Person being sacked, no, this person should be sacked. This line where it says that actually downing streets concluded that this is the last chance this year to reset public views of the government. 0k. Chance this year to reset public views of the government. Ok. That same story on the front of the telegraph. Dup orders may to reign in divisive hammond. Letsjump to the observer quickly. Again its brexit. They want to draw a plan to effectively block mrsmay from issuing a no deal brexit. Can they do that . How are they going to do it . Its the key aim of a group which includes we are told former tory chancellor kenneth clarke, several conservative ex ministers together with prominent labour snp, liberal democrat and green mps, they wa nt to liberal democrat and green mps, they want to give parliament the ability to veto or prevent they say by other legal means a bad deal or no deal outcome. No wonder parliament is not going to be looking at the next phase, next stage of this eism withdrawal notification bill because there is far too much division. There are too many clauseles, too many amendments and some the government could be defeated on. When sentences are thrown at Michel Barnier or others saying the ball is in your court. Look, its simple, brexit and a ali Year Partnership is the most difficult and complex thing to do, to do this under the glare of the 24 7 media is extremely almost impossible. Then when you have internal divisions and people dont agree on the vision, i think this is. Of course the eu is watching carefully a nd is. Of course the eu is watching carefully and thinking who will we end up negotiating with and will the deal be worth the paper or there will be another Prime Minister . Again we are dancing on the head of a pin again. Its all about brexit and stuff, lets get some policies out there rather than worrying about this, thats my view. Trouble ahead. Not going to be plain sailing. Shall we talk more trouble at 11. 30. Love to. We will have some positive stories. I am taken by the round pound. Didnt get there, but we will at 11. 30. Cant wait. Thank you very much. Thank you for watching. Stay with us. Coming up next its meet the the late victorian and edwardian age was the apogee of empire and its often been painted as a time of plenty for the british. Yet it was also politically tumultuous and anxious, a time of change and decay, as well as progress. And simon heffer, in his sweeping history of the three decades before the first world war, calls it the age of decadence. Welcome. It was a time of trouble, and yet perhaps because of what followed, we tend to think of it as a golden age. Why do you think that is . Well, i think many of us have grown up with the forsyte saga and Downton Abbey on television, which does seem to suggest that certainly if you had money it was a great time, but it wasnt such a good time for everybody else. You mustnt forget, everybody else was 90 of the population. We had a growing middle class, but there was still a working class, whose wages flatlined in the ten or so years before the war. You must remember old age pensions were only introduced in 1909, five shillings a week for those over 70. Most people, i think the average male death was at 48, so very few people lived to claim it. If you did live to 70 before 1909, and you were clapped out and couldnt work, you went to the workhouse. So it was a harsh society, but it was also a society in which there were people with real issues, who wanted to take them to a liberal government elected in 1906 in the hope that they, unlike the tories before them, would sort them out and these are notably women, who want the vote, the irish, who want home rule, and the working class, who want more money. Lets talk about a couple of things you mentioned there. What strikes me is that people who know you as a newspaper columnist, as a solid man of the right, might be surprised to find you in this book being extraordinarily sympathetic to the irish home rule pressure, and very much a gladstone man rather than a salisbury man. Salisbury dominated the 18905 as a conservative Prime Minister. Just what is it about gladstone that you found so admirable on the irish question . I think gladstone was a man of complete integrity, who understood that the irish were, like many in england, educated people, who were entirely capable of running their own affairs, and in 1869, when he had just become Prime Minister for the first time, he famously said, my mission is to pacify ireland. He couldnt do it in his first administration, but when he was re elected in 1880, he was determined to do it and of course the fenian brotherhood at this time, the progenitors of sinn fein, are causing an enormous amount of trouble. They are having terrorist attacks on the mainland, they killed the chief secretary to ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish in 1882 in phoenix park, and the chief Civil Servant of ireland, and he realises that you cant tell people who are capable of expressing their wish for the country that they cant have it. And the political failure to move on ireland in that period is one thats haunted british history ever since. It was catastrophic, and he tried another home rule bill in 1893, which failed, and eventually asquith brought one in. He had to bring one in 1912, because he needed the support of irish mps to keep his majority in the house of commons, but it was incredible how slow we were to learn notjust that the irish were capable of governing themselves, but that there would be terrible consequences as you say, a century really of unpleasa ntness and dissent, between two people who should really get on very well with each other. Well, of course, the picture of this period is so fascinating because of course you had at that time a monarch, queen victoria, until the beginning of the century, who was intensely political. Her hatred of gladstone, which emerges through the story, is quite extraordinary, and something i think that people still although it is so well known people find remarkable, given what happens in our own age. Well, she famously said of gladstone, he addresses me as though i were a public meeting. And gladstone was a man who i think found it at times difficult to deal with people who were not on his intellectual planet which was most people. But when you couple that with deference to a monarch, i think he did find it difficult, but he was unbelievably reasonable to the queen, who was vile to him in return, and he never really complains about this until 1894, when he ceases to be Prime Minister for the last time, and he writes a memorandum in which he says, im really quite hurt by the way she didnt even thank me after over 60 years of Public Service when i went for my final audience. That brings us to the question of empire, because at the time of the diamond jubilee, in 97, the British Empire really was at its peak. This was the great moment. And then, within a few years there was the boer war and gladstone, who had never really been a man of empire, was really proved right in the way he almost can see the beginning of the end. Yes. I mean, gladstone saw empire much as the romans saw their empire, which was that you only added a bit to it in the interests of defence. You didnt do it for reasons of exploitation or expansion. And he didnt really understand why people wanted to have a scramble for africa. Of course, people like cecil rhodes and joe chamberlain, who was the colonial secretary back in london, were very keen to get their hands on places like the orange free state and the transvaal in particular, that had huge gold and diamond reserves and they used the excuse of british settlers in those boer republics being maltreated, being denied civil rights, to start the boer war. And it was believed that because these were a bunch of rough dutch farmers, armed with carbines, that the british army would flatten them in no time at all. Why they thought that, i dont know, because it was only less than 20 years earlier that weve lost the first boer war and there has been enormous problems with we remember rorkes drift and all those other things in south africa, where the native armies had been incredibly difficult to beat. And people went to recruiting stations in britain in1899, 1900, to join the british army, and in large numbers were rejected because they were unfit. They were malnourished, they did no physical education in schools, and they were totally unsuitable for being in an army. So in a strange way that war was a window into the heart of the nation at that time. It tells us so much. Yes, it does. It took us nearly three years to beat the boers and after it there was this huge enquiry, led by lord esher, into what was wrong with the army, but also enquiries into what was wrong with our people. But the fact it took nearly three years rather than the three months to beat these boerfarmers made a lot of people in this country think, well, what happens if we had a much more severe challenge . We started to realise that despite the esher reforms, despite reforms in the Education System that made young men in particular do physical education, we were still going to have a real job providing a proper army if war broke out. Aside from the rough politics and fascinating politics of the time in peace and war, and the great figures like gladstone and salisbury, you write this book about the kind of society that people knew. Its literature, its architecture, its art, and also inevitably its monarchy, and edward vii emerges as a scandal ridden, louche, really rather extraordinary, and not very admirable individual. It was really remarkable how they pulled it back after that period, wasnt it . Edward vii became a very popular king. He was a man who was detested by his mother. She wouldnt even let him see state papers until he was in his 50s. He was called in the famous tranby croft libel case, where he was revealed to have not just played but instigated an illegal card game. And of course he had a string of mistresses, so edward vii had an awful lot of baggage around him, but when he became king he became enormously popular, because unlike his mother he was out there, he made many public appearances and people felt that they were familiar with him. Where do you think in the end this period sits in our island story . I think that this will fit in our time, in our history, as a time of enormous change that prepared us as it were for the modern world, and if we hadnt had a war in 1914 im pretty certain there would have been massive civil unrest in this country, to try and broker that sort of new social settlement, that in fact it took two world wars to bring, in which the working class and women were properly enfranchised. That would have happened anyway, but this is the prelude to it. Although the ruling class may have been rather oblivious to the fact they were going towards the precipice, i think the working class always understood there was going to be a reckoning. Its just that the reckoning came in a very different way from the way they were expecting. Simon heffer author of the age of decadence, thank you very much. Thank you. Hello. Pretty mild evening at the moment and temperatures arent going to dropa moment and temperatures arent going to drop a huge deal. Winds coming in from the south. Strongest across western areas, maybe gale force across the high lands and islands later. Outbreaks of rain here becoming heavy and persistent. The odd spot of rain or drizzle for scotla nd odd spot of rain or drizzle for scotland and Northern Ireland but most will be dry. Clearest of the skies to eastern parts of england where we saw the best of todays sunshine and where see the best of the sunshine on sunday. Scotland and Northern Ireland outbreaks of rain and drizzle. Some write shall shall the wind not quite as strong. With cloud breaks across england and wales temperatures could be higher than showing on the chart. One or two spots could hit 23. Then it gets interesting. Sunday into monday, the remanents of what is currently hurricane ophelia reaches the republic of ireland. Monday, western fringes of england and wales and Northern Ireland could see wind gusts of maybe 80mph. Bye for now. This is bbc world news. 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