this is bbc news — the headlines. qatar says its efforts to mediate to bring about a ceasefire in the israel—gaza war are �*stalled'. the gulf state has played a key diplomatic role in trying to bring an end to the conflict — and secure the release of the remaining israeli hostages held by hamas. more than a hundred—thousand peope have been protesting in the spanish city of valencia over the emergency response to flash floods — which killed more than two—hundred people. they're calling for the regional head — carlos mazon — to resign — saying his administration was unprepared for the disaster. the white house says joe biden will receive president—elect donald trump at the white house on wednesday. it follows mr trump's decisive victory over vice president kamala harris in tuesday's election. president biden has urged americans to �*bring down the temperature�* — following the bitterly partisan election campaign. now on bbc news. political thinking

with nick robinson hello and welcome to political thinking. a populist right winger defeats an incumbent government of the centre left that claims to speak for working people. mm, donald trump's success this week. it may be a warning to keir starmer and the labour party coming as it does just days after the defining moment in the life of this new labour government. the budget. my guest on political thinking, a conversation with, rather than a newsy interrogation of someone about what shaped their political thinking, is the chancellor's number two. the man who has to make the sums add up. the chief secretary to the treasury, darrenjones. he's a man who's gone in the space of less than a year from being parliament's toughest inquisitor, as chair of the business select committee to one of the most significant roles in this new government.

darrenjones, welcome to political thinking. hello. great to be here. we have to start with the biggest news, notjust of this week, but arguably of the year and years to come, the election of donald trump. did you stay up for the results? were you there with the popcorn and the pop tarts? no, no, i didn't actually. i mean, in previous elections i probably would have done. but i now have three children. the school run, it was the week after the budget and ijust thought, i'm going to go to bed and get a good night's sleep and see where we are in the morning. so you wake up, you look at your phone, or i hope you switch on the today show and you hear the results and your reaction is... well, i was you know, i was surprised that president elect trump won all of the seven seats in play. states in play, sorry in the way that he did. and what did you say in private? 0.... well, you know, i've i've been involved in politics for so long now, whether it's about american

elections or brexit outcomes or general election wins or losses, you just say, ok, that's the world as it is. time to get on with the job. really, you can do that? because you will know that for many people. people i know, people you know, if they're in bed finding the news, they pulled up the duvet, they turned on music, radio rather than news. they shouted or they screamed or they cried or they despaired. well, they're a little bit of that in thejones household. well, i'm speaking for myself here as opposed to others. um, but no, i mean, you know, i woke up about a 5:45 in the morning. um, and there are many of these scenes in my life, whether it's about, you know, labour losing elections, thankfully, now winning elections. i remember the outcome of the brexit referendum, you know, american elections over previous years, some european elections, once you've kind of been around that cycle a few times, um, you know, you've just realised, especially now you're in government. that's what the american people voted for.

president elect donald trump is going to be the president. uh, obviously we will work with him and his team in the way that we always do as a country, and you've just got to get on and deal with the world as you find it. now, you know america, you know american politics. you went to work for hillary clinton's campaign back in in 2016. yeah. although i should be clear, i volunteered, given recent given recent news stories. so if you weren't paid. and sent by the labour party. no, no, no, i went of my own accord and i campaigned in miami—dade, in florida. um, and that was obviously the election when donald trump was first elected. um, at that time, you know, which was a very surprising outcome at that period of time. so it was quite an interesting, um, interesting campaign. and for me, it was around the time where i thought, actually, i might give up on politics because i'd lost the general election in my now constituency in 2015, i campaigned to remain in the european union. i thought, i'll go for a surefire campaign over in the us and help

hillary clinton. and then, you know, our sister party lost. and i thought at that point, you know, maybe, maybe. this isn't for me. but thankfully my now constituents gave me a chance to change my mind in 2017. yeah, and on. the eve of the election, you have a glamorous meeting. not with hillary, but with who? yeah. well, so eve of poll is really important for any election campaign because you've got to get out and, you know, remind your voters that they've got to get to the ballot box the day after. and in the us, it's broadly similar to the uk. you go out with a with a list of people who've been identified as your voters. you put a leaflet through the letterbox. or in america they do these things where they hang these hangers on the door handle so that when the voter comes out in the morning, they remember to go and vote. and we were all called back to the campaign centre on eve of poll, which seemed very strange because really, you should be out in the field, as they say in the us. and i thought maybe hillary is here because why else would they? why else would they call us back? so we all come back into this school sports centre and we're all kind of herded into the corner.

um, and cher arrives. the cher? the cher, she kind of floats in and she tells us. she tells us why she's a supporter of hillary clinton, which is very lovely. i'll be honest, i was a little agitated. i wanted to get out and campaign, and then ithought, but, you know, this might be a quick thing. it went on for quite a long period of time and then we were all queued up. i have to say, not with much choice to have a photo with cher. and then we had to, um, wish her well as she left. and it's the only time i've seen outside of a video of kind of north korea where she had, i think maybe eight bodyguards run alongside her limousine until it got quick enough so it could kind of get away by itself. interesting that you say that back in 2016, you thought of giving politics up because of the defeats that you'd had personally and for the causes you believe reading up about you, i realised that in many ways you were an accidental politician. you almost give up. you win. in a surprising victory in 2017, partly onjeremy corbyn�*s coattails, despite the fact you didn't agree with him. partly on remainer coattails in bristol in 2019. you think of not running again. i mean, are you an

accidental politician? i suppose so. i mean, look, i've been i've wanted to be a politician for a long time. it's a huge kind of honour and public service and a great responsibility. a lot of the time in politics, though, there are lots of great people that want to become politicians. 0ften it's a bit of luck as well as your skill or ability. and you know, you know, i'm an ambitious kind of guy. i want to do well in this job. but equally, politics to me isn't my whole life's purpose. yeah, but what's striking about your year, as i mentioned in the introduction, is, boy, you've not come and gone. you've come and come and come. i mean, in the sense of, you know, one minute you're a backbencher, then you're chairing this very powerful committee. we'll hear a bit of what you did on that committee in just a few minutes. shadow cabinet. cabinet right at the centre of forming this budget. are there moments when somebody opens a door for you to get into a chauffeured car or says chief secretary. ah, there you go. how did that happen?

yeah. i mean, look, you know, i have a pass to swan in and out of downing street. that's crazy. you know, when you're, when i was first appointed by the prime minister, you go off to buckingham palace to see the king, to join the privy council. you're making decisions often every half an hour, about hundreds of millions, billions of pounds that affect people's lives and their communities directly. and, you know, that's not normal. and you have to remember when you're doing that, that you mustn't become institutionalised or kind of used to or expecting that because you're just holding an office for a period of time. well, let's talk about those sorts of decisions and the office, because people are often confused by that title, chief secretary. no one knows what it means. no. well, i'll tell you my phrase and you tell me yours. i always say i've over the years of covering politics, it's the man or woman who has to say no. well, sometimes, but also yes to the right questions. yeah, the chief secretary is the deputy to the chancellor and was created in order to help kind of settle

all of the public spending decisions. so, loosely, the chancellor will decide how much money we have to spend as a country and how they will raise it. and it's myjob working with her and our colleagues around the cabinet table to decide how we dish that out to fund the government. let's talk a bit about the process of the budget, cos when i interviewed jeremy hunt, when he was still the chancellor, he talked a bit about how you make decisions leading up to a budget and said he had this very complicated spreadsheet of choices. um, back in the days of gordon brown being chancellor, his advisers, ed balls, damian mcbride, still an adviser to labour ministers, he said, look, actually, it was old fashioned cue cards on a desk. you know, if you want to spend that, that's1 million or1 billion more likely. if you want to cut, that raises 2 billion and you're moving these cards around. how did it work for this budget? so you have this scorecard, which i think is whatjeremy hunt was referring to, which is the very limited circulation.

fancy excel spreadsheet which covers everything around tax and debt and cost of debt and fiscal rules and the whole, the whole shebang. and that's the big strategic picture that the chancellor, you know, looks at and we contribute to. but then in myjob, you have these very large kind of a3 printouts looking at what we call trade offs, or we talk a lot about the marginal pound between departments. what can you buy for that pound? and if you pick a that means you can't do b or you really happy happy with that. but i was surprised how analogue the process still is. one of the changes that i'm making to the spending review process is to digitise it, just so that we can actually use data much more effectively and make better strategic decisions. analogue in the sense it literally is pieces of paper or cards. yeah. so i write a letter to a secretary of state. they respond with a letter in an excel spreadsheet, and then you have lots of officials analysing the spreadsheets and writing advice notes. but an actual letter, a physical bit of paper. yeah, yeah. i mean, it's mad and it's mad. so there's a whole room for improvement there about how we better use technology and data. is this what you're

like at home? i mean, if i asked mrs jones, would she say he's got a spreadsheet for every decision we take in the household? i mean, look, you should get her on. i mean, actually, ithink i think lucy, uh, pointed out when i was first appointed that maybe i'm, i've got the best type of personality to be chief secretary to the treasury, which is a polite way of putting it. i think that you do have a spreadsheet for your home spending decisions. i'm, i'm very focussed on every pound value for money, uh, making sure that, you know, i come. come on. do you have a spreadsheet at home for all your spending decisions? yeah, we do. um, and but both for me and and my wife and then ourjoint account and our spending. um, do you sit down at the kitchen table? dining table? wherever. do you sit down and go through it together? go. you know. yeah. yeah, yeah. honestly, you know, spending on vegetables has gone up by 17%. it's time that we cut back on. yeah, yeah, yeah. when your direct debits change, you've got to update the spreadsheet. so all the numbers flow through to the bottom. you know how much money you can

save and how much disposable income you've got for the... is it also true that you referred to your children as cost centres one, two and three? yes. but because i didn't want to talk, to talk about them by their names in public for it's quite. revealing language, cost centre. very expensive. i mean, you know, anyone with young kids knows these, these, these things cost a lot of money. i sense you a very disciplined person because there's something in your life that fascinated me. you're a vegan, and you took the decision, as far as i can tell. almost overnight you thought, right, that's it. give up meat. i've decided to do this. i can't imagine that level of personal discipline. sure, but i should really confess, because we're all sinners, aren't we? i mean, i'm a pretty relaxed vegan. i did take that very hard line view in 2014. but in a confession to you, i think it was the observer food monthly magazine many months ago, many years ago. i'm also very happy to be vegetarian. it was basically a decision around, you know, the climate emissions associated with food production. sure. but my point was less about, as it were,

the ethics and morality of what you eat. that's for another conversation. it takes a real discipline tojust decide, right. i've decided. that's it. i won't touch the stuff anymore. yeah. and look, maybe it's a reflection of what i've had to do in my life to get where i am. i mean, you'vejust got to be really clear about what you're doing and how you're going to do it. and, you know, now, in myjob, if you've got to deliver difficult messages or bring people with you, you've just got to be you've just got to get on with it, basically. it's a reflection on the difficulty of where you are. you're referring are you to the fact that you've got would you call it a tough background? i don't think i'd say tough. i mean, i come from a working class background. you know, i grew up in a council flat in my now constituency in the days before the national minimum wage. and, you know, that was difficult. but i had loving parents. i had a roof over my head. i had a great community. your dad was a security guard? yep. your mum a health service administrator? yeah. so was there a lot of going without? yeah. i mean, you know, there

would be times when my parents would choose not to eat in order to feed me. you know, we couldn't have all the things we wanted to have. they told you that they weren't eating or you just spotted that? no, i saw it. you were sitting down and they were not. no, i saw it, i saw it, and that had a huge impact on me. partly because you feel powerless living in those circumstances. and so it drives a lot of my labour values about opportunity and power for people, giving them the choice over their own lives about what they want to do. and you proudly describe who as your political hero. well, isaid, tony, i mean, tony blair's government is the root of my interest in politics because i didn't come from a political family. my parents aren't involved in party politics. i didn't know anybody involved in politics. it seemed a very distant thing to me growing up. but the 1997 election, i remember, i remember how positive my parents were and my family. i remember the huge impact the national minimum wage had on us. i remember being told at my school, which was at that time one

of the worst performing state schools in the country, that this gifted and talented program that the government funded meant that i had i was given extra opportunities and itjust stayed with me that, you know, the things that these guys on the tv did. these politicians completely changed my life and my opportunities in life. and i always thought that if i had the chance to do that for other people, for kids like me, from backgrounds like mine, that would be a good thing to do. i'm told, is this right, that you have a bookshelf in your commons office that is about your political values or why i'm here? bookshelf, is that right? so there's some photos. they're not books. so i have a number of photos in my in my office that will remind me why i'm, you know, doing what i'm doing. and so there's a photo that was taken as part of a newspaper interview of me at my old council flat, which, as i say, is now in my constituency, and it's a photo of my kids because i care about things like climate change and what we're doing in the world.

um, and then a photo of me and my wife for every election on polling day that i've been successful in, because i'm very conscious of the sacrifice that she and my family make for me to be able to do the job that i do. you're constantly thinking about that, which is interesting. is it also why, for you, this phrase that became so controversial in the run up to the budget and afterwards, this phrase, working people mean something to you? in a way, i think a lot of people thought it was just a kind of spin doctors kind of focus group phrase. does it have something in your gut as to what it means? yeah, it really does. it really does. and i was always a bit confused as to why people got so kind of in knots about that. i mean, whenever i was asked, what's a working person? i'm like, it's a person that goes to work that gets paid and they've got to try and make ends meet. now, i said at the beginning that political thinking is a conversation with rather than an interrogation of. so i'm being very kind to you and the way you made your name as chair of the select committee was not always that kind. now i'm going to invite

you to put your headphones on. the greatest hits of the former chair of the business select committee. i'm asking you whether you agree with that. yes or no. we do everything that we can to make you. i agree with what ijust said. yes or no? are you in this mess. because you don't know what you're doing? 0rare youjust- a shameless criminal? first of all, please don't interrupt me because it's rude and it's inappropriate. second, let me finish. do you agree with me that it is a system wide failure? - yes or no? in my view, you're hurting the country, prime minister. just on a very human level. surely you must know that it's in the country's interest for you to leave now, isn't it? look. i, i, i, i, i... boris johnson, they're the boss of the post office and the boss of p80. yeah. how does this softly spoken boy end up being mr aggressive when it comes to taking the chair at the select committee? well, look, the thing that gave me the most pride in chairing the select committee. for example, in the royal mail dispute, working with postal workers and others is that select committees are a function of parliament, which is a function of

the politicians that we elect as a public. 0urjob is to hold the powerful to account on behalf of the people. that is really important. and there's loads of stuff that we do every day that might not get through to the public. but these hearings where i was holding powerful people to account, who had not behaved in the way they should have done an injustice to other people, it was important that i did that in a way that was tough, but also made people have pride in their parliament in being able to do thatjob for them. and it is rooted in my personal politics about feeling disempowered, growing up and knowing what it means when you do not have the ability or the authority or the power to hold powerful people to account when they are not behaving in the right way. that's very interesting. you're saying you're trying to at least channel what you think is the anger of people who were like, you had no power. you've got it now. through the questioning. through the holding to account. exactly right. earlier, you referred to being an admirer of tony blair.

you referred to reform, which is very much his language. and yet i look at this budget, i think huge amounts of money spent in return for no visible reform. you say a little bit of it. reform. every tax change that was identified targets the country's wealth creators. it doesn't look very blairite to me. well, look, we spend about £1.2 trillion a year as a country. it's a lot of money. and the two, as i've said, the two watchwords of this government growth, which you hear us talk a lot about, because that's the way in which you get more money into public services without having to tax people higher rates of tax. but reform is also the big watchword of this government, because we have got to take this opportunity to get a grip of how that money is being spent to deliver better outcomes for people. but the way reform works is you have to get people sometimes to do things they don't want to do. i mean, clearly there is sometimes painless reform in which you just have many, many systems. yeah, but if you say, here's £22 billion, you who run the health service.

oh, by the way, now we'd like to change some working practices. they're going to say, well, we'll have the 22 billion and you can come back to us for the other stuff later. so there's reform built into those numbers, because they would have liked more, to be frank. and so what we're asking them to deliver for that money does require them to improve their productivity in how they deliver services. but remember, the spending settlement of the budget was only for one financial year, 2526. myjob now that the budget�*s been set and we've got how much money we've got to spend over the next few years, agreed with the chancellor. the second phase of the spending review that i run now until the spring 2025, is when we make those multi—year decisions for public services. so you will know that the number crunchers at the institute for fiscal studies and pretty much everybody else said what this budget was about was a lot of money in the short term and then painfully tight budget settlements in later years under this labour government. and what they said is it's not deliverable if you're going to give more money to health, that means less forjustice, less for housing, less for councils.

and indeed, that's why the secretary of state's for those departments wrote over your head and over the chancellor's head to the prime minister to complain about it before the budget. the numbers don't add up unless you do something dramatic, do they? so they do add up. but the the challenge i put back to those commentators is they assume. and the ministers? i'll focus my comments on you do that in private is that they assume no improvement in the delivery of public services, so they just assume you have to keep paying more and more each year for kind of failed public service delivery. that is not acceptable. that's why reform is so important. and what they look at when they look at these numbers is they look at the rate of growth in public expenditure, how much more each and every year are you going to pay on top of what you're already paying? we're already spending £1.2 trillion a year. like, the big question is how do you spend that money better? that is the big question. what i'm suggesting to you is the government has an answer to it,

and you've been in office quite a while now. well, we've been in office for a few months, but this question is going to be a defining feature of the second phase of the spending review in the years ahead. now, growth is the other half of this, as you say, and you say it's central, but it's a puzzle for me. the prime minister's got missions. he likes talking about a mission government. there were five of those. then he talks about before the election. steps, six first steps. then he gave a speech this week in which he said he got a mission to cut illegal immigration. you can't have multiple missions if growth is what you're about. growth has to be everything you're about. and yet you put up taxes on working people, increase regulation on businesses. you make the cost of employing anybody higher by giving workers more rights. you, i can't see an example of where you've yet prioritised growth. £100 billion of extra funding in infrastructure over the next five years. five year spending settlements on capital with a ten year infrastructure strategy. higher levels of spending on research and development than we've had in the past. more investment in skills. more funding forfurther education and apprenticeships. unlocking enabling infrastructure. 0n rail, on housing, on energy.

you know, there's tons of announcements here. you know, there's tonnes of announcements here. breakfast clubs for working parents at schools, changing the carer�*s allowance so carers can work more hours. they get britain back to working plan. the thing with growth is that it's a puzzle. there are lots of different pieces in the puzzle that you've got to get right, and it is the first and most defining mission of this government because on public spending, you can only put more money into public spending if you grow the economy. we can't, we can't do further tax rises in this parliament. donald trump beat a government that says many of the things that this labour government says, not least about investing and particularly investing in greenjobs. what lesson do you think the party should learn from the failure of the democrats? what is it? a warning to the labour party? i think there are two things, and these are both very personal to me because these are kind of my own ambitions. i said earlier, i want to be one of the best reforming politicians of my generation, and i want

all of my colleagues to be in that category. but that has to be felt and be tangible to people. you can'tjust point to an 0br graph and say, isn't everything great? people need to feel they've got more pounds in their pocket, they're able to pay the bills, they've got opportunity in this country, and you must always be focussed on those outcomes and be really connected to people and their experience of the country. you can'tjust stay in the treasury office and hope everything will be fine, because the spreadsheets look good. and the second thing, and this is always a test that i set for myself, is that as politicians, we've always got to be better communicators. we're notjust administrators, we are leaders. we have to be able to explain to people the decisions we're taking, the trade offs and where we're going as a country, and that has to be rooted in remaining connected to those people. it's not a lecture from a politician to a voter. it's being in the same place as a voter, which is why every opportunity i get, i'm out of the treasury, visiting a hospital, visiting a school, talking to people around the country to really understand the consequences of my decisions. so you might not agree

with very much, if anything, with donald trump, but you have to learn from his communication skills. he won the campaign very decisively. yeah. the foreign secretary once called him a woman hating, neo—nazi, sympathising sociopath who was a profound threat to the international order. i know you're all chums now. that's the official line. but he wasn't wrong, was he? well, you'll have to ask david lammy that question. but, look, we've all said things in the past that maybe we regret. the important thing is how we build on that relationship going forward. i'lljust end with this question for you. what did john major, rishi sunak and liz truss have in common? they were all chief secretaries to the treasury, but i, who. ended up as prime minister and... some of them very bad prime ministers. that's not an ambition of mine, i can tell you. it tookjohn major three years, liz truss three years and rishi sunak two years. from having yourjob to being prime minister. how long will it take you? i doubt i'm going to be joining them in that list of chief secretaries to become prime minister in a few years.

that's very, very unlikely indeed. darrenjones, chief secretary to the treasury, thank you very much forjoining me on political thinking. my pleasure. kiran. mrjones, there's a reason why chief secretaries to the treasury often rise to the top in politics is because theirjob means they have to get their heads around every department in government. they have to understand the trade offs, the choices, the priorities. they have to understand the detail to and be good at explaining what they're about. that's it from this edition of political thinking. thanks for watching. hello there. we're finally expecting to see a bit of a change to the weather. something a bit brighter with some sunshine. finally seeing the back of this gloom and grey weather. so remembrance sunday marks a change, i think, for scotland and northern ireland.

but for most again it's going to be pretty cloudy with outbreaks of rain. and that's because we've got these weather fronts moving in from the west. it's this area of low pressure and the high pressure behind it that will be the game changer. so we start the day grey for many rather gloomy. these weatherfronts pushing in from the west will bring some spots of showery rain. could see a little bit of sunshine here and there, but the best of the sunshine will appear across scotland and northern ireland as we head into the afternoon. as winds turn westerly here and again, temperatures on the cool side ten to 12 or 13 degrees through sunday night. that weather front sinks southwards. barely anything on it, but it introduces a clearer and a chillier air mass, but with clearer skies, so it's going to turn quite chilly across northern parts of the uk to start monday. little less cold across the south because we've still got a bit of cloud here. so here it is, this clearer air mass moving in behind the cold front around this area of high pressure. so again it is high pressure. but because of this slight change in air mass we should see the sunshine.

on monday could look vastly different. a bright sunny start for many and the sunshine continuing into the afternoon. something we haven't seen for such a long time. a little bit of cloud across northern and western scotland and northern ireland, but most places bright into the afternoon and a cool day to come. ten to around 13 or 1a degrees. 0ur area of high pressure then still with us into tuesday, just drifting a little bit further westward so it could allow some cloud with some patchy rain through the day on tuesday to roll in across east and southeast england. so that could spoil the sunshine a bit through the day. but elsewhere, another dry one. some good sunny spells around those temperatures again, ten to around 12 or 13 degrees. pretty much where we should be for the time of year, and very similar story. as we head through the week, high pressure largely dominates. could see these weak weather fronts spiralling around that could give spells of patchy rain and a little bit of cloud at times, but we should hold on to the sunshine as we go through the week. most places should stay dry, just a hint of it starting to turn colder from the north by the time

we reach next weekend. take care. live from washington, this is bbc news. president biden invites donald trump to the white house — as the handover to the new administration begins.

qatar says it will not mediate in peace talks between israel and hamas until the attitudes of both sides improve. and huge protests in the spanish city of valencia over the handling of last week's deadly flash floods. the white house says presidentjoe biden and president—elect donald trump will meet wednesday at the oval office as the transition gets under way. president biden's invitation to mr trump is a tradition between the outgoing and incoming presidents. the two were last seen together in new york at an event to mark 23 years since the september 11 attacks. before that, their most notable recent meeting was injune, the first debate of the presidential election. a poor performance by president biden on stage that night led to him eventually dropping out of the campaign.

and now that kamala harris has lost, some democrats are blaming mr biden