BBC News with Jonathan Izard.

One of the Pope’s former senior advisors says he won’t be accompanying the Pontiff on his historic visit to Britain, which begins on Thursday, because of illness. The announcement follows the publication of an interview in which the advisor, Cardinal Walter Kasper, said “when you landed at London’s Heathrow Airport, you sometimes think you’ve arrived in a Third World country”. A spokesman said the Cardinal had been misunderstood and the comments were not negative in intent. David Willey reports from Rome.

Cardinal Kasper, who’s 77, has just retired as head of the Vatican department which deals with relations with other Christian churches. The cardinal had been invited by the Pope to join the party of thirty or so senior Vatican officials accompanying him this week on a state visit. The cardinal’s private secretary told me that the cardinal had had a bad attack of gout, but the cancellation of his name from the Pope’s entourage came after publication of an interview he gave last week to a German magazine, in which he talked of an “aggressive new atheism” spreading throughout Britain.