Newscast

The broadcast reported from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, where Chris Mason described the mood as upbeat and chipper. He said the party was in a worse numerical position than at the last general election but relatively improved from a year earlier, with Kemi Badenoch’s leadership solid and Reform having taken a hit in recent months. In an interview, Badenoch was asked about polling that put the Conservatives around 20 per cent, down on the general election, and about winning from that position. She said politics was volatile and multi-party, pointed to current polling showing a hung parliament, and predicted another election immediately if no party had an overall majority. Asked about working with Reform in such a scenario, she said if people wanted Conservative they had to vote Conservative, that she wanted Reform voters back, and criticised Reform as being mired in scandal, citing its Welsh leader stepping down after arrest and a predecessor imprisoned for taking bribes from Russia.

On policy, the programme reported that the Conservatives had announced a Britannia Shield, described as an Iron Dome-style system to protect British military bases in the UK and overseas from drones and missiles, in the context of an apparent attack around RAF Fairford and the withdrawal of American planes. The party argued that welfare savings could fund extra defence spending and said it would cut employer national insurance for 21 to 24-year-olds, calling the employer NI rise a jobs tax and linking it to young people not in employment, education or training. The broadcast also discussed Badenoch’s pamphlet and her call for fundamental change in the NHS, while she said she believed in free care at the point of need and spoke about changing the architecture around the NHS to make it more efficient. Ahead of her conference speech, inheritance tax was flagged as a likely focus.

Later, the programme examined misinformation about a suspected plague case in Russia. It said the WHO had assessed the risk to the European region as very low, to the Russian Federation as low, and to Siberia’s Irkutsk region as medium to low. A Russian woman had died from an unspecified form of pneumonia, and she worked at a plague institute in Siberia. BBC Monitoring’s Vitaliy Shevchenko said Russian media reports were unclear and speculative, with local hospitals in lockdown and officials altering social media posts after mentioning plague. Dr Simon Clarke said it was known the woman worked at the institute, with suggestions she died from plague or a lab accident involving a broken test tube, though Russian authorities were rowing back on plague evidence. He explained that bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic plague are all caused by the same bacteria.