16/03/2017 Points West

Our headlines tonight: The election expenses scandal.

Five Tory MPs are questioned by police after the party battlebus

The Swindon woman whose bus was hijacked in Brazil.

The national scandal over election expenses has led to five

Conservatives in the West being interviewed by the police.

It's connected to a visit by the Tory battlebus

Here's our political editor, Paul Barltrop.

They're all Conservatives who were fighting key seats

Marcus Fysh of Yeovil, James Heappey of Wells,

Stroud MP Neil Carmichael, Luke Hall who won Thornbury and Yate

and Alex Chalk of Cheltenham have all been questioned by the police.

The Avon and Somerset and Gloucestershire forces had been

asked to investigate what happened in their constituencies

by the Electoral Commission, which has fined the Conservatives

for breaking election spending rules.

In terms of what we looked at was money that was

spent on campaigning - was it spent on the big

national campaigns that were about getting that party

elected or were they about supporting an individual candidate

in a specific constituency to get elected?

And I think that's the best way of summarising that difference.

Now, can you tell the difference between these two?

Well, one carried David Cameron, so was regarded as national

The other brought dozens of activists to campaign in key

Because they helped a specific candidate, it should have been

included in local campaign spending, but wasn't.

Did they make much impact on the election?

In Wells, activists stayed for just two and a half hours,

There were people who didn't know who my successors...

What my successor's name was, they couldn't pronounce his name

properly, but they were knocking on doors, giving out local leaflets

I think, clearly, what's happened is that we've got local campaigning,

which has been masked as national campaigning, and it's

The MPs didn't want to be interviewed today,

but it's clear that, privately, there's anger that

Conservative headquarters got them into this mess.

The party's been fined but it doesn't end there.

Their cases have now been referred by police

A woman from Swindon has been robbed at gunpoint in Brazil.

Sofia Janicka was on a bus which was hijacked by four armed men.

They came onto the bus and they were saying, in Portuguese,

that they were going to kill us and leave us naked in the field

I don't know, there was some confusion.

That's when he pulled the gun to my head, at the top of my head.

And Sofia has said she is continuing with her trip around Brazil

Fans of Swindon Town Football Club have made

A group has announced it wants to buy the club's stadium.

The news came at the Swindon Town supporters club AGM.

Well, it was standing room only in this pub in town tonight

as the Swindon Supporters Trust announced to the wider fan base

that it had made a ?1.1 million offer to the council to buy

the club's stadium, the County Ground.

Eventually, the fans want to try and run as much

Stephen is from the Supporters Trust.

Last year, I think, at our AGM we had one person turned

We went to the usual sort of routine.

This night tonight, I think we probably had a couple of hundred

crammed into a very small room underneath there.

The headline act in all of it, really, is that we want to get

the County Ground as a fan-owned stadium and we want to

redevelop that area, we want to regenerate that area.

It falls in between the club and the council at the moment.

I think, in 20 years' time, it will look exactly

We've got to try and make an impact on that area as fans.

Well, there are a lot of fans down there tonight, I tell you,

and community shares are a brilliant way of trying to do this

and lots of clubs up and down the country have done it.

James Matthew has talked the fans through how exactly that would work.

Just tonight, we've had an offer come through on one

of our social media channels for ?100,000 straightaway.

We've got the capability, to be honest, to get high net worth

individuals to pay for this on their own, but we want

the fans to get behind it, we want the political will,

we want the people to get behind this.

It's not about individuals any more, it's about the community.

And finally, how would this work in terms of the ownership

of the club because you guys would obviously own the stadium

but then the owner would own the football club?

And that's a good thing because we care about this thing

and it would be the first one in the country, but what we want to

do is we want to take this stadium, we want to improve it

and we want to make this football club great again.

Ways we could do that - we can own the stadium,

we could maybe reduce the rent, help on the playing side.

We definitely want the club onside with this.

It would be a fantastic thing for the area.

Well, on the pitch, it may be a tale of disappointment at the moment

for Swindon Town but, off of it, the Supporters Trust

think they've put the first plan in place to move the club forward.

Andy Howard, BBC Points West in Swindon.

Over to Cheltenham now for the latest from the races

with our sports editor, Alistair Durden.

In particular, trainer Willie Mullins

and jockey Ruby Walshe, who teamed up to win

But tomorrow, it is the Gold Cup, the highlight of the festival,

and most of the chatter is about Colin Tizzard,

the farmer turned trainer, who has two of the favourites

for the big race - Cue Card and Native River.

We've been to the Somerset-Dorset border to find out.

Work starts before sunrise at the stables in Milborne Port.

Colin Tizzard leads a thriving yard that's earned ?1.5 million in prize

There aren't that many Tizzards around.

There is still an air of modesty about the former dairy

farmer who's become one of Britain's's leading trainers.

A short drive from his stables are the picturesque gallops

He's come a long way since getting his licence back in 1998.

It's not an easy profession, I tell you that.

It is every morning, seven days a week, every day

So it's not easy but I've got to try and make sure

In the last ten years, it's got out of control.

You've got to deal with a lot of staff, you've got to delegate,

you are talking to owners all the time.

If a good horse comes up and someone half makes a remark

they wouldn't mind another one, you've got to do it.

If you don't take on straightaway, someone else will buy that horse.

Colin admits he still getting used to the spotlight his successors

created that his story is one racing has fallen in love with. It has been

a tremendous rise from relative obscurity and the fact that this

story is here in the grassroots of the British countryside. It is

fantastic for the sport. Those hours of milking cows are now a thing of

the past and he is right at the top of the tree. 12 months ago, this

fall. But the hugely popular 11 New Rd has picked himself up to have

another go this year. And then there is native river, who has taken

everyone by surprise. We thought if we had a horse good enough to run in

the Gold Cup, it would be an achievement, and we suddenly find it

is favourite, it is real. As for Colin Tizzard, he is refusing to

pick his favourite. Whatever the result, he will be back in the yard

on first light on Saturday to start all over again.

It's been confirmed that Ed Sheeran will headline the Pyramid Stage

He'll close the event on the Sunday in what'll be his only festival

Radiohead and Foo Fighters have already been confirmed but the full

line-up will be announced at a later date.

And that's the news from across the West tonight.

We're back tomorrow on Gold Cup Day, but for now I will say goodnight

The forecast for tomorrow will be a day that will turn breezy. It will

equally after a chilly and bright star turn cloudy as well. We should

hang on dry conditions until fairly late. For the rest of the night, we

have a weak cold front moving across us from west to east, bringing a

sprinkling of like rain. Once that clears through, the skies were clear

and it will turn into a chilly night, temperatures getting as low

as two or three Celsius. The hint of frost about by first light. It

should be a fairly funny start tomorrow. You will notice the winds

breeds. A windy story compared to recent days. Through the afternoon,

the clouds thicken up. It will start to introduce patchy rain from the

West. It will take into the tail end of the afternoon and evening before

that pushes out towards areas in the east. But many areas will be dry.

Temperatures roughly 10 there will be rain around, most

occurring overnight. Good evening, quite a range of

whether an offer earlier today in the north and north-west of the UK

quite a lot of showers around, lively ones, little bit of sunshine

in between. The best of the sunshine to be found at the other end of the

country towards