Theresa May says 'work is ongoing' to restrict migration to the UK in the event of a financial collapse in the eurozone

The Home Office is working on plans to restrict migration to the United Kingdom if the eurozone crisis deteriorates leading to large numbers of jobs seekers tarvelling from Europe, the home secretary has said.

Theresa May said that "work was ongoing" to restrict immigration if there is a financial collapse, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

She said there was no sign of increased migration, but the government was examining the trends, When asked if she was considering immigration restrictions, May replied: "It is right that we do some contingency planning on this [and] that is work that is ongoing."

All members of the European Union have the right to work in the UK with the exception of the new members Romania and Bulgaria. While more than a million Europeans live and work in the UK, similar numbers of Britons live and work across Europe.

May's comments appear to be focused on Greece, which some commentators believe is likely to leave the eurozone which will in the short term at least cause even greater economic instability than the Greeks are experiencing now.

If Greece does leave the eurozone, the whole of Europe will be affected, especially those that are wrestling with debt problems such as Portugal, Spain and Ireland.

European governments have been preparing secret plans of action for a Greek crisis which could be precipitated if there are no clear victors in the second Greek elections next month.

Take responsibility and stop trying to avoid taxes, International Monetary Fund chief tells Athens

The International Monetary Fund has ratcheted up the pressure on crisis-hit Greece after its managing director, Christine Lagarde, said she has more sympathy for children deprived of decent schooling in sub-Saharan Africa than for many of those facing poverty in Athens.

In an uncompromising interview with the Guardian, Lagarde insists it is payback time for Greece and makes it clear that the IMF has no intention of softening the terms of the country's austerity package.

Using some of the bluntest language of the two-and-a-half-year debt crisis, she says Greek parents have to take responsibility if their children are being affected by spending cuts. "Parents have to pay their tax," she says.

Greece, which has seen its economy shrink by a fifth since the recession began, has been told to cut wages, pensions and public spending in return for financial help from the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank.

Asked whether she is able to block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs, Lagarde replies: "I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens."

Lagarde, predicting that the debt crisis has yet to run its course, adds: "Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax." She says she thinks "equally" about Greeks deprived of public services and Greek citizens not paying their tax.

"I think they should also help themselves collectively." Asked how, she replies: "By all paying their tax."

Asked if she is essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe that they have had a nice time and it is now payback time, she responds: "That's right."

The intervention by Lagarde comes after the caretaker Greek government met to discuss a sharp fall in tax revenues – down by a third in a year. Under the terms of the country's bailout, Athens has agreed to improve Greece's poor record for tax collection in order to reduce its budget deficit, and Lagarde's remarks are evidence of a growing impatience in the international community. Reports surfaced in Germany and France of preparations being made to cope with Greece's possible departure from the single currency after its election on 17 June.

Belgium's deputy prime minister, Didier Reynders, said it would be a "serious professional error" if central banks and companies did not prepare for an exit.

The euro came under fresh attack on the foreign exchanges, dropping below €1.25 at one point on Friday, as the Spanish government was in talks to pump up to €19bn of rescue finance into Bankia, one of the country's biggest banks, and the Catalan regional government sought financial help from Madrid to deal with its debts.

Signs emerged of a widening gulf between Germany and France over whether common eurobonds should be issued to help those countries, such as Greece and Spain, with high interest rates on their debt.

Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, poured cold water on the idea – which is strongly backed by the French president, François Hollande – and also said financial aid to Greece should be cut off if it failed to keep to the bailout deal.

Jürgen Fitschen, joint head of Germany's biggest bank, Deutsche, described Greece as "a failed state … a corrupt state". Separately, however, there were reports suggesting that the chancellor, Angela Merkel, was dusting down the economic modernisation plan used to revive East Germany after the fall of communism in the belief that similar measures could be applied to Greece and other struggling eurozone countries. Today's Der Spiegel magazine says Merkel will present a six-point plan based on the East German blueprint as a growth strategy. It includes measures such as privatisation, looser employment law and lower tax rates.

Opinion polls are pointing to a close race between parties backing and opposing the terms of Greece's €130bn bailout, but neither Germany nor the IMF has demonstrated any willingness to water down Greece's austerity programme.

In her interview Lagarde says Greece is not getting softer treatment than a poor country in the developing world, and that the IMF does not find it harder to impose strong conditions on a rich nation.

"No, it's not harder. No. Because it's the mission of the fund, and it's my job to say the truth, whoever it is across the table. And I tell you something: it's sometimes harder to tell the government of low-income countries, where people live on $3,000, $4,000 or $5,000 per capita per year, to actually strengthen the budget and reduce the deficit. Because I know what it means in terms of welfare programmes and support for the poor. It has much bigger ramifications."

Many children among dead as town of Houla in Homs province is attacked by Syrian forces, according to activists

At least 90 people, including many children, have been killed after Syrian forces shelled and attacked the town of Houla in Homs province, according to anti-government activists.

The death toll reported on Friday was one of the highest in one area of the country since an internationally brokered ceasefire came into effect last month.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the violence began when security forces opened fire on an opposition protest in Houla. Anti-government forces retaliated and the army began shelling the area, killing an estimated 90 people.

A spokesman for the United Nations' envoy to Syria told the Associated Press in an email on Saturday that international monitors were travelling to Houla "as we speak" to investigate.

The surge in violence came as Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general told the UN security council there had been some progress in reducing violence, but the overall situation remained very serious.

"There is a continuing crisis on the ground, characterised by regular violence, deteriorating humanitarian conditions, human rights violations and continued political confrontation," he reported to the security council in a letter.

Reports from activists and the government suggest that violence took places in dozens of areas involving helicopter gunships, tanks, artillery, roadside bombs and small arms.

Activist Ahmad Kassem told Reuters: "The soldiers are shelling Houla right now, the casualties are huge."

In his report to the security council, Ban wrote that the size and sophistication of some recent bomb attacks in Syria suggest that "established terrorist groups" may have been behind them and urged groups and countries not to supply weapons to either side in Syria.

Ban said the UN observers noted that "significant parts of some cities appear to be under the de facto control of opposition elements".

"There is an overall atmosphere of tension, mistrust and fear," Ban said. "The overall level of violence in the country remains quite high."

In other areas of Syria, activists said that a further 33 people were killed. The Syrian government news agency said that 17 people had been killed by anti-government gunmen. None of the figures could be independently verified.

Exclusive: Firm set for NHS contracts allegedly massaged data
• NHS watchdog inspection after whistleblower tip-offs
• Serco says concerns about service are without foundation

Cornish complaints raise questions over drive to outsource care
Care Quality Commission: the NHS watchdog
Cornwall out-of-hours case study: Eve Tonkin

A leading private health company, poised to win much of the new wave of NHS outsourcing contracts, is under investigation for allegedly providing an "unsafe" out-of-hours GP service, and over claims that it manipulated results where it failed to meet targets.

Serco, which runs a large range of outsourced services for the government and local authorities, was subject to an unannounced inspection by NHS watchdogs in Cornwall last month in response to whistleblowers who claim that it:

• allowed queues of up to 90 patients at a time to build up at its telephone helpline;

• met its targets, in part, by adjusting figures to blame delays on patients;

• rang at least one patient who had waited too long to see a doctor to give them a new waiting target instead;

• repeatedly took visiting doctors off roving duties in order to operate clinics and hotlines because it had too few staff on duty to cover the county.

Many of the concerns appear to be supported by evidence gathered in a Guardian investigation that has drawn on data from computer records, drivers' logs, internal correspondence and interviews with several sources connected with different parts of the Serco operation in Cornwall who have asked to remain anonymous.

Serco has also confirmed some of the allegations. But it denies that the service is unsafe and says it is acting within the terms of its contract with the local primary care trust, which allows it to adjust waiting time figures according to who was to blame and make "comfort calls" to patients who have waited a long time. It did not comment on the whistleblower reports of how many patients were left waiting to be assessed at its call centre.

The Guardian has learned that the health regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) made an unannounced inspection of the service in April, shortly after it took on responsibility for registering out-of-hours GP services under new rules. It was unclear until then who, if anyone, was able to monitor Serco's performance independently of the primary care trust (PCT) that commissioned it.

Both Serco and the Cornwall NHS PCT vigorously denied that patient safety was ever at risk. They said that the allegations are not new and that the claim that performance data have been manipulated has already been rejected by an independent audit for the PCT. They added that they have been advised that if the CQC had serious or urgent concerns for patients' safety they would have been raised immediately, and that they have not been raised.

The PCT remains confident that the service is adequately resourced and meeting national standards. Bridget Sampson, director of primary care for Cornwall, said: "We are disappointed that rumours still persist around the quality of service provided by Serco. Patient surveys show a high level of satisfaction with the service and an independent audit did not find any evidence of data being changed. The contract provides a value for money, high quality service for patients with equitable access to GP appointments out of hours."

However, critics of the service said they have been pressured to keep quiet and say Serco has launched an investigation of email traffic to see who has leaked information to the press. Serco said any monitoring of emails was within the law and was to protect patient confidentiality.

Dr Gareth Emrys-Jones, a retired BMA council member and former chair of the GP co-operative that used to run the out-of-hours service for Cornwall as a not-for-profit company, was one of several people who contacted the CQC.

"I have been approached by a significant number of people representing all classes of employees at Serco who felt unable to whistleblow directly but who perceived the service to be unsafe because of a lack of clinicians and inadequate cover for the needs of the patients of Cornwall," he said. "They have cited incidents where it appears that data has been altered in order to achieve compliance with quality standards that they knew had been missed. These related to an extended time period and were not one-off incidents. I was concerned for the staff and for the service because if the allegations are true it would have serious implications."

The CQC investigation comes as the NHS undergoes radical restructuring now that the government's controversial health and social care bill has been passed.

Under coalition policy, all 52 newly formed PCT clusters in England are required this year to identify at least three of their community services to put out to competitive tender in a process that will lead to a rapid increase in private sector involvement in the NHS. Serco, which generated revenue of £4.6bn in 2011, is likely to bid for many of the NHS contracts.

Serco first won the Cornwall contract in 2006 with a bid that valued it at approximately £6.1m a year over five years. It was awarded a further five-year contract last October, valued at £6.4m a year. The out-of-hours service had previously been run by a company set up by a co-operative of local GP practices for a cost of approximately £7.5m a year.

Staff allege that shifts for doctors and nurses have repeatedly been unfilled in the past few months, so that target times for visiting the sickest patients at home have been missed repeatedly.

They claim that staff shortages in the call centre — where patients' calls are first received and their urgency is assessed in a return call by a clinician as part of a "triage" stage – have resulted in long queues building up.

They also allege that clinicians have been pressed to downgrade the priority of calls when assessing them because there are not enough doctors available to make home visits. To deal with the queues, GPs allocated to home visits have repeatedly been pulled in from being out on the road to triage phone calls in the call centre instead.

On 28 January patients queuing for a triage phone call faced waits of up to four hours at some points, they say. Staff have alleged that on the Thursday before Easter more than 50 calls were waiting for triage for part of the evening.

On Good Friday, a long wait built up for out-of-hours clinic appointments and the only slot available for some patients meant a one and a half hour drive across the county, they said. On Easter Saturday they alleged staff shortages led to more than 90 calls building up in the queue for triage during the evening. Serco did not comment on the allegations about queue lengths.

Staff also said that the target times for patients to be seen by a clinician are repeatedly missed.

Once patients have been assessed, they are allocated a priority depending on how urgent their case is. They are then given either a clinic appointment if they are able to travel, or a home visit, in under one hour, two hours or six hours, according to their need.

On 14 February, they say, because shifts were unfilled, a clinician who had been assigned to home visits for the Penzance area had instead to cover for clinics in two areas for part of the night and for the home visits for two other additional areas while another clinician was called off the road to triage calls.

Several calls waiting for urgent home visits in under two hours missed their target that night. A distressed terminally ill cancer patient who had been warned on calling the service that no GP would be available for up to six hours had to wait for nearly seven hours to be seen. The GP who visited the patient's home allegedly said he was the only doctor available for home visits for the whole county west of Bodmin.

Correspondence seen by the Guardian suggested that another GP believed he was in a similar position on a different night last year. Further correspondence reveals that senior clinicians have repeatedly expressed concern to Serco management about staff shortages jeopardising the safety of the service.

Serco rejected any allegations that just one or two GPs were covering the whole of the county on any occasion. It said that the contract does not dictate how many GPs should be on the road.

"Serco employs a range of skills across Cornwall to meet patients' needs and the PCT's requirements. These include nurse practitioners, emergency care practitioners and GPs. It is typical to use a range of roles to provide out-of-hours services and there is no service requirement for Serco to supply all cars, clinics or the call centre solely with GPs."

Serco pointed out that a national benchmarking exercise looking at data from 104 PCTs found Serco's out-of-hours service to be one of the best performing in the country. (The exercise was conducted by the Primary Care Foundation, a business consultancy that counts Serco and the Department of Health among its clients and was based on data for the financial year 2010-2011 supplied by the services themselves.)

Sources also alleged that calls that are in danger of not meeting their targets have been retriaged to "start the clock" again. On 25 February a call logged at 9.34am, and triaged at 9:37am, was given a home visit time of "before" 3.37pm. When it became clear that the target time could not be met the call was retriaged with a call at 3.12pm, completed at 3.16pm. A new target time of 9.16pm was then allocated to the visit, it is alleged.

Sue Matthews, regional officer for the Royal College of Nursing in Cornwall, said: "I have expressed concerns to Serco management on a number of issues. Our members have reported waiting hours being extended by several hours, and that the current reporting system is being manipulated so that it does not reflect accurate activity or the time of visits or callback times."

Serco said it recognised the example the Guardian gave on 25 February and had reported the matter to the PCT after an internal audit, "indicating that the call had failed". The company stated that "calls back to patients are only made when Serco believes it may exceed the timeframes set by the Department of Health, and they are deemed 'comfort calls' rather than retriages and are made to assess if conditions have worsened or improved to ensure patient safety is not compromised."

Among the most serious allegations being investigated by the CQC are that Serco management altered logs tracking response times and targets. The PCT said that its audit found no evidence of this and showed that the systems used by Serco would not allow data to be altered after the fact.

Computer logs, seen by the Guardian, of data-tracking calls to the service and response times measured daily and weekly against targets, show one set of figures at the end of 12 February for the number of calls meeting or failing to meet targets in various priority categories on 11 and 12 February. But different figures for the same dates appear in the log as displayed on 15 February.

The effect of the altered figures is to remove some of the "red" failed targets and make them "green" achieved targets, and to alter the percentage of targets met in other categories.

Explaining the apparent discrepancy in figures, Serco said that it "audits all calls daily to understand areas in which issues are highlighted and where these may have fallen outside its control, including where a patient is deemed to have caused delay. Such cases are then reported to the PCT and changed accordingly on the internal management systems." This enables the company to give the PCT two reports, one with figures that include "cases where patients have caused delays" and one without. This promotes greater transparency and does not constitute the wrongful alteration of data, it said.

Among those who have reported the service to the CQC are Sarah Newton, Conservative MP for Truro and Falmouth and Andrew George, Lib Dem MP for St Ives. "The out-of-hours service provides GP services for two-thirds of the full week," said George. "People don't just fall ill during surgery opening hours. There has been a pattern of complaints and concerns that have come to me particularly over the last year that give rise to question over the safety of the service alongside other information that suggests the service is being run on the very margins of what is clinically safe.

"I have contacted the PCT and Serco but the concerns have continued, which is why I have blown the whistle to the CQC to get the issues properly investigated." Newton said she contacted the CQC after receiving concerning reports from her constituents.

Serco rejected any suggestion that clinicians were under pressure to downgrade calls and said that it met all required standards. "All staff have been trained to prioritise cases individually and as per the clinical judgment of the clinician. In addition, Serco uses decision-support software to ensure consistency of triage and prioritisation.

"Serco has consistently achieved the target times for home visits. For January 2012 Serco reported that 97.5% of patients were seen face to face by a clinician within the Department of Health timeframes. For 11 Febrary, 88.37% of patients were seen face to face by a clinician within the timeframes. On 14 Febrary, there were four GPs covering west Cornwall until midnight.

"The area was also fully staffed after this time until 8am the following day. The contract requirement is for the service to be able to respond to patients' needs within set timeframes and does not dictate car allocations across the county."

• Have you been affected by changes to out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall? Contact felicity.lawrence@guardian.co.uk to share your experiences

• Are NHS services where you live being put out to tender? Help us build a picture of what's happening to the health service by filling out this form

Blind activist's brother Chen Guangfu disappears after leaving village to seek help for son facing murder charge

The brother of the blind activist Chen Guangcheng has gone missing after fleeing his village in north-eastern China to seek help for his son who is facing an attempted murder charge.

Chen Guangfu, the eldest brother of Chen Guangcheng, disappeared two days after he arrived in Beijing to support his son, Chen Kegui, who has been detained in a case that has become a rallying point among rights activists.

The Shandong-based lawyer Liu Weiguo said Chen Guangfu, a 55-year-old farmer and labourer, did not return to his hotel room in Beijing on Friday night.

Zhao Wei, a Shandong supporter of Chen Guangcheng's family, was the last person to have contact with Chen Guangfu before they parted ways on Friday afternoon, Liu told the Reuters news agency.

"As of now, there's still no news on Brother Guangfu," Liu said. "We're not optimistic. Guangcheng is also very worried. He's contacting friends to look [for him]."

Chen Guangfu appears to have become the latest target of Beijing's reprisals against Chen Guangcheng's family in the wake of the activist's escape from his village in late April after 19 months of detention at home.

Last week Chen Guangfu said he had been chained to a chair and beaten for three days to make him reveal how his sibling had escaped from house arrest in the Shandong countryside.

His son, 32, was accused of attempted murder after using knives to fend off local officials who burst into his home on April 27, the day after they discovered his blind uncle had escaped. He could face the death penalty. A team of independent lawyers who have offered to represent the defendant were dismissed by the authorities and told not to speak about the case.

Chen Guangcheng took refuge in the US embassy, where he stayed for six days and sparked a diplomatic crisis between China and the US. That crisis, which overshadowed a visit by the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was finally defused last Saturday when China allowed him to fly to the US to study.

Michael Posner, the US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour, said on Thursday that Washington was closely monitoring Chen's family in China.

An 18-year-old gunman has killed one person and wounded eight others in what appeared to be a random shooting

An 18-year-old gunman killed one person and wounded eight others in what appeared to be a random shooting in a southern Finnish town, police said Saturday.

Officers arrested the suspect outside Hyvinkaa, some five hours after he fired several shots at people from a low rooftop just before 2am (2300 GMT Friday), said Detective Chief Inspector Markku Tuominen.

The suspect, a local man from Hyvinkaa, 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of the capital, Helsinki, did not resist arrest, Tuominen said.

"The man was found with two weapons ... including a hunting rifle," Tuominen said, adding that police knew of no possible motive pending an investigation.

The gunman killed an 18-year-old woman and critically wounded two people, including a 23-year-old police officer who arrived at the scene soon after Hyvinkaa police received an alert.

Shootings are not uncommon in Finland where there are 650,000 officially recognised gun owners in a population of 5.4 million people, with strong hunting traditions. In recent years, Finland has also seen two deadly school shootings.

In 2008, a culinary student killed nine fellow students and a teacher before shooting himself at a vocational school in the western town of Kauhajoki. A year earlier, an 18-year-old killed six fellow students, a nurse and the principal at a high school in Tuusula, southern Finland.

After those attacks, authorities took steps to improve safety at schools, including installing surveillance cameras and locks on classroom doors and training staff to deal with shootings.

Two months ago, a 23-year-old gunman wounded the father of his former girlfriend in an office building before firing several shots through a classroom door in southern Finland. No one was hurt at the junior high school, and the attacker quickly surrendered.

Institute for Science and International Security says uranium output up by a third but needs more refining for use in bombs

Iran has significantly increased its output of low-enriched uranium and if it was further refined could make at at least five nuclear weapons, according to a US thinktank.

The Institute for Science and International Security, which tracks Iran's nuclear programme, made the analysis on the basis of data in the latest quarterly report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The UN watchdog's report, published on Friday, showed Iran pressing ahead with its uranium enrichment work in defiance of UN resolutions calling on it to suspend the activity.

It said Iran had produced almost 6.2 tonnes of uranium enriched to a level of 3.5% since it began the work in 2007 – some of which has subsequently been further processed into higher-grade material.

This equates to nearly 750 kg more than in the previous IAEA report issued in February, and the thinktank said Iran's monthly production had risen by roughly a third.

"This total amount of 3.5% low enriched uranium hexafluoride, if further enriched to weapon grade, is enough to make over five nuclear weapons," its analysis said.

But the thinktank added that some of Iran's higher-grade uranium had been converted into reactor fuel and would not be available for nuclear weapons, at least not quickly.

Enriched uranium can be used to fuel power plants, which is Iran's stated purpose, or to provide material for bombs, if refined to a much higher degree. The west suspects that may be Iran's ultimate goal despite the Islamic Republic's denials.

Iran began enriching uranium to a fissile concentration of 20% in 2010, saying it needed this to fuel a medical research reactor. It later expanded the work sharply by launching enrichment at an underground site, Fordow.

It alarmed a suspicious west since such enhanced enrichment accomplishes much of the technical leap towards 90% – or weapons-grade – uranium.

The IAEA report said Iran had added another 350 enrichment centrifuges to the existing 700 at Fordow, which is buried deep under rock and soil to protect it against any enemy attacks.

Although not yet being fed with uranium, the new machines could be used to further boost Iran's output of uranium enriched to 20%.

The Institute for Science and International Security said Iran still appeared to be experiencing problems in its testing of production-scale units of more advanced centrifuges that would allow it to refine uranium faster, even though it had made some progress.

Exclusive: Abdurrahim el-Keib says Abdullah al-Senussi, who has fled Libya, was 'directly or indirectly involved' in 1984 murder

Libya's interim prime minister says on Friday his country's former intelligence chief was "directly or indirectly involved" in the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher and knew the identity of her killer.

In an interview with the Guardian, Abdurrahim el-Keib said that Abdullah al-Senussi – who fled Libya last year and escaped to Mauritania – was the key to solving Fletcher's murder nearly 30 years ago. "He's the black box," Keib said.

"I guarantee he was almost directly or indirectly involved in most if not all of the crimes [of the former regime]. That doesn't mean others weren't involved. But he definitely knows who they were."

Senussi is wanted by the international criminal court for crimes against humanity in Libya. In addition, France wants to try him in connection with the 1989 bombing of an airline over Niger in which 170 people died. Britain is also interested in talking to him about the Lockerbie bombing, in which Senussi is suspected of involvement.

Keib said he was convinced Senussi could name the person who shot Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984. He laid a wreath on Friday at the spot in St James's Square, bowing his head. "This is a crime we have all been affected by," he said. "Yvonne Fletcher was doing her duty as a policewoman, trying to protect both sides."

Libya's leader met David Cameron on Thursday. He told him several of his friends had been demonstrating that day in 1984 and pledged to work closely with Britain to achieve justice. A team of detectives from the Metropolitan police will fly to Libya to continue its inquiry into Fletcher's murder. Asked whether her killer was most probably still alive and in Libya, Keib said: "I leave this to the investigation."

He urged Downing Street to help Libya extricate Senussi from Mauritania, where he fled last year. Senussi is Muammar Gaddafi's brother-in-law. He is accused of numerous crimes including a massacre in Tripoli's notorious Abu Salim prison, which left around 1,200 inmates dead.

He appeared this week at a secret court hearing in Mauritania, charged with entering the country illegally, and is being held in a villa in the capital, Nouakchott. Keib promised Senussi his day in court": "This person needs to be tried in Libya soon so we can close the books on many of the crimes committed by the past regime."

The Libyan prime minister shrugged off reports that Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam had been mistreated in custody, and said he would be tried in open court according to international standards. Saif's trial would take place in Libya, he said: "I met with him. I made sure he was well-treated." Asked whether Saif was likely to be executed, if found guilty, he said: "Our intention is not to kill people, you know. Our intention is to bring this issue to closure and move forward."

Keib said he was optimistic about Libya's future. He said elections to create a new national assembly due on 19 June might be postponed by a week or two but would definitely take place over the summer. "The Libyan people did it [the overthrow of Gaddafi] against all odds. We will surprise the world again by going through the election peacefully," he predicted.

He conceded that former regime elements, operating from both inside and outside Libya, were actively trying, as he put it, to destabilise the situation. "They are plotting against the Libyan people. They want to take us back to the Dark Ages," he said. Asked why Gaddafi loyalists would want to cause trouble, since their leader was dead, he replied: "They are in a state of denial."

Keib refused to be drawn on what role he might play in any future government. "I would serve Libya even as a garbage collector, if that helps Libya," he said. Libya's interim ruling body, the National Transitional Council will hand over to the new national assembly, whose chief task will be to draw up a constitution.

Since the fall of Tripoli last summer, the NTC has struggled to assert its authority. Human rights abuses have continued, with bloody clashes between rival militias. There is also a growing divide between Libya's regions, with some towns such as Misrata becoming virtual city-states. There are also serious divisions between different ministries in Tripoli.

Keib, however, rejected the claim that Libya was hurtling towards disaster and becoming inexorably Balkanised. He said the new constitution might result in a federal Libya; another option was a system of provinces and municipalities. Secessionism wasn't just a Libyan problem, he said, adding: "There are a group of people in Texas who want to separate."

In addition, Keib said it was wrong to suggest that Gaddafi's overthrow last year was exclusively the result of western-engineered regime change – as Moscow claims. "It's unfair to say that Nato liberated Libya. It takes away from the energy, lives, determination and tremendous effort that the Libyan people have done."

Speaking earlier at Chatham House, Keib – a professor of electrical engineering who became interim prime minister last October – described Britain as a beautiful country. He said he first visited London as a child in 1965, when he went to a summer school to learn English and lived in Adelaide Road, Swiss Cottage.

Keib said he was keen that young men and women from Libya studied at British universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. Asked about the London School of Economics, which unwisely accepted £1.5m from Saif al-Islam, he joked: "LSE even better."

Leveson inquiry releases original draft from culture secretary to David Cameron regarding Murdoch's bid for broadcaster

Jeremy Hunt's position was further weakened when the Leveson inquiry published the original draft of the culture secretary's memo to David Cameron about the Murdochs' takeover bid for BSkyB.

The draft, sent on his private Gmail account to his aide Adam Smith on the afternoon of 19 November, goes much further in explicitly backing the bid than the final, more sanitised draft.

Hunt demands of the bid: "Why are we trying to stop it?" and claims that if ministers do not back the bid, they could end in the wrong place "politically". Both phrases were removed from the later draft, about which Smith emailed: "Much happier with this version!"

Hunt also goes into considerable detail in the original draft showing that he has already rejected the arguments of the bid's opponents. He writes: "Those poeple [sic] who are arguing that the Murd-ochs will have too much influence are in my view confusing the revenues which Sky gets (around £8bn) which are much higher than – say – the BBC's £4bn, with the influence Sky has editorially which is much less because a) mpst [sic] of the channels watched on Sky belong to other people over which it exerts no editorial control; and b) where it does (eg Sky News) it has less than 5% market share."

Hunt writes in terms that suggest he saw the legal process begun by the then business secretary, Vince Cable, as somewhat cosmetic. He says: "Much of what we do will be constrained by the absolute necessity to respect due process at every stage, but I think you, I Vince and the DPM should meet to discuss our response to potential different scenarios. May I arrange such a meeting?"

His observations about due process were changed in the final draft to sound more neutral. The final version read instead: "It would be totally wrong for the government to get involved in a competition issue which has to be decided at arms length." The final version also added a new sentence that sounded more statesmanlike: "We must be very careful that any attempt to block it is done on genuine plurality grounds and not as a result of lobbying by competitors."

Downing Street has sought to argue that Hunt was doing no more in his private memo to the prime minster than he had already said in public. But this evidence of his real thinking may make that position increasingly hard to sustain.

The latest email disclosure comes after news that No 10 tried to rewrite the resignation statement of Smith, Hunt's former special adviser, using language that would have implied that the 30-year-old official had strayed beyond his remit in communicating with News Corporation about its BSkyB takeover bid.

Smith told the Leveson inquiry that he had objected to a last-minute rewrite to his resignation letter, which had been proposed by the office of the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood. He successfully insisted that it be removed.

He also revealed that he had initially been told by Hunt that "it won't come" to his resignation on 24 April, immediately after it emerged in evidence to Leveson that he had been in regular contact with the News Corp lobbyist Frédéric Michel during the company's bid for BSkyB between June 2010 and July 2011.

The following day he arrived at work only to be told by the culture secretary that "everybody here thinks you need to go". Smith, who had previously been praised for his work, was handed a draft resignation letter to sign. Colleagues of the prime minister's most senior civil servant then requested that the first line in the proposed letter be amended to read: "While I believed it was my role to keep News Corporation informed … " The initial draft had adopted a more neutral tone, and read: "While it was part of my role to keep News Corporation informed … " Smith said that after he objected to the change – because "the department had known that that's what my role had been" – the original version was reinstated. He added that he had offered to resign because "I thought by this stage that the perception had been created that something untoward had gone on".

He told the inquiry the extent of his contact with Michel could not have come as a surprise to anyone in the DCMS. Smith, who sent 257 text messages to Michel during the BSkyB bid, said senior figures in the department, including Hunt, were all "generally aware" of his activities.

Asked by Robert Jay QC, counsel to the inquiry, if he had mentioned Michel's name in his discussions with Hunt, Smith said: "I believe so … I mean, I would have mentioned it … I suppose I would say they generally knew I was in touch. On some certain issues they certainly knew."

In his witness statement, Smith said: "I believe that Mr Hunt [and others] were all generally aware of my activities from a combination of … the discussions at our meetings and more informal contact." He added that he had "received no specific instructions as to whether or not there were any limits to the types of information which I could provide".

Questioned by Jay, Smith repeatedly disputed Michel's interpretation of comments he made in texts and emails to the lobbyist. In his witness statement he said: "I did not recognise a lot of what was being said about me as being accurate."

At one point Jay asked him whether he agreed with Michel's comment to the inquiry that he believed the special adviser was speaking for Hunt during their conversations. "Not on detailed issue points, no … more as a buffer," he replied.

Asked whether he and Michel had become inappropriately close, Smith said: "I think the tone of some of the language I may have used in some of the texts in hindsight was a bit too flippant and loose certainly but I don't think the substance of what we've been through was inappropriate."

However, Jonathan Stephens, the most senior civil servant at the DCMS, told the Leveson inquiry yesterday afternoon that he was shocked by the extent and tone of the communication between Smith and Michel. "The extent, the number, the nature of these contacts was in my judgment clearly inappropriate and not just in one or two disputed cases," the DCMS permanent secretary said.

On Thursday, when Michel appeared at the inquiry, it emerged that there was evidence of 191 telephone calls, 158 emails and 799 text messages between the News Corp lobbyist and the DCMS, of which 90% were with Smith.

Stephens added that Smith "was drawn into almost what seems to be a web of manipulation and exaggeration and was inadvertently drawn beyond what he intended to do or wanted to do".

Metropolitan police detectives investigating alleged inappropriate payments to public officials by journalists made their 30th arrest, a 37-year-old woman employed by News International.

Fears of weeks of tension as results point to a run-off between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and a former general

Egypt looks set for weeks of tension and uncertainty after the first round of its landmark presidential election produced a runoff between the candidate backed by the powerful Muslim Brotherhood and a former general who is seen as a hangover from the regime of the deposed Hosni Mubarak.

In what many described as a "nightmare scenario" that will mean a polarised and possibly violent second round, Mohammed Morsi of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party polled around 26% in the two-day first round. Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's last prime minister, came second with 23% when 90% of the votes had been counted.

Amr Moussa, the former head of the Arab League, who tried to capture the centre ground, was knocked out. Late on Friday there was only a slight chance that the final picture would change when votes for Cairo and Giza were in.

Turnout was said to be around 40% of the 51m-strong electorate. Official results are yet to be published but a combination of exit polls, centrally collected data and reporting by the candidates appeared to confirm a dramatic runoff that many supporters of the revolution consider a catastrophic outcome. "It feels as if the revolution never took place," lamented a despondent George Ishaq, a founder of the leftwing Kifaya Party.

"The Brotherhood are despotic and fanatical and Shafiq is the choice of Mubarak. It is a very bad result. The revolution is not part of this contest."

Analysts predict a bare-knuckle race over the next three weeks with the Brotherhood mobilising its well-oiled machine to get the vote out for Morsi while the army and police are likely to support Shafiq – despite their official neutrality. On Friday the Brotherhood quickly launched an attack on Shafiq as a "fuloul" (remnant) of the old regime who was "climbing to power over the corpses of the martyrs of the revolution".

Shafiq told his supporters: "To the generous people of Egypt, justice is the rule of law."

Hisham Kassem, a publisher who had backed Moussa, said: "It's a disaster. Shafiq will try to restore the Mubarak regime. And my trust of the Brotherhood is minus zero."

Other liberals retreated into black humour. "All it takes now is for Mubarak to be released and be made vice president," one tweeted. "This is not the second republic," said another, "it's a stillborn deformity".

Zeinobia, a prominent blogger, compared the outcome to the humiliating defeat of Egypt and the other Arab states by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. In an already tense atmosphere, there could well be serious unrest if, as some predict, Mubarak is acquitted on charges of corruption and illegal killings next month.

Assessments are divided over the likely final outcome on 16 and 17 June. Egypt's Coptic Christians will rally round Shafiq because of their visceral dislike of Islamists. Supporters of Moussa will do the same. Morsi can expect to get the votes of some who backed Hamdeen Sabbahi, the independent Nasserist candidate. But not all: "How many showers do you need to wash away a vote for the Brotherhood?" asked one progressive who refuses to back Shafiq at any price.

Hani Shukrallah, the veteran Al-Ahram journalist, called for unity. "Instead of debating the prospect of supporting one repulsive candidate or another," he wrote, "let's begin the task of putting revolutionary house in order." Morsi will also get the support of many of those who voted for Abdel-Moneim Abul Fotouh, a Brotherhood renegade and independent Islamist who, along with Moussa, had been a front-runner in recent polls. But large-scale abstentions are also likely.

"If you put the figures together it looks like Shafiq will win," said Kassem. But other analysts warned that it is always a mistake to under-estimate the Brotherhood as some did after apparent signs in recent weeks that Morsi's star was waning.

The Brotherhood already dominates Egypt's parliament, where its MPs have performed badly. It also stands accused of trying to pack the body writing a new constitution and reneging on a pledge not to compete for the presidency.

Morsi has promised a "renaissance" that will curb Mubarak-era corruption and improve the country's dilapidated infrastructure but also introduce a greater degree of rule by Islamic law. After suffering decades of repression and playing cat and mouse with the Egyptian government, the world's oldest Islamist movement senses its hour has come.

"I think we are on the verge of a new era," said the Brotherhood's Essam el-Erian. "We trusted God, we trusted in the people, we trusted in our party." Its success is part of a regional trend that has seen Islamist parties thrive as autocratic regimes, in Tunisia and Libya as well as Egypt, have fallen in the Arab spring.

Israel fears that Islamist rule in Egypt could threaten the 1979 peace treaty, which is the linchpin of US policy in the Middle East. Morsi advocates a "review" but will not scrap it. Shafiq has vowed to uphold it. Shafiq's strong performance reflected widespread worries about crime and insecurity and a yearning for stability, improvements to the economy and public services.

"Polarisation is the main characteristic of Egyptian society," said a former Liberal MP. "Shafiq did much better than Moussa because all his discourse centred on security whereas Moussa talked about economic development. But the first concern is law and order."

Climate crisis is not caused by lack of options and solutions, but lack of political action, says Greenpeace spokeswoman

The latest round of international climate change talks finished on Friday in discord and disappointment, with some participants concerned that important progress made last year was being unpicked.

At the talks, countries were supposed to set out a workplan on negotiations that should result in a new global climate treaty, to be drafted by the end of 2015 and to come into force in 2020. But participants told the Guardian they were downbeat, disappointed and frustrated that the decision to work on a new treaty – reached after marathon late-running talks last December in Durban – was being questioned.

China and India, both rapidly growing economies with an increasing share of global emissions, have tried to delay talks on such a treaty. Instead of a workplan for the next three years to achieve the objective of a new pact, governments have only managed to draw up a partial agenda. "It's incredibly frustrating to have achieved so little," said one developed country participant. "We're stepping backwards, not forwards."

Connie Hedegaard, the EU climate chief, said: "The world cannot afford that a few want to backtrack from what was agreed in Durban only five months ago. Durban was – and is – a delicately balanced package where all elements must be delivered at the same pace. It is not a pick and choose menu. It is very worrisome that attempts to backtrack have been so obvious and time-consuming in the Bonn talks over the last two weeks."

There was also little progress on the key issue of the financing by rich countries of actions in the developing world. Meeting in Bonn, negotiators and officials from around the world haggled over the set-up of a 'Green Climate Fund' that would channel cash from the developed world to poorer countries, to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the effects of climate change.

However, they agreed much of the detail that will be needed to extend the Kyoto protocol – currently the world's only legally binding treaty on emissions cuts – beyond 2012 when its current provisions expire. That extension should be finalised at a conference in Doha, Qatar, this November – but may not be if the EU does not see sufficient progress in negotiations on the proposed new post-2020 treaty.

Chrisiana Figueres, the top climate change official at the United Nations, who presided over the two weeks of talks, said: "Work at this session has been productive. Countries can now press on to ensure elements are in place to adopt the Doha amendment to the Kyoto protocol. I am pleased to say that the Bonn meeting produced more clarity on the protocols's technical and legal details and options to enable a smooth transition between the two commitment periods of the protocol."

However, the only major developed countries that have agreed to continue the Kyoto protocol are those of the European Union. Canada and Japan have dropped out, and the US never ratified the 1997 accord.

The fortnight-long talks in Bonn followed an unexpected last-ditch agreement in December at a meeting in Durban, when countries resolved to spend the next three to four years thrashing out the terms of a new global treaty on climate change and emissions cuts, which would come into force from 2020. Such a treaty would follow on from the Kyoto protocol and from the Copenhagen pledges made at a 2009 summit, in which both developed and developing countries agreed for the first time jointly to curb emissions by 2020. Those pledges do not have the legal force of a full treaty, however, and have been shown in a variety of studies to be inadequate to stave off dangerous levels of climate change.

One of the main tasks for the fortnight-long meeting in Bonn was to flesh out a programme of work towards a new post-2020 treaty. That has been partially achieved, but participants said more needed to be done to draft a clear negotiating timetable. The last major international treaty on the climate that had full legal force - the Kyoto protocol - took five years to negotiate, so the current round of talks will be on a tight deadline if they are to finish in a fully drafted agreement by the end of 2015, as planned.

Countries also discussed at Bonn whether they should try to cut emissions faster than currently planned within the next eight years. That question will be discussed further in the November talks. Green groups were pleased that the possibility of strengthening the 2020 targets was still on the table. However, some participants worried that it could prove a distraction to the difficult task of crafting a whole new post-2020 treaty by 2015.

Celine Charveriat, advocacy and campaigns director at Oxfam, said: "No progress was made to deliver the financial support that the world's poorest and most vulnerable need to deal with the growing impacts of climate change. It is now vital that, at the next UN climate summit in Qatar in November, rich countries commit to an initial US$10-15bn to the Green Climate Fund between 2013 and 2015, as part of a broader financial package.

"At a time when ambitious emission reductions are more urgent than ever, developed countries in Bonn made no progress to close the gap between current climate targets and what is required to avoid the worst of climate change. Developed countries must improve on their current low level of ambition and accept higher reduction targets no later than at the Qatar summit."

Tove Maria Ryding, coordinator for climate policy at Greenpeace International, said: "Here in Bonn we've clearly seen that the climate crisis is not caused by lack of options and solutions, but lack of political action. It's absurd to watch governments sit and point fingers and fight like little kids while the scientists explain about the terrifying impacts of climate change and the fact that we have all the technology we need to solve the problem while creating new green jobs."

Yes Scotland needs two years before expected referendum to win over majority of Scots, says first minister at campaign launch

Alex Salmond has predicted that a million Scots will be signed up to join a popular mass movement that will eventually win independence for Scotland, as he launched a formal campaign to leave the UK.

The first minister was the first to sign the new "yes declaration", an open-ended pledge to make Scotland a "greener, fairer and more prosperous" independent nation, which won backing from actors such as Brian Cox and Alan Cumming, and a scattering of left-of-centre political figures such as the Scottish Green leader Patrick Harvie.

Salmond acknowledged that the new Yes Scotland movement – touted as the largest community-based campaign in the UK's political history – needed the two and a half years before the expected referendum in autumn 2014 to persuade a majority of Scots to support independence.

Only a few hours before the campaign was launched at a cinema multiplex in Edinburgh, the former chancellor Alistair Darling released a YouGov poll putting popular backing for leaving the UK at only 33%, with only 57% support among Scottish National party voters at last year's Holyrood elections.

With four million registered voters in Scotland, signing up a million people to the declaration would cover most of those already thought to support separation but would not hit the level needed for the "yes" campaign to win.

Salmond said the next two years were needed to give "form and substance" to the desire for independence. It would be a "brick by brick" campaign.

"We're at the start of something very, very special: the beginning of a campaign to restore nationhood to the nation of Scotland. Our opponents are rich and their powerful and therefore to win and to win well, we're going to have to galvanise the whole community of the realm of Scotland," he said.

"By the time we enter the referendum campaign in autumn 2014, our intention is to have one million Scots who have signed the independence for Scotland declaration. Friends, if we achieve that, then we shall win an independent Scotland."

The campaign is expected to be very heavily based around exploiting digital media, focusing on the online "yes declaration", alongside a significant street and workplace-based campaign by individual SNP activists targeting family members, friends and colleagues to generate the support needed to win a majority at the referendum.

It emerged after the event that this campaign is still at a very early stage and has no significant organisational structure: although offices are being rented in central Edinburgh, it has no full-time, paid staff, campaign director or board of management. It is also unlikely to present any firm policies, to avoid internal disputes over joining Nato, retaining the monarchy or relying heavily on North Sea oil.

Despite the SNP being given nearly £2m in donations from a bequest by Edwin Morgan, the former national poet, and Colin and Chris Weir, who gave £1m after winning a £65m Euromillions jackpot, the campaign's two main organisers are SNP staff seconded temporarily to arrange Friday's launch.

Although the SNP and Salmond's nationalist government have won public and political endorsements from senior and wealthy business figures in Scotland, including the Stagecoach owner, Sir Brian Souter, and the multimillionaire and entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter, the launch focused on proving its centre-left credentials in order to attract Labour, republicans and Green party supporters.

Salmond was joined on stage by Harvie, who earlier this week suggested he was still deeply sceptical about the campaign; Colin Fox, republican leader of the Scottish Socialist party; Ravenscraig union leader and community activist Tommy Brennan; and Dennis Canavan, the former but dissident Labour MP for Falkirk West.

With most of the campaign's public backers known supporters of independence – such as Liz Lochhead, Scotland's national poet – the most striking new endorsements came from the former RBS chairman Sir George Mathewson, and Blair Jenkins, a former head of news and current affairs at BBC Scotland. A Scottish government adviser on broadcasting, Jenkins gave the campaign unpaid advice before its launch. Mathewson is a long-term friend and adviser to Salmond.

The most notable absence was Sir Sean Connery. Despite being the most famous supporter of independence, born only a few hundred metres from the Cineworld multiplex used for the launch, there was no video presentation or personal appearance from the actor. His brief contribution was read out by fellow actor Martin Compton.

Cox, the New York-based Emmy-winning actor, who was born in Dundee, described himself as a "democratic socialist" who had become profoundly disillusioned with New Labour and Tony Blair. He provided the voiceover for a Labour party broadcast in the 2007 general election.

Giving the longest speech of any of the participants, in which he admitted that he once saw nationalism as archaic and bogus, Cox said he now believed wholeheartedly that independence was the best solution for Scotland.

"I think Scotland has earned the right to its own nation status," he told an audience of about 500 campaign supporters, including senior ministers from Scottish government, and the media. "It has earned the right to determine its own destiny."

However, despite signing the declaration, Cox told the Guardian that he was unlikely to move back to Scotland for the referendum, preventing him from voting in it. He said his wife and family were happy and firmly rooted at their home in the US.

Cumming, another Holywood star who joined Salmond at the launch, is said to be planning a move back to Scotland to vote at the referendum. He said independence was the natural next step after devolution of power to Holyrood.

"Since devolution Scotland has blossomed not just as a cultural force on the world's stage but in terms of the confidence and pride the Scottish people have come to enjoy," he said. "Independence can only add to our potential and release a new wave of creativity and ambition."

Labour said the campaign lacked any detail or substance. Darling, who has emerged as the co-ordinator of an umbrella "no" campaign backed chiefly by Labour, the Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats, said: "The real problem that the nationalists have got is that their momentum has stalled and we can see from the poll that only one person in three has actually bought their message."

The Olympics, Euro 2012 and the diamond jubilee are expected to produce a big caseload, many of them drunk, for hospitals

Drunken revellers will be treated in "booze buses" and field hospitals and have injuries stitched up at the roadside under NHS plans to cope with a surge of alcohol-related problems during a summer of major events.

One central London hospital is being put on "semi internal major incident" alert from Monday ready for the Queen's diamond jubilee celebrations next weekend, adopting a protocol usually only seen on New Year's Eve.

Doctors, ambulance services and the police are finalising measures to keep those who have been binge drinking during the jubilee celebrations, Euro 2012 and the Olympics out of A&E to ensure hospitals do not become overwhelmed.

Extra staff will be deployed, in emergency departments and in mobile units near events and gatherings. There is particular concern about the extra pressure on services caused by the four-day jubilee bank holiday weekend and England's three football matches at Euro 2012 which start a few days later.

London will bear the brunt of increased demand because of the high number of celebrations taking place there. St Thomas's hospital opposite the Houses of Parliament, whose proximity to the West End means it deals with the largest number of intoxicated patients in the capital, will next week go into "semi internal major incident mode" in preparation for the jubilee weekend. It will take steps that are usually only necessary on New Year's Eve, when it treats large numbers of drunks who have attended celebrations beside the Thames.

"We increase our staffing levels in A&E, have more nurses working on the wards, and clear our emergency admission beds in preparation," said Dr Beth Christian, an A&E consultant at St Thomas's. "Sometimes we open up outpatients and put mattresses down on the floor." In addition, beds in admission wards will be cleared the day before major events to be available for drunk patients, she added.

University College Hospital, also in central London, will also increase the number of doctors and nurses and levels of drugs and other supplies.

In Portsmouth, paramedics will hand out flip-flops to intoxicated young women who can no longer walk safely on their high heels, in line with their regular weekend practice. The city will also use the treatment unit run on Friday and Saturday nights by the Project Safe Space multi-agency hub. Its staff, police and ambulance crews deal with minor injuries and the suturing of wounds, and provide five mattresses for people to lie down and sober up safely.

Tim Churchill, demand manager at South Central Ambulance Service which covers the city, said the centre helps reduce the demand on A&E and ambulance services. "Over the summer, because of the events, and particularly if the weather is good, we will be increasing service provision," he said.

Dr Mike Clancy, president of the College of Emergency Medicine, which represents A&E doctors, said big events would put "added pressure" on NHS emergency services which are already facing rising demand.

"The resilience of the system is being tested on a daily basis," he said. "The events this summer are added pressure because there will be more people in the country and there will be increased numbers of alcohol cases for departments to deal with. Initiatives that safely care for patients suffering from uncomplicated mild intoxication in settings other than the emergency department are helpful."

In June, the Sunderland Teaching Primary Care Trust, together with the police and ambulance service, is setting up its first mobile unit with medical and other support services on board to help people injured or harmed through alcohol.

In the East Midlands, the ambulance service will provide medical support for the extra events being put on to celebrate the Olympics. First-response vehicles with paramedics on board – who can stitch people's injuries at the roadside – will operate in Derby and Leicester for the jubilee weekend and for weekends during the Olympics.

Some hospitals, including the Royal Liverpool Hospital, are increasing the numbers of frontline staff on duty next weekend and during Euro 2012.

Brian Hayes, a senior paramedic with the London Ambulance Service, said he was particularly worried about Euro 2012, especially as the late afternoon and evening kick-off times for England's games in Ukraine and Poland would make it easier for fans to drink while watching them.

The London service will deploy its "booze bus", a customised ambulance that collects up to five drunks at a time and takes them to a recovery centre in Soho where they can sleep on camp beds while being monitored by paramedics. It has operated over the last two Christmases; in February, it began opening on Friday and Saturday nights. It treated 259 people over eight weekends between February and April.

The service is "cost effective" because it keeps people away from busy A&E departments and ambulances, said Hayes. London's ambulances dealt with 66,254 alcohol-related incidents in 2011-12; each callout cost £225.

Alcohol misuse costs the NHS millions of pounds each year. A recent audit by St Thomas's estimated that for the 12 months from late 2010 it dealt with 5,500 alcohol related A&E attendances that cost the NHS between £3m and £4.3m.

Dr Christian said this figure "is the tip of the iceberg" because there is massive under reporting. She said the emergency admission ward was "not set up to be a drunk tank", but 10 of their emergency beds are often occupied by people who are drunk.

"This is a very costly way to manage patients," she said. "An additional 30-40 patients for an A&E night shift can mean a department that is coping becomes a department that is overwhelmed. They are often very disruptive patients. The NHS can't afford a £1,000 for every big night," she said.

The four-hour waiting target in A&E, she added, means "we don't have the luxury of observing patients, so some patients risk being over investigated".

The head of HSBC's UK banking business said the fairest way was to charge for transactions – but this was also the most unpopular

The head of HSBC's UK banking business has called for a debate about how to pay for current accounts following the call by top banking regulator Andrew Bailey to end "free" banking.

Joe Garner, who runs HSBC's high street banking operations in Britain, said the fairest way was to charge for transactions – but this was also the most unpopular. "The cost of operating an account for someone who comes into the branch every few days compared with someone who logs on from time to time is radically different. If there was a monthly charge there is still a cross-subsidy," said Garner.

"The only truly fair way of charging for banking will be transaction-based pricing, ie you pay for exactly what you do," he added. "But customers tell us this is the most unpopular way for paying for the banking. The most popular model is the current one – but that doesn't mean it's the right one."

Bailey's call for "intervention in the public interest" over free banking, which he suspects could encourage mis-selling because of the "unclear picture" over the price of financial products, has attracted attention as he is acting head of the body that is to become the prudential regulation authority. It will be set up in the Bank of England to oversee the industry.

Speaking on the fringes of HSBC's annual meeting, Garner said he could not give "an open commitment on the pricing of any product" when asked if the bank – one of the first to introduce free banking in the 1980s – was committed to maintaining it, but said there needed to be "thoughtful discussion". He made it clear that there were no plans for any changes. Asked the same question, chairman Douglas Flint said the bank was "committed to being competitive".

Flint, who at times had to deflect criticism of board members, the bank's sales practices and pay policies, said banks needed to help facilitate economic recovery. "What is even more critical is that the financial sector does not endanger any recovery through another crisis of its own making," he said.

One private investor, Michael Mason-Mahon, intervened persistently, at one point questioning the integrity of the board – including Flint himself, prompting the senior independent director, Sir Simon Robertson, to intervene to defend him as a "man of the highest integrity". There was applause as Flint was re-elected with a vote of more than 97%.

Chief executive Stuart Gulliver ruled out major acquisitions of the type that the bank has been associated with in the past. He said he expected the eurozone to "hold together" but raised the prospect of a form of "euro Tarp" – the bail-out system used in the US during the 2008 banking crisis – as well as an insurance scheme for savings across Europe.

Dave Uren, from the union Unite, urged the board to listen to representations from workers who, he said, had alerted the bank to the potential payment protection insurance mis-selling scandal, which has so far cost HBSC £800m in provisions.

Shareholder power

HSBC chairman Douglas Flint has said he would consider sounding out private shareholders over executive pay – just as City investors are consulted – but ruled out putting employee representatives on the board. As the remuneration report endured a protest vote by 14% of shareholders, Flint also faced criticism for not providing details of the highest and lowest paid employees. The bank paid chief executive Stuart Gulliver more than £7m last year. Bernadette Fisher from the Unite union said clerical workers took home £17,000. "Is that right … when you are making multimillionaires of a small group of people?" she asked.

Baby Peter's death three years ago has created a fundamental shift in the nature of child protection work, study finds

Shockwaves caused by the case of Baby Peter three years ago have created a fundamental shift in the nature of child protection social work and led to thousands more children justifiably being taken into care, a study has concluded.

The study, by Cafcass, which administers children's guardians in family court cases, confirms that the increase in care applications made by local authorities in the months after the conviction of the killers of 17-month old Peter Connelly in October 2008 has barely subsided, effectively establishing much lower thresholds for intervention in the lives of vulnerable children deemed to be at risk of neglect and abuse.

The "Baby Peter effect" means that local authority social services departments are much more likely to take children away from their families, and to do so more swiftly and appropriately, the Cafcass survey of children's guardians found. In 85% of cases studied, guardians believed that a care application was "the only viable action and that there was no other alternative".

Anthony Douglas, chief executive of Cafcass, welcomed the shift, which he said demonstrated that children were being safeguarded more effectively and appropriately by local authorities than they were three years ago. He called the change in social work practices "an important growth in realism about the depth of justifiable concerns about the risk being experienced by some children".

Douglas said the social work profession had "survived a battering" from politicians and the media in the wake of the Peter Connelly case, and praised children's social workers for their professionalism and commitment in responding to the added pressures they face.

But he warned that ongoing cuts to council children's services and school budgets could strain local authorities' ability to maintain the high levels of intervention. Many councils have up to now protected or even increased spending on children's safeguarding to cope with rising numbers of children entering the care system, often at the expense of youth services and family support programmes. But this could change as more cuts are made after the next government public spending review in 2013, he said,

Cafcass said that since 2007-08 there has been a 62% increase in local authority care applications, while in 2011-12 the number of applications topped 10,000 for the first time.

There were 9.2 care applications per 10,000 children across all local authorities in England in the year 2011-12, up from 5.8 in 2007-08. Application rates varied between authority. The highest was South Tyneside with 30.1 care applications per 10,000 children, while at the opposite end of the scale the Isles of Scilly had none, followed by Rutland with 2.2.

In Haringey, north London, where Peter Connelly was on the child protection register at the time of his death, care applications have soared, from 8.2 per 10,000 children in 2007-08 to 17.1 in 2011-12, down from a peak of 22.65 in 2010-11.

Douglas said councils with effective early intervention programmes designed to help struggling families before their problems reached crisis point were more likely to take fewer children into care. Some guardians who responded to the survey said they felt a lack of early intervention, resources, respite care and family support contributed to the higher numbers of care applications.

The study revealed that the prevalence of parental neglect as the trigger for court applications was increasing. In 60% of cases parental drug and/or alcohol abuse was found to be a contributing factor to the applications. In just over half of cases parental mental illness was a factor. In 52% of cases one or both parents had themselves had involvement with social services as children.

Peter Connelly was 17 months old when he died in Tottenham, north London, at the hands of his mother, Tracey, her violent partner, Steven Barker, and his brother Jason Owen.

He suffered more than 50 injuries despite being on the at-risk register and receiving 60 visits from social workers, police and health professionals in an eight-month period before his death on 3 August 2007.

Children's minister Tim Loughton welcomed the report which he said showed than in the majority of cases local authorities were making the right decision about whether to take children into care. "We know that care applications remain at very high levels. These decisions are never taken lightly – but children's welfare must be paramount and they must be protected as early as possible from risk and abuse."

Debbie Jones, president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, said: "These improvements have happened at a time when the number of care proceeding applications have continued to rise, showing that local authorities are working hard to improve quality in the face of reduced resources and increased demand."

The media furore following the conviction of Peter's killers resulted in the dismissal of Haringey's then director of children's services, Sharon Shoesmith, and four social work professionals involved in the case. Shoesmith subsequently won an appeal against her sacking. On Friday, two social workers, Gillie Christou and Maria Ward lost their appeal against wrongful dismissal.

Met Office predicts 'barbecue weekend' with almost unbroken sunshine across whole UK

After achieving record annual temperatures on Friday, much of Britain is expected to bask in the warm afterglow of summer temperatures and enjoy a "barbecue weekend".

The Met Office was forecasting "almost unbroken sunshine", feeling less sticky with a cooling easterly breeze, lasting throughout the weekend. Crowds lining the roads for the Olympic torch relay in Wales were warned to stock up on water and sunblock.

On Friday afternoon the temperature of the Thames in the newly refurbished Royal Victoria dock, where thousands are expected to undertake the mile-long Great London Swim this weekend, reached 15C.

On Thursday, the hot weather was blamed for shattering a large pane of glass at Portcullis House, the £235m office block for hundreds of MPs opposite parliament.

On hearing the glass shatter, the Labour party member Catey Smith tweeted: "OMG! In Portcullis House and glass ceiling panel cracked. Huge noise! Security moving ppl away."

With a barbecue weekend if not a barbecue summer finally upon us, supermarkets were stocking up on sausages and burgers; at zoos, animals were being issued cooling ice lollies. Ladbroke's bookmakers were slashing the odds on newspapers being able to run "long to rain over us" headlines over the diamond jubilee weekend, giving 4-1 on the hot weather lasting another week.

But Dan Williams from the Met Office said there would be a chance of rain as the week progressed.

Williams said Saturday was "looking like a pretty fantastic day".

"There's lots of blue sky and sunshine around from the get go to the end of the day for the whole of the UK," he said.

However, it is expected to be a degree or two lower than Friday's year-high temperatures because drier and slightly colder air will be making its way from the east rather than the south-east. Williams said that by Wednesday it would become cloudier with a fair chance of short rain showers.

In 1979, he was an 18-year-old freshman who liked Earth, Wind & Fire and wore silly hats. David Maraniss' new biography reveals how Barry from Honolulu became Barack, president of the United States

He had turned 18 a few weeks earlier. The afro he started at Punahou School had grown a bit fuller, but was under control. He was Barry Obama, freshman, from Honolulu. The name, along with those of his two new roommates, was typed on the index card that had been slotted on to the door of Room A104 of Haines Hall annexe in preparation for his arrival. Maybe his face didn't look Hawaiian at first glance, thought Jeff Yamaguchi, who lived down the hall and whose family was from the islands, but it quickly became apparent that he had the easy-going attitude of a Hawaiian local, "that mannerism and style and personality that is very unique and identifiable from tourists… a mentality you develop over time, just 'Whatever.'"

It was autumn 1979 when Obama arrived at Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles. The campus was much like his school in Honolulu, with gentle slopes and flowering landscapes. Its academic expectations were equally high and the weather in southern California sunny. All so familiar, but Obama had come to college in search of something more.

In the end, his stay at Occidental would compose only half of his college experience. Just two school years, when he was 18 and 19, from August 1979 to June 1981. But in the development of the person he was to become, Occidental was significant.

Obama's roommates were Paul Carpenter, a blond southern Californian who occasionally took his friends surfing (bodysurfing, in Barry's case), and Imad Husain, an intellectual Pakistani with a droll sense of humour who grew up in Karachi (though his parents now lived in Dubai) and finished his secondary education at Bedford School in the UK. Barry Obama played a lot of Hendrix, Earth, Wind & Fire and Billie Holiday, but was known in the annexe for his wicked impression of Mick Jagger. He could do the walk, the strut, the face.

The annexe was home to African-Americans and international students from the Asian subcontinent, budding intellectuals and aspiring writers, party animals, surfer dudes and jocks. Barry Obama represented a bit of each of them: he was black and white, surfer, basketballer, writer and perceptive observer, wholly American and yet the son of an African and intimately familiar with Asia from his years in Indonesia. His ability to connect across racial and cultural lines was not merely a superficial art of survival but rooted in his life and being.

Most of Obama's classmates could not see how hard he was working to reconcile the contradictions that life threw at him. They thought he was cool, smart without being pedantic, and seemed to have his act together. To Mark Parsons, who came to know him mostly because they both smoked and spent a lot of time together huddling outside the student union, Obama seemed "almost Zen in walking through all the chaos in our dorm". He displayed one trait that showed he wanted to be a player though: he wore a lot of "stupid hats". He usually wore them cocked, to look cool. Obama also had a peculiar smoking style, a little affectation. He turned his wrist up and cupped the cigarette between thumb and index finger. He smoked a cigarette the same way he smoked a joint. "I have a sense that he smoked because he was addicted, as I was," Parsons said. But, Obama told Parsons, there was another reason. "I remember him telling me he would quit after he got married. He didn't want to quit smoking because he said he would gain weight, but after he got married it would be OK to gain weight. I think it was mostly a joke."

A fellow student, Lisa Jack, an aspiring Annie Leibovitz who went around campus persuading interesting people to let her photograph them, recalls that a friend "started to tell me about this really good-looking guy. His name is Barry and people are talking about him." To have Lisa Jack shoot profiles of you was considered a mark of distinction, and Obama gladly accepted the offer.

At about 11 one morning he turned up ready and eager for his photo shoot. He was wearing flip-flops, jeans and a collared shirt with button-down breast pockets. He brought along a pack of non-filter cigarettes, a wide-brimmed boater hat and a bomber jacket. Jack did not instruct him on the wardrobe or accessories; they were all his idea. He started to experiment, moving around for different poses. It was one of those times when his ambition was unmistakable. He blew smoke like he was on a Bob Dylan album jacket. He put on his hat and cocked it low like he was Hendrix. "I think he was into it," Jack recalled. "He was pleased he had been asked."

In the subjects he preferred, political science and literature, Obama signed up for as many advanced courses as he could take. In any discussion, Obama would listen to everyone else before bringing in his point of view. Jeff Yamaguchi put it this way: "He listens and he listens and he listens, rather than respond immediately to the first thing that's out there. It's like, 'Let's let it percolate for a little. Let's let it simmer.' He reads people really well. He doesn't use the same play for every person. He has different plays in his playbook. He adjusts to the situation."

The four African students at Occidental called Obama their brother; he told them how much he wanted to go to Africa to see his father and his roots. He talked to one of them, Kofi Manu, a Ghanaian, about finding an apartment in their sophomore year, but instead moved into a place with his Pakistani friend Hasan Chandoo. Their place became a regular hangout for the Pakistanis and their friends. It was in this company Obama felt most comfortable. "These were my closest friends," he noted decades later, during an interview in the Oval Office. Race was not a factor. It was an international sensibility that brought them together, Obama said. "I think there is no doubt… they were sort of world citizens, with kind of peripatetic lives. All of them had that sort of shared characteristic of spanning cultures, which I think strengthened our friendships."

The late-night discussions he participated in now were more intense than those of his freshman year, more overtly political, more directed at America's role in the world. Chandoo and the other Pakistanis, along with the writers Obama associated with, had a seriousness of purpose and a worldly sensibility.

His classmates considered Obama "a floater", moving not only from culture to culture but also from political group to political group, dabbling, showing interest, but never staking a home. This was a natural part of college experimentation, to be sure, but in Obama's case it reflected a deeper and longer-lasting trend, one that would define his life in and out of politics: his need and ability to avoid traps. The less entrenched he was, the easier it was for him to get out of something and move on.

He had become part of Occidental's activist network, participating in a vigil protesting against the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. It led him to give the first public political speech of his life, on 18 February 1981, giving him the first intimations of what it was like to move crowds, large or small, with words. But after only two years at Occidental, Obama was ready to go. In late March he filled out applications to transfer to Columbia in New York. He wanted to go deeper into the American experience, and the black experience. "I figured that if there weren't any more black students at Columbia than there were at Oxy, I'd at least be in the heart of it," he said.

The next four years in New York, from late summer 1981 to midsummer 1985, was a lonely time. As Obama put it himself, decades later, "I was leading an ascetic existence, way too serious for my own good".

He felt no attachments to Columbia, but he did enter into a relationship with Alexandra McNear, a former Occidental classmate. McNear had edited Occidental's literary magazine, Feast, in which Obama had published two poems. In fact, the name Barack Obama, as opposed to Barry, premiered in public in the magazine's inaugural issue. McNear was in New York that summer after her junior year and for nearly two months they were lovers in Manhattan.

When it was time for McNear to return to Occidental, they began a long-distance relationship, conducted mostly through a series of passionate letters. Obama was the central character in his letters, in a self-conscious way, with variations on the theme of his search for purpose and self-identity. In one letter, he told McNear that it seemed all his Pakistani friends were headed towards the business world, and his old high school buddies from Honolulu were "moving toward the mainstream". Where did that leave him? "I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups," he wrote. "Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me… The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs."

Here, at 22, was an idea that would become a key to understanding Obama the politician and public figure. "Without a class" meant he was entering his adult life without financial security. Without a "structure" meant he had grown up lacking a solid family foundation, his father gone from the start, his mother often elsewhere, his grandparents doing the best they could, but all leading to his sense of being a rootless outsider. Without a "tradition" was a reference to his lack of religious grounding and his status as both white and black, feeling completely at home in neither race. Eventually he could make a few essential choices in terms of how he would live out his personal life, moving inexorably towards the black world. But in a larger sense, in terms of his ambitions beyond family, he did not want to be constricted by narrow choices. The different path he saw for himself was to rise above the divisions of culture and society, politics and economics, and embrace something larger. To make a particular choice would be to limit him, he wrote in the letter to McNear, because "taken separately, they are unacceptable and untenable".

Looking back on that period from the distance of the White House, Obama recalled that he was then "deep inside my own head… in a way that in retrospect I don't think was real healthy". But the realisation that he had to "absorb all the traditions" would become the rationale for all that followed. "There is no doubt that what I retained in my politics is a sense that the only way I could have a sturdy sense of identity of who I was depended on digging beneath the surface differences of people," Obama said during an interview on 10 November 2011. "The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life. So that is at the core of who I am."

During his Columbia days, Obama discussed his struggle for identity not only with McNear but with a few friends from the Pakistani crowd. One of his acquaintances in that group was Mir Mahboob Mahmood, known to his friends by his nickname, Beenu. They were never the closest of friends, yet their conversations seemed to bring out Obama's innermost thoughts and hopes.

Mahmood remembered how, "for a period of two or three months", Obama "carried and at every opportunity read and reread a fraying copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It was a period during which Barack was struggling deeply within himself to attain his own racial identity, and Invisible Man became a prism for his self-reflection."

By Mahmood's account, they had known each other only a few months when Obama posed this question to him: "Do you think I will be president of the United States?"

What did this mean? "I think it was a very serious question, and clearly, at least in my mind, this was where he was headed," Mahmood recalled. His answer then: "If America is ready for a black president, you can make it."

When Obama, during the White House interview, was asked about Mahmood's account, he said he could not remember such a conversation, and that people had a natural tendency to apply memories to him retroactively, but added, "If he has a vivid memory of it, I won't deny it." The ambitious path he saw for himself then, Obama said, remained vague. "I don't think I could see a clear path [to the presidency]," he said. "At that age I was much more interested in being a leader outside of politics. If you had asked me during that time what kind of career I'd love to have, more likely I would have said something like a Bob Moses [the civil rights leader], maybe with a slightly higher profile than that."

In a letter postmarked 22 November 1982, Obama wrote to McNear that he would be coming to Los Angeles for the semester break. The day after he sent the letter, his father was killed in a car accident in Nairobi.

A father he had barely known, gone. His grandparents thousands of miles away, and his mother farther away still. It would be hard to overstate the loneliness young Obama felt at that moment, by himself in New York. But in December, when Obama and McNear reunited in Los Angeles, he casually mentioned it. It "was not an emotional telling on his side", she said. They stayed at her apartment for most of two weeks. McNear wrote in her journal then that Obama "was the closest friend I had, and that I really loved him but didn't know if we could sustain a relationship".

She wrote to Obama, expressing the fear that he was becoming less interested in her. He wrote back on 4 April that she was mistaken. He was "burning the midnight oil" to finish his studies, he said. And he was, as usual, consumed by the effort to find himself. "I feel sunk in that long corridor between old values, modes of thought, and those that I seek, that I work towards," he confided.

Obama skipped the graduation ceremonies, finishing his time at Columbia much as he had begun: isolated and apart from the college scene. He had his résumé completed by the time he finished classes. He took temporary employment where he could find it, spending one week supervising a group of temp workers at the New York fire department. It was, he reported, "a fascinating experience affording me a taste of the grinding toil of a low-white-collar job, as well as the ambivalent relationship" between bosses and workers. Here were people talking about sports and life and family in ways that were not fraught with complicated meanings and symbols, he wrote in a letter to his now former girlfriend McNear. "I felt a greater affinity to the blacks and Latinos there (who predictably comprised about three-fourths of the workforce…) than I had felt in a long time, and it strengthened me in some important way."

Obama was six months out of Columbia when Genevieve Cook came along and engaged him in the deepest romantic relationship of his young life. They met at a Christmas party in 1983. Cook was Australian, an assistant-teacher in Brooklyn. Like Obama, she had lived in Indonesia, before her parents divorced, and again briefly in high school. She called him BAH‑rruck, with a trill of the r's. She said that is how he pronounced it himself, at least when talking to her.

He was living on the Upper West Side then and working in a job that paid the rent but did not inspire him. He was still keeping mostly to himself, occasionally hanging out with his Pakistani friends, who partied too much and too hard, he thought, but were warm and generous and buoyant intellectual company, always willing to debate philosophy and the political issues of the day. Cook offered something more. She was three years older, born in 1958. She kept a journal, as he did; brooded about her identity, as he did; had an independent, at times exasperating mother, as he did; and burned with an idealism to right the wrongs of the world, as he did.

Day by day, week by week, Cook's perceptions of Obama, noted in her journal, became more complicated.

January 26, 1984

…how is he so old already, at the age of 22? I have to recognise (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening… Distance, distance, distance, and wariness. I am wary – very clear – I really wonder where it's all going, all this with Barack.

February 19

Despite Barack's having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him – protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn – I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more – he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.

February 24

My British humour comes through with him – very uncommon. An uncommon, earnest young man. He is very beautiful – more than he thinks himself to be. Oooooo I can't wait to be in Brooklyn with spring coming…

February 25

... the sexual warmth is definitely there – but the rest of it has sharp edges and I'm finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi‑stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness – and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.

May 16

It so delights me that from time to time Barack will talk about the more private, inner aspects of what he sees and feels of our relationship – not out of some need to bring up and solve a problem (which is what I tend to do), but merely to communicate it. It is something I could well learn to do. To trust him, myself, whatever's cooking there in my brain – the good and the cloudy.

June 10

Barack frets about the continual comfort I am always willing to offer – recognising it as feeling good, but also chafing against the threat of its impeding a rawer sense of "the struggle"…

June 20

Curious this thing in Barack, where he identifies "skipping out" on eg Sohale's dinner, with the taking of different paths. He doesn't just see it as preferring to stay home and start a new story. Somehow splitting himself off from people is necessary to his feeling of following some chosen route? which basically remains undefined. And am I to be left behind also? That he may feel he's striking out? Shedding encumbrances, old images, the known and comfortable…

June 27

But the abruptness and the apparent lack of warmth w/ which B. left them was jarring.

Beenu Mahmood saw a shift in Obama that corresponded to Cook's perceptions. He could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself from the Pakistanis as a necessary step in establishing his political identity. For years, Obama seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective. But to get to where he wanted to go, he had to change – not cut off the Pakistanis as friends, but push away enough to establish a clear and separate identity. As a result, Mahmood recalled, "The first shift I saw him undertaking was to view himself as an American in a much more fundamental way."

In preparing for his future, Obama disciplined himself in two activities: writing and running. He was what Cook called "a virtuous daily jogger", and that was one of the differences between them. She would run, too, but without his discipline and not as far. "One of the reasons he was maybe such a dedicated jogger was part of him still felt he was the fat boy, which I found hard to see," Cook said later. He had indeed been a chubby boy from infancy through seventh grade, when his body started to elongate. Cook noticed that despite his thin physique, there was still a certain softness to him: "There was this still quite raw and close to the surface aspect of himself which had to do with being the fat boy, or chubby boy, that people laughed at, that no one knew quite where to put, and who had a deeply ambivalent notion of being loved or not."

They talked about race quite often, as part of his inner need to find a sense of belonging. She sympathised with and encouraged his search for his identity. If she felt like an outsider, he was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? At times he confessed to her that "he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body." At some point that summer she realised that "in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black".

Mahmood saw the same thing as Cook: Obama's internal struggle with his racial identity. He related it to his memory of Obama carrying around that dog-eared copy of Ellison's Invisible Man, and also to his memory of the day Obama wondered whether he could ever be president. Trying to embrace his blackness, Mahmood thought, was "probably the biggest shift I saw [in Obama during the New York years]… Barack was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity… That was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black."

Early in Obama's relationship with Cook, he had told her about "his adolescent image of the perfect ideal woman" and how he had searched for her "at the expense of hooking up with available girls". Who was this ideal woman? In her journals, Cook conjured her in her mind, and it was someone other than herself. "I can't help thinking that what he would really want, be powerfully drawn to, was a woman, very strong, very upright, a fighter, a laugher, well‑experienced – a black woman I keep seeing her as," she wrote.

• This is an edited extract from Barack Obama: The Making Of The Man, by David Maraniss, published next week by Atlantic Books at £25. To order a copy for £20, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846.