in campaigns sometimes you have the journalistic boon of recordings that were not knowingly made by the person who was speaking, if that makes any grammatical sense. it doesn't, really... one such recording made its way to my ears in the last couple of days, rather unfortunately for the home office, where a member of james cleverly�*s team is overheard saying something rather rude. so we will be talking about that on today's newscast, and all the other news. and henry is with us, too. newscast, from the bbc. hello, it's patty in the studio. and it's laura in the studio. and it's henry in the studio. it is very nice to have you with us. so, there is a scoop. which is, a recording made of a minister saying that the rwanda policy is crap. and, laura, you have got a hold of it. idid. shall we listen to it before we discuss? ...has anyone got their cameras on? the policy is crap. 0k? it is. but it is not about policy, it isi about the effect of the policy. there is second and third order effects, and australia, - for example, their policy had a devastating effect. - there is no doubt at all, - when those first flights take off, it will send shock wave across the channel. . oh, dear. so, henry, as a political hack, when you hear that, what do you think? i think belting story, i think that it is extremely embarrassing for the conservative party, especially on a morning, just before a morning where they have put the home secretary, james cleverly, out to go and try and get this question of immigration and asylum into the centre of the campaign. i mean, it is worth saying, the comments probably are not quite as disloyal as the use of the word. at the start of the clip, it might make you think. but, as i thinkjames says in his response to you, when you put this to him, he was being candid. candid can be a euphemism, candour is not welcomed by campaign chiefs during an election campaign, as in so, candidly acknowledging that he still thinks the flights will be deterrent but there are issues, is not really what the conservative party is going for 11 days out from polling day. no, it is not the script. and it is worth saying, we should be completely clear about this, whatjames sunderland has said to me in response to this is that he meant the response to the policy was crap, and that it will ultimately work and essentially, that the idea of moving migrants around the world is not something you would do for its own reason, but the position they have got into is that this is the weight to do it, is the way to do it, they say they do not have a choice and he does believe that the policy will work. the thing is, you can hear in that clip he says, has anyone got their phones are cameras on? he knows he is about to say something honest. about to give an honest view, and he knows also that people will raise their eyebrows when they hear it. so, where is that recording made? he was speaking at a private event, run by the true blue patrons club, it was a dinner event for young conservatives where senior conservatives like him, a member of the home office ministerial team, he is james cleverly�*s pps, are invited along to go and speak to them privately. it was at the beginning of april this year. so it is recent, mr sunderland is disappointed that he was recorded. an event like that, it is not what you would expect. but obviously as a member of the home office team, obviously when rwanda has been such a controversial and important policy to this government, there is a public interest in hearing what he said in those candid remarks. also, it takes me to the phrase true blue. because there are many blues, and someone who has leaked this got in as a conservative, as a blue, but it is from, perhaps, on the pastel shades. laughing it is a different blue to the sunak blue. this has the whiff to me of rivalries within the conservative party, someone releasing this. this is not an interloper from the labour party who is got into the true blue. well of course, we would never talk about resources as journalists. however, one of the things you highlight there is the rwanda policy is not something that all conservatives have been happy about. the home secretary himself has never quite denied that he also used the word that we can bleep out, where he said the policy was... so, this is something that has been a problem, and it is interesting, there are quite a few conservatives, i don't know if you would agree with this, henry, but over the months there are quite a few conservatives who have said privately, why is rishi sunak making illegal immigration so prominent, because it is very hard for any government to do that much about it. it is an international issue. whereas, if he actually looked more at legal migration, where governments can, post—brexit, do quite a lot to influence the numbers and some people believe that was a political mistake. to ever go for this slogan in the first place. totally right. and you have conservatives who complained that through talking so much about illegal immigration, rishi sunak has basically raised the salience of immigration more generally. and the public, particularly members of the public who are most anxious about immigration, do not necessarily make that distinction. but here is another logic gap. nigel farage promised me as a voter that if i went for brexit, i could get immigration under control. nigel farage is now apparently doing cakeism, because he is standing again. and have i got to forget that in an earlier iteration he told me that brexit would mean i could control hoardes, queues, he did that! but aren't you as a voter more likely to direct your anger to the people who have been in government? for the... isn't it eight years today since the brexit referendum? it is. and you are more likely to direct your anger at those conservative party politicians who, i mean, borisjohnson and michael grove would subsequently say, no, it isjust about control. it is not about the numbers themselves, it was about having the democratic authority to... but it is undeniable, the number of illegal migrants under the post—brexit system who have come to the uk, has been high. higher than before. and certainly higher than a lot of those voters wanted. and that is one of the big challenges, one of the many, sort of, 14 years in government challenges. for rishi sunak, who wasn't around at that time, though he did vote leave, of course. to confront in this general election campaign. that is absolutely right. we should say that the numbers of legal migration have now started to come down, partly because of a product of some of the changes that the government has made to visa routes, but also because that seems to be the general way in which it is going. but the number of boat crossings have been going back up again, and that is very challenging for rishi sunak and the home secretary, appearing on programmes like this morning, having to defend something which was a massively prominent promise, they raised the prominence of this whole issue and they are extensively not being able to keep that promise. it is tricky for labour as well, not because they want to ditch the rwanda policy. but when you say, well, how are you going to actually address this? they have got very colourful language. but their plan is not that different to the one that conservatives have been pursuing, which has not worked. here is bridget phillipson. it will focus directly at source on dealing with the issue, - so our border security command will have an extra 1000 - cross—border officers - which will deal with the gangs, they will seek to smash the gangs, but alongside that, _ i think it is scandalous - that we are spending millions of pounds every day on unsuitable hotel accommodations. _ |we have got to clear that backlog, j the conservatives have completely broken the asylum system, completely broken it. - they know themselves i that this rwanda gimmick is not going to work, - we have heard from the home secretary, the fruity language he used to describe this, - we have heard from his own aide that he thinks the policy is crap. | i love the phrase, fruity language. it is not used enough in politics. ...fruity, but she did the double there, she had fruity and she then used the word. i know, i had to think yesterday, are we allowed to say it on saturday mornings? there should be a bell... we will find out whether it goes on iplayer or not. it is a useful reminder, listening to that interview there, that labour, if it wins onjuly the 5th, is not going to reduce waiting lists onjuly the 5th in hospitals, isn't going to stop the boats onjuly the 5th, isn't going to have more money onjuly the 5th, isn't going to fill in the gap here. so, there will be boats arriving onjuly the 5th for keir starmer to be worried about. which is one of the reasons keir starmer always says, look, lam promising hope, but it is realistic hope. and frank hope is, which often makes me think,... isn't that a bloke? he might have been a writer on the two ronnies, or something. laughter but he is that, you know, | keir starmer is and is very unusuall position at the moment of simultaneously trying to be the hopey, changey guy, as you would be if you are... let's call him frank hope. frank hope is trying, exactly, but he is also trying to preemptively manage expectations for the victory that he claims to not at all be complacent about. so, can ijust say here on newscast, on sunday, there will be boat arrivals in july the day after the general election. well, it depends on what the weather will be like on that particular day, but it seems quite plausible. the other thing, by the way, that really struck me, as i digested laura's scoop, is when we used to talk about in the studio in february, march, rumours of an early general election, rumours that a general election might take place before the autumn, one of the big rationales that those in the conservative party who wanted an early election, a summer election, would say to me and i am sure to laura as well... was, well, if you have an election before a flight has taken off for rwanda, then that becomes one of the huge issues of the campaign. the conservative campaign will be able to say either you vote for us and a flight takes off on july the 5th or you vote for labour and a flight will never take off. they have done that a bit and james cleverly did that a bit today. but i wouldn't say it has been anywhere close to one of the top themes of the campaign, and ijust think that it's really interesting. because i think a lot of conservatives would assume that would have been a much bigger part of their campaign than it has been. partly it hasn't been because they've been waylaid onto all sorts of other things that we will talk about. but also come i think they have chosen to fight an economy and tax—based campaign rather than an immigration campaign. and that is an interesting political choice. especially if it doesn't go that well for them. it's very interesting. and the rwanda issue also feeds into the theories around why they went for a summer election. and a tory source said to me very explicitly yesterday, in their view, mps were told we'd go in the autumn, a flight would have taken off. and that's why we're going to wait until the autumn, because by then planes will be going, they're going to the spring. and their view was that means that the government knows with dozens, a dozen sorry, around a dozen challenges to the plan in the british courts that actually, it's going to unravel in real time if they carried on trying to do the plan and they thought, oh, my god, we can't have that. and that's the reason why they went for an early election. but look, theories will abound. documentaries will be made, books will be written on all of this. but it is that, kind of what's happened around rwanda is a very, very interesting sort of moving political piece. and it's also this frustration as well. there are some conservatives who think they should have fought a very clear security election. labour still hasn't matched the defence spending, for example. they don't match the rwanda plan. you could have, a minnister saying to me the other day scary security election, and they chose not to do that as well. so it's interesting. and you could have had a post rate cut election. yes, but this is for the future documentary makers. if only we knew who would make them. so we move on to the simple matter of gambling on the date of a general election, which is something that we never thought we'd be here discussing, because that's now what the gambling commission is looking into under the terms of the 2005 gambling act, section 42, it is against the act to trade or to gamble with inside information, to use privileged knowledge, or to assist somebody else to do so. and we are now with a growing list which is embarrassing the conservative party. we know, courtesy of the sunday times, excellent reporting this morning, there is a fourth conservative, nick mason, the party's data officer, who says he hasn't done anything wrong, but he took a leave of absence from the party last night. and he is being looked at, we understand, by the gambling commission... and denies any wrongdoing. and he denies any wrongdoing. however, this again, is one of these stories that just allows, as each day goes on, labour to keep hammering the drum for their claims that the conservatives are about cronyism. they're out for themselves, they're not interested in the public, they're more interested in their own profit and this kind of story. henry, it's a kind of, to use that word, it has that elusive cut through. and there's already evidence from focus groups, isn't there, that have been happening around the country. and newscasters, let us know. you know, i know our programme inbox is full of people saying basically, i cannot believe this. if you had to script the worst possible development for the conservative campaign in the last couple of weeks of this general election, i think it would have been fanciful and bizarre to come up with this. and yet here they are. this is i mean, my mental thesaurus is not big enough to come up with the words to do justice to this. but let me also identify a practical problem for the conservative party here. the final couple of weeks of a campaign aren't really about the air war, they're about the ground war. they're about turning out people to vote. they're about knowing where your voters are. how to get them to the polls and where to focus your energies. and for reasons beyond rishi sunak's control, they now are without their chief data officer and their director of campaigns, who, as i understand it, is effectively their sort of field, field operator, that's what you'd call them in america. that seems quite a big problem for the conservative party in terms of doing what they need to do in the last couple of weeks. the rishi sunak stuff can carry on untrammelled albeit he's only going to get asked questions about this for the next few days, which is not ideal for him. but the actual practical business of getting votes in a general election is, i'd imagine, quite significantly hindered by the fact that these people, nick mason and tony lee, have taken leaves of absence. i think it's undeniably true. i mean, and what more, if people are trying to make the case that actually the tory campaign, as some of their own candidates believe, is kind of... over? giving up? i'm not saying that, that's the view of some conservatives. somebody said to me, that is just, look, it's done and dusted. if you haven't got two of the people who've got really important roles actually with their bums in seats, getting on with the job. how could any hopes of them turning it around really be pursued? it certainly got much harder. the other practical thing tojust mention is that this is a political scandal, i think _ i think that it is a scandal. yes. and michael gove said it was like watergate. but for the individuals concerned, i mean, we've all become much more familiar with section 42 of the 2005 gambling act than we ever were before, iassume. and these are offences where the maximum penalty is imprisonment. so this is very serious for some of the most senior people in the conservative party. obviously, they deny wrongdoing. and i'm not saying that should they end up being charged, that would be what the penalty would be. but we're not talking slap on the wrist or fine here, potentially. but in the case of the brexit referendum, there was a lot of suggestion that in the financial markets people were shorting the pound, expecting the outcome. and that is not illegal. that's. .. so we've got this weird thing where information that i might guess at or know in the bookies is going to take me to trouble, whereas making millions off the leave vote is apparently is fine. but isn't that the difference as well as the, you know, punting on your own on bookmakers online website and shorting the markets... the big difference here is the allegation, we don't know this, but the allegation that these people knew the outcome, they were not making an extremely educated guess as someone working in politics might be able to do on all sorts of things. the claim is that they were among the very few people in on the secret. a few days before, i mean, the only one where we know is, we know that craig williams placed his bet, i think the sunday before rishi sunak called the election on the wednesday. and the claim is that they were among a very few, a very small group of people who were not making the most educated guesses it's possible to make. they were making dead cert. well, and that's that's what it was said to me in the bookies in essex. sorry, i didn't mean to speak over you. i went into a bookies in essex. true blue, in essex. very rare to get access with a microphone. and that's, what henry has said is exactly what one of the punters betting on royal ascot said to me. there's a difference to a tip from the stable lad who tells you, old kuenssberg, is going to do very well in the 315. there's a difference when you absolutely know. is a different thing, as you've explained very well, without referring to me as an old nag, i'm grateful for that. it was an accident. no, i said, without referring to me as an old nag. don't do it in retrospect, the scam. but it is really serious. and that's why this morning the home secretary, james cleverly, was very reluctant really to say anything at all. if people have acted - inappropriately, i'm not going to defend that. i will be happy to condemn that. but the point is that just as others in other parties have made it clear that the appropriate thing to do i is wait for investigations to be | concluded before we decide whether or not sanctions i are appropriate or. what they should be. that is the case here. and as i say, i've been told, i've been told explicitly - by the gambling commission not to discuss this. _ interesting, though, because rishi sunak was quite happy to say, i'm terribly angry. this is appalling if it's happened. and then today he was much more sober. so maybe there is a sense and i'm speculating, maybe there is a sense that actually the scale of this might be spreading, as you have suggested, that this might be a first wave of something more serious, but who knows? but it's a busy old time because we're in the middle of the general election. lots of different things that have been knocking around in the news today. one of the things we asked bridget phillipson, who wants to be education secretary in a couple of weeks' time, about this morning, was whether or not labour would continue with the proposed banning of teaching gender ideology in schools if they win the election. this is what she had to say. many aspects of the draft had good and straightforward - principles in it. other elements of it, i thi