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Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was stripped of his knighthood by the Forfeiture Committee, which said he had ‘brought the honours system into disrepute’. Stephen Hester, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, turned down a £963,000 shares-only bonus payment in the face of ‘enormous political pressure’. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that the government was borrowing £2.9 billion less this year than expected and that there might be room for tax cuts in the budget next month. A man in Bournemouth found blue spheres of jelly an inch across on his lawn after a hailstorm.
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David Norris and Gary Dobson said they would appeal against their convictions for the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Police arrested two current and two former journalists at the Sun and a policeman in an operation investigating payments made to police by journalists. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said, as she had said last October, that police would be obliged to deal with antisocial behaviour if five households in one area complained about a resident. Mrs May also said in a separate initiative that all tents would be banned from Olympic venues lest there be protests. An 86ft redwood in Sheffield Park, Sussex, exploded during a thunderstorm.
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The destroyer Dauntless was readied to set sail for the Falkland Islands. The Duke of Cambridge flew there first for a tour of duty as a helicopter pilot. BAA, the airport operator, lost its appeal against a Competition Commission ruling that it must sell Stansted airport. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said he opposed the notion of same-sex marriages: ‘I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is.’
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