack. a lot of people thought all it needed was more money, and we put a lot more money into it. we put on the side of a bus. we're going to put £350 million more a week. we actually put in about twice as much. productivity in this country is coming right down. why is that? private sector public productivity doing 0k. public sector productivity doing terribly. we need to look at that. let's use net zero as an example. i would have liked a net zero plan that was less reliant on state subsidy and less reliant on government direction. that would have allowed the private sector to come in and deliver, i think,

a strategy to reducing carbon emissions that would have been more sustainable. instead, government got involved and said, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. we're going to create greenjobs. but are those jobs actually productive? you can pay somebody to break windows and another person to repair the windows. those are two jobs you've created — no productivity whatsoever. there are people listening. and indeed, nigel farage would probably articulate something along the lines, you say, look, this climate change thing is basically a scare story. there isn't a threat or even if there is a threat, we've got to learn to live with it and hope tech will solve the problem. are you saying they are wrong? those are two jobs you've created — no productivity whatsoever. there are people listening. and indeed, nigel farage would probably articulate something along the lines, you say, look, this climate change thing there isn't a threat or even if there is a threat, we've got to learn to live with it and hope tech will solve the problem.

are you saying they are wrong? no, that isn't the case. we have to get to net zero. so what i'm saying is that climate change is a serious issue that needs work. but what strategy should we pick? we could pick an adaptation strategy that this is going to happen. how do we, you know, build lives that will work within that? we've chosen a strategy which is to reduce carbon emissions. there is no guarantee that that will work. i want to see something if we are going down that path, something that has other, uh, benefits. so energy security. but it's interesting, you said if we go down that path, most people think that decision has been taken by all parties, not least yours, but put it into law. the legislation is there but is it working? we are responsible for i% of global emissions if we go down that path is a global thing. it's notjust the uk. we can reduce the emissions down to zero and the emissions worldwide don't go down. i'm asking you a simple question. are you the conservative who is part of a government that says we are committed to net zero, but you want to discuss how you do it? or are you like nigel farage saying, no, no, no, let's not do that? well, we'll make us poor. remember what i have said that is net zero

a solution or is it a slogan? that's where i want us to start from, and i am not sure that we have properly thought that through. you know that nigel farage and reform speak to use your words with clarity and conviction. you said that when you were explaining, you thought that your party wasn't doing that enough. and they'll be very clear about this. we're the party of the drivers. we're going to get rid of all this nonsense. do you know how to speak to the sort of working class voters that nigel farage has appealed to? i think i do, because they often come up to me on the street and tell me that they do. almost every taxi driver that has driven me has said, we like what you say and how you say it, but you. you come from a wealthy background. you've said that. in fact, i lived a very poor life for, for some time not having enough money, having not, not even enough to get on the bus, having to look after myself from the age of 16 and often sending money back home to, uh, you know, back to my parents. so that made, um, that made a difference. sent money to my

siblings, for example. when i moved here, sending money back to where my family were. and you worked at mcdonald's? yes, idid. you're laughing i think because, you know, people have teased you because you said i became working class. no, that's not why i'm laughing. i was laughing because i had a sausage and egg mcmuffin this morning. other brands are available. other brands may be available, but i don't. sausage and egg mcmuffin will still. eat breakfast at mcdonald's. i cannot eat the burgers any more because i did when i was at college. i ate it every day, twice a day. sausage and egg. quarter pounder with cheese with fries and a coke. and i had it so much that i can't look at the burgers again, but i can still look at the mcmuffin. so that's why i'm laughing. but ok, some other people laughed at other people, raised their eyebrows pretty close to the ceiling by the notion that you become working class.

i became working class, you said. were you just trying to say i wasn't always privileged? what i think is that people, a lot of people in the commentary classes do not understand downward social mobility, and they think that where you are is what you are and that's that, and people don't move between them. but my understanding of class as it is today is that it is different from what it was during downton abbey. people actually do move in between them. and given the level of migration that we've had into the country, the old class system doesn't work and people like me don't fit in to fit into it. now, talking to those voters without generalising, but it is true, you will have to address the issue that you talked about at the top — immigration and also integration. you said something intriguing. you said that culture... was it intriguing, nick? oh, i think it was. i'm intrigued.

you said the culture was more important than numbers when it comes to immigration. yes. more important? numbers matter, but culture matters more. why? and what do you mean by culture? and it is about should we set a cap which i do think that we should. let's work out what that cap should be. if you say we should only have 10,000 people come into the country, net. if 100,000 people who love british culture leave. and 110,000 people who don't like british culture come in, you've got your 10,000. but things are worse than they were before. that's why the culture matters more. who is coming into our country? what do they want to do here? do they love it? do they want it to succeed? who judges that, though? well, we all have to know.

how do you get the state which you say is too big, that you don't want to tell us to smoke in gardens? well, how does this state body decide whether you like british culture? and he doesn't like british culture? and they do a bit? and by the way, who defines what british culture is? and this is one of the things that government has not done. we need to think about this. so when i was, um, uh, putting out our response to the do you remember the commission on race and ethnic disparities? and we had a response on what government wants to do. one of the things which i commissioned, and it's probably been stopped now by labour, was to look at the successful migrants and the ones who are unsuccessful. we act as if everybody who comes into the country is equal. what do they do when they arrive here, what skills they bring, the level of integration that they have, you know, whether they're refugees or economic migrants. all of this plays a part. but if you do that, do you end up saying, we're happy for people to come from countries a, b, and c, but not countries from x, y, and z?

i think that we should be getting to a point where we can say, we're happy to take more from countries a, b and c, and countries x, y, and z. we're going to have stricter rules on them and not have a completely agnostic, um, uh, view on, uh, on countries. let's end this conversation not on principles, but on you. you said something intriguing the other day. she said, i will be a fun leader. really? yeah. well, don't look so surprised, nick. go on. are you saying i'm not fun? i'm saying, what do you mean by a fun leader? well, i think the best way that i can describe that is if you look at when i was opposite angela rayner at our first meeting, i'd never actually spoken to her before. despite what people might think, she is someone who i, you know, i quite likejust as a persona. she's obviously got very, very different politics from me,

but we're all trying to deliver a better country. i think their way is completely the wrong way and will likely end in disaster. but everybody wants more gps, everybody wants, you know, more homes and so on. it is how you do it that makes the difference. how i will be leader will be constructively opposing. but where we think that they're getting things wrong, pointing that out, bringing in some humour, bringing in some light heartedness. i think that we've been very gloomy. we're not the gloomy party. we are actually quite an optimistic and fun party, and i want to bring that out. the reason i hesitated is because this is not the kemi badenoch that people think they know. even your own supporters think. even your own supporters... i take the distinguished former conservative mp and times columnist matthew parris praises you, says you're the right person for the job. let me just say that. but then he describes your weaknesses because he's assessing the weaknesses

and strengths of both candidates. in a column he wrote recently. incautious, shoots from the hip, picks fights, misses, opportunities to seek consensus, sometimes simply rude. do you recognise any of that? nope. none of it? i actually see myself as seeking a lot of consensus. you look at what happened with the brexit regulations, where, you know, the erg were demanding a bonfire of regulations, and i thought, actually, this is not going to get through parliament. the lords aren't letting it through. where is the way through here? we'll get rid of two to 4000, which i did. we'll end the supremacy of the ec], but we'll keep the ones we want. that's me seeking consensus. this is politics. you can't please everybody all the time. i'm not trying to please everybody all the time. you don't think you're a person who shoots from the hip? no, no. i do speak my mind, and i tell the truth. because i think that there is so much of people not saying what they really think, not saying what the truth is.

let's turn to your family then. you've got three young children. five, seven, 12. you have a very supportive husband. i do. well, very supportive. he describes you as the greatest political mind of her generation. they say you should never meet your political heroes. i'm married to mine, says hamish. your husband. did you all sit down and say, can we hack this leader in politics? so it helps that i met him in the party. so this is what i tell people, that i'm married to the conservative party. i literally married my deputy chairman, and he's a former councillor as well. and he was on the candidates list. and one day he said to me, i think you're a lot better at this than i ever would be, and i think you should go for it and i will support you all the way. so i don't do anything without discussing, without discussing with him. and he probably is more frustrated than anyone else because he sees me being portrayed in a way that he simply doesn't recognise.

well, you would have heard the comments about how she spends too much time looking after her children, and he's thinking, i'm the one looking after the children. what are you talking about? which, of course he is. you know, yesterday night he couldn't come to a reception with me because he had to look after the children and so on. so he sees he also sees that i am still doing otherjobs. i'm still shadow housing secretary. i wasn't planning a leadership campaign. i was being business secretary. my opponent resigned. he's had plenty of time to go everywhere. so when he sees people saying, oh, kemi doesn't like turning up, he knows that i have been working where they can't see me and he thinks i get an unfair criticism for that. and he finds that very frustrating that you're doing all this work, we don't see you, and yet you're still being criticised by people who hate you. but he also sees something which is an impact that politicians�* families really have to deal with.

so there is a venn diagram of the far left and the far right. where we hate kemi is the thing that they have in common, and he thinks that i get a lot more attacks from people, whether it is, you know, black nationalists who, you know, we hate whiteness and so on, to the ones who hate black people, whether it's just people whose politics are so different from mine. and he sees them all going after me, he worries about my safety. and when i do think about should i be doing this? it's because i don't want to put that pressure on him. it's quite tough. but still, you've decided to. yes, yes, yes, because we're doing it for the future. we want our children to have good lives. kemi badenoch, thank you forjoining me on political thinking. thank you. well, what's absolutely clear is there's no shortage of political thinking from kemi badenoch. she joked at the end of that interview that we could have kept going probably for another hour or two. that is what excites her supporters. that is what makes some of her

critics very nervous indeed. thanks for watching. hello. we had a real mixture of whether to start off the weekend. across east anglia, south—east england, a lot of cloud, an odd spit of drizzle. we had a weather front that brought some rain to northern ireland and scotland, delivering 22 millimetres into the highlands, the wettest place in the uk, but then we had this slice of sunshine stretching from east scotland down towards south—west england where we had eight and a half hours of sunshine in camborne in cornwall and eight celsius heat in dorset in bournemouth. and looking at the weather picture at the moment, week weather fronts are moving south—east, just a lump of cloud by the time it reaches east anglia. that cloud keeping temperatures up at around seven degrees 01’ so. otherwise, it is going to be quite a cold start

to your sunday morning with temperatures three to five degrees pretty widely. it might be chilly, but it is going to be a lovely start to your sunday morning as well. now, we'll keep the sunshine all day across england and wales, but for scotland and northern ireland, a weather front is on the way through the afternoon, bringing cloud and rain in. it is also going to turn quite windy, with gusts running into the 40s miles an hour. our temperatures on sunday afternoon running close to average this time of year, ranging from around 11 to 15 degrees, north to south. now, that rain across northern areas of the uk through sunday night pushes southwards while weakening those fronts again, moving in towards higher pressure. and so as we look at the forecast for monday, it is going to be quite a dull and damp day for england and wales, some mist and fog patches up over the high ground, a bit of drizzle to start their day in scotland and northern ireland, with extensive cloud, but it should turn at least a little dry and perhaps a few bright spells around. a bit milderfor northern areas, temperatures coming up to 15 in belfast and glasgow but not a great deal of sunshine around. now, into tuesday, high

pressure starts to move in across the uk, it is quite weak initially, and there is going to be extensive cloud beneath that area of high pressure so for tuesday, a great day, a few spots of morning drizzle, the afternoon, one or two brighterspells, but predominately, it is a cloudy looking day on tuesday, temperatures 1a to 16 degrees and so on the mild side of things for this time of year. that area of high pressure continues to build across the uk through wednesday and thursday so there should be a few more breaks in the cloud developing, particularly close to the centre of the high pressure towards england and wales, so the weather turning a bit brighter. across northern areas in the uk later in the week, it is set to turn colder, we might even see some rain or wintry showers across the far north of scotland. live from washington, this is bbc news. iran downplays israeli air strikes on its military sites, as the us and other countries call for both sides to avoid further escalation.

it looks like they didn't hit anything other than military targets. my hope is this is the end. israeli forces withdraw from a hospital in northern gaza, a day after storming it. the world health organization warns of a "catastrophic" situation at gaza's medical facilities. ten days to go until the election, michelle obama campaigns with kamala harris in michigan as donald trump hits the other battleground state of pennsylvania. hello, i'm azadeh moshiri. we begin with reaction to israel's airstrikes on iran. it's an attack world leaders have been bracing themselves for. while iran is downpaying the scale of the strikes — saying they caused limited damage — its army said the raids killed four of its soldiers.

israel on the other hand says three waves of fighterjets