Afternoon Briefing Tuesday 6th October

0:01Welcome to the Times Radio afternoon briefing on Tuesday 6 October. Kemi Badenok has told Times Radio that a missile and drone defence system being proposed by the Conservatives cannot be compared to Israel's Iron Dome. Called Britannia's shield and costing£10 billion, it'll be announced at the Tory party conference today. Badenok has told Times Radio how the Tories would pay for it. The Sovereign Defence Fund, for instance, is money that has come from the net zero projects that Ed Miliband had for Great British Energy and so on. We don't think that that's a good use of money. We think it should go into defence.

0:36We've also talked about reinstating the two-child benefit cap. We've talked about stopping Labour's ridiculous Chagos deal, paying to give away British territory. We found the money. Francis Tusser, who edits defence analysis, has told Times Radio that£10 billion is nowhere near enough. £10 billion probably gets you, I don't know, defence of Kent and Essex. If you look at what, say, a country like Qatar has done, they've spent about 25 to 30 billion and Qatar is in terms of fiscal size about the size of London. The National Crime Agency says it seized 25 so-called super dinghies which it says were going to be used to smuggle migrants across the channel.

1:18They would have been able to carry about 1 ,700 people in total. They were intercepted at East Midlands Airport en route from Turkey to the Netherlands. Huge protests are taking place across France today with students demonstrating over what they're calling the chronic underfunding of education. Hundreds of schools have been blockaded. Almost 200 people have been injured and more than 5 ,000 arrested. This student tells us why they've taken to the streets. I think we can try at least to be heard but the government isn't at all listening to us to everything that we need. They're just sending more police officers and funding more police.

1:53We try at your maximum to be peaceful but the police is just too violent for us to just sit there and take it. And Geoffrey Archer has died suddenly at the age of 86. The former Conservative MP sold more than 300 million books worldwide. His latest novel called Adam and Eve is being published today. His editor Kate Elton who's also head of HarperCollins has told Times Radio he had a very strong work ethic. Just loved editing and loved working unbelievably hard which as an editor is frankly quite a lot of what you want so he had this incredible work ethic. He would work every day from 6 till 8 and 10 till 12 and 2 till 4 and then off from 6 till 8 again so he really put in the hours but he also just loved the process of writing so he would draft again and again and again so the first time I got a novel he would probably be on about draft 12 to 14.

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