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The Bank of England launched out on a further £75 billion worth of quantitative easing, but refused to buy government bonds maturing in 2017 because traders had driven up the price. Typical households will not return to the level of income they enjoyed in 2009 until 2015, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The Olympic stadium is to remain in public ownership after the Games, the government confirmed, and not sold to West Ham. Unemployment rose by 114,000 from May to August to 2.57 million. The BBC decided to cut 2,000 jobs as part of savings of £670 million a year. Dave and Angela Dawes from Wisbech won £101,203,600.70 in the Euromillions lottery, the third largest jackpot for British winners.
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Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, was pursued by political enemies who asked why his friend Adam Werritty had often visited the Ministry of Defence without security clearance and had been present at a meeting between Dr Fox and a defence supplier at the Shangri-La hotel in Dubai, when ministry civil servants were not present. The attack later focused on exposure of Dr Fox’s private life. He told the Commons that ‘it was a mistake to allow distinctions to be blurred between my professional responsibilities and my personal loyalties’ but added that Mr Werritty had told him he was ‘not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income’. Mr Roy Wyre, aged 66, was fined £75 for brushing his Alsatian, Spencer, in a park in Nottingham.
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In a shadow Cabinet reshuffle, Stephen Twigg went to education, from which Andrew Burnham moved to health, from which John Healey departed to leave the front bench. Caroline Flint moved to energy. John Denham left business to become PPS to Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition. Sir Gus O’Donnell is to retire as Cabinet Secretary at the end of the year. Jeremy Heywood is to succeed him as Cabinet Secretary but not as head of the Civil Service. Nor will Mr Heywood become permanent secretary for the Cabinet Office, a post to be filled by Ian Watmore, the former chief executive of the Football Association. Malcolm Jack, the Clerk of the House of Commons, refused an application by the National Audit Office for details of MPs under investigation over expenses, so the office qualified its audit of members’ accounts for the year ending 31 March 2011.
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Abroad
A summit on the debt crisis by leaders of the 27 European Union states was delayed from 17 to 23 October. After talks between Greece and the troika of the EU, IMF and European Central Bank, it was admitted that the country would fail to meet its fiscal targets for 2011, but should still receive another slice of bailout funds. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in Berlin. She would prefer each country to secure its own banks; he wants to mobilise the European financial stability facility (EFSF). The Slovakian parliament voted against strengthening the EFSF, and the government fell. Madeirans re-elected Alberto Joao Jardim, its leader since 1978, and landed Portugal with €1.6 billion of Madeira’s concealed debts since 2004.
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The United States charge two Iranians over an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had tea with President Robert Mugabe in Harare and gave him a dossier of police abuses against Anglicans in Zimbabwe. Bishop Nolbert Kunonga, who has taken over Harare cathedral, called Dr Williams’s visit a ‘crusade for gays’. Egyptian soldiers killed at least 25 Copts protesting against the burning of churches. Eight Bangladeshi migrant workers convicted of killing an Egyptian in 2007 were publicly beheaded in Riyadh. Forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi, the deposed ruler of Libya, continued to defend part of the city of Sirte. The government of Burma showed signs of wanting to release hundreds of political prisoners.
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Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister of Ukraine, was jailed for seven years on charges of acting beyond her powers in signing a gas deal with Russia. An American frigate and a British Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship freed 23 hostages in a 56,000-ton Italian carrier and detained 11 Somali pirates. Forces of the African Union claimed to have driven the militant Islamists of al-Shabab out of Mogadishu, though it still controlled much of central and southern Somalia. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, died, aged 56. Users of BlackBerry telephones found the system kept crashing. CSH
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