Floods swept Cumbria after 12.4 inches of rain fell in 24 hours (at Seathwaite), the most ever recorded in Britain. Main Street in Cockermouth was more than waist deep in water. Some 1,300 houses were affected, and insurance claims were expected to reach £100 million. PC Bill Baker died in the collapse of the Northside bridge at Workington, away from which he was directing traffic. Six bridges were washed away, and all 1,800 in the county were to be checked, with the Calva bridge at Workington being condemned, separating the town by a 20-mile drive. The floods arrived a day after the government announced in the Queen’s Speech that ‘legislation will be introduced to protect communities against flooding’. Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, visited the area.
Mr David Curry resigned as chairman of the Parliamentary Standards and Privileges Committee and referred to the Parliamentary Commissioner allegations that he had claimed thousands of pounds for a second home at which he seldom stayed. Scotland Yard sent the cases of four MPs and peers for consideration by the Crown Prosecution Service. A poll by Ipsos Mori put the Conservatives at 37 per cent and Labour at 32. Mr Brown told the Confederation of British Industry that ‘we will see a major announcement’ on ‘a European network of train service that takes us quickly not just to Paris and Brussels but quickly to Cologne and Amsterdam’. A portrait of Lady Thatcher was unveiled at 10 Downing Street.
Sir John Chilcot began his public inquiry into the Iraq war. Mr Jonathan Montgomery, the chairman of the Human Genetics Commission, said he had received ‘some evidence’ that police sometimes arrested people in order to gather their DNA for retention. The Democratic Unionist Party continued its wrangling with Sinn Fein over the devolution of policing in Northern Ireland. A 400lb car-bomb failed to explode properly outside the Policing Board offices in Belfast.
The Supreme Court overturned rulings by lower courts that the Office of Fair Trading could investigate the fairness of bank charges for unauthorised overdrafts. The Bank of England revealed that it had secretly lent £61.6 billion to the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS last October to prevent their collapse. Britain’s public-sector net borrowing rose to £11.4 billion in October, bringing total net debt to £829.7 billion, or 59.2 per cent of GDP. Lloyds Banking Group launched a £13.5 billion rights issue, the biggest attempted in Britain. The Payments Council, a panel from major banks, decided to vote next month on the abolition cheques in 2018.
Mr Marc Bolland, a Dutchman, was named as the successor of Sir Stuart Rose as chief executive of Marks & Spencer. The Oxford and Cambridge Boat race is to be called the Xchanging Boat Race from next year in a sponsorship deal with a business services company.
Herman Van Rompuy, the Prime Minister of Belgium, is to be the first permanent President of the EU Council of Ministers, and, as its first High Representative, Cathy, Lady Ashton, Leader of the Lords since 2007 and the wife of Peter Kellner, the internet-polling businessman. The United States Senate voted by the bare 60 votes needed to begin consideration of the healthcare bill promoted by President Barack Obama. Mr Obama was said to be on the brink of announcing that 34,000 more troops would be sent to Afghanistan. He held his first state dinner for 400 in a tent, in honour of the visiting Indian prime minister, Mr Manmohan Singh. The hajj pilgrimage to Mecca began on the day the United States celebrated Thanksgiving. The British Foreign Office warned travellers to Timbuktu of ‘a high threat from terrorism’ after a rise in kidnapping by a group allied to al-Qa’eda. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran visited President Luiz Inazio Lula da Silva of Brazil. The world’s oldest sheep, a Polwarth-Dorchester cross ewe called Lucky, died in a heat wave in Victoria, Australia, aged 23.
The Albanian socialist opposition refused to take its seats in parliament until there was a recount of the general election held last June. A gas explosion killed 104 miners in Xinxing, north-east China. Coca-Cola said it planned to treble its sales in China over the next decade. China executed two men involved in selling baby milk powder contaminated with melamine that left six children dead and another 300,000 sick. Peruvian police arrested three men and a woman whom they accused of murdering 60 people in order to sell their fat to European cosmetics companies, a claim regarded with scepticism by doctors. A Belgian engineering student was found to have been conscious, not in a coma as thought, for 23 years. ‘I screamed, but there was no one to hear,’ he said. CSH
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