04/09/2011 BBC Weekend News

Good afternoon. The former Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling has

spoken of how his relationship with Gordon Brown got progressively

worse as the then Prime Minister tried to replace him during a

banking crisis. In his first broadcast interview since extracts

of his memoir started being serialised, he told the BBC that

the situation had been deeply unpleasant.

The yet again a leading Labour figures have decided to bank a few

pennies from a publisher in return for unburdening himself about his

experience of working with Gordon Brown. Yet again it falls some

distance short of a flowing river of compliments. Alistair Darling's

memoirs are serialised in a national newspaper. He says he ran

a fairly brutal regime and that his behaviour was sometimes appalling.

Attacking the Tories and then me is the stuff of politics but what is

so debilitating is when your own lot is doing it to you. He is also

critical of his approach to the recession. He wanted to be more

candid about cuts than Gordon Brown was willing to be. The Bank of

England faces criticism as well for not knowing enough about what was

going on during the banking crisis and for being badly structured.

present Government wants to make the Bank of England not just

responsible for interest rates, but also the supervision of banks, when

his track record is mixed. Also it has the overall responsibility for

ironing out the peaks and troughs of the economic cycle. That is a

lot to invest in one body. reform of banking will be an

important debate tomorrow but it is another day for Ed Miliband and

Labour when they are reminded of the poisonous atmosphere at the top

of their party when they are in Government.

The front runner to be leader of the Scottish Conservatives says he

will disband the party North of the border if he wins the leadership

election. Murdo Fraser suggested that a new centre-right party with

a Scottish identity would attract more voters. We currently have only

one member of Parliament supporting a Conservative Government from

Scotland. I think that is a disgrace and we should be doing

much better than that. This is a bold statement, but is it being

taken seriously? I think the idea has momentum now in a way that it

did not have several years ago when Murdo Fraser first suggested it.

Perhaps that is because in the meantime nothing seems to have

detoxified the Tory brand in Scotland. Murdo Fraser things that

independence for the party and a new name will help. He does not

support independence forced -- for Scotland, however. Some thinks this

plays for a nationalist agenda but others wonder if it is real change.

He has to win a leadership contest for this change to happen and he

has two candidates to beat. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former

head of the International Monetary Fund, has arrived home in France.

The 62 year-old fought his way through a mob of photographers to

his front door in Paris. He has been in the United States in May

when he was arrested on sexual assault charges which have now been

dropped. He faces another allegation in France.

In sport, on the final day of the World Athletics Championships, Mo

Farah has just won the gold medal for Britain in the 5000 metres

after disappointment in a 10,000 when he picked up silver. He swept