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David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, made his first statement to the Commons and said that if membership of a single market meant having to give up control of United Kingdom borders, ‘that makes it very improbable’. The official spokesman for Theresa May, the Prime Minister, who was away in China, disagreed, claiming that Mr Davis was merely ‘setting out his opinion’. ‘Saying something is probable or improbable,’ she said, ‘I don’t think is necessarily a policy.’ Speaking in China about freedom of movement after Brexit, Mrs May said: ‘I want a system where the government is able to decide who comes into the country — I think that’s what the British people want. A points-based system means that people come in automatically if they just meet the criteria.’ The RMT union held a two-day strike on the Southern railway network. The annual profits of Southern’s owners, Go-Ahead, rose by 26.8 per cent to £99.8 million.
Keith Vaz, a Labour MP since 1987, resigned as chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee after a Sunday newspaper reported that he had spent some time with a couple of rent boys at a flat he owns. The Rt Revd Nicholas Chamberlain, Bishop of Grantham, said that he was homosexual and in a ‘long-term and committed’ relationship; he had decided to speak of his private life before a Sunday newspaper could publish a planned exposure. The Rt Revd David Jenkins, after whose consecration as Bishop of Durham in 1984 York Minster was struck by lightning, died aged 91. Richard Neville, the co-founder in 1967 of the magazine Oz, died aged 74. The National Trust launched a public appeal for £7.1 million to buy personal objects that had belonged to Sir Winston Churchill and have been on long-term loan from his heirs at Chartwell.
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