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Average wages (including bonuses) in the three months to July were 8.5 per cent higher than a year earlier. This should mean that state pensions rise by 8.5 per cent from April 2024, if the government does not claw back anything; the predicted rise would bring into the tax-paying bracket 650,000 more pensioners, a total of 9.15 million. GDP fell by 0.5 per cent in July. Wilko shops began closing as attempts to rescue the chain failed; Poundland offered to take on the leases of up to 71 shops. The cost of a first-class stamp is to rise from £1.10 to £1.25; before April this year it was only 95p. Bernard Looney resigned as chief executive of BP over a matter of personal relationships. A government auction for contracts for new offshore wind farms brought not a single bid. Britain rejoined the Horizon scientific research scheme after reaching an agreement with the European Union. Britain enjoyed temperatures above 30°C for seven days running. In England, 19 schools had delayed the start of the new school year because of the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) in their structure. Police alerted to a ‘mass murder’ at Chapel St Leonards, Lincolnshire, found it was a yoga class in session.
A parliamentary researcher was arrested in March under the Official Secrets Act, it emerged, and was granted bail. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, met Li Qiang, the Chinese Premier, at the G20 summit in India, and ‘conveyed his significant concerns about Chinese interference in the UK’s parliamentary democracy’. The arrested suspect said: ‘I have spent my career to date trying to educate others about the challenge and threats presented by the Chinese Communist party.’
Daniel Khalife, 21, a former soldier on remand accused of trying to gather information for a hostile state, escaped, strapped to the underside of a delivery lorry, from Wandsworth Prison, where he was working in the kitchen. ‘No stone must be left unturned,’ said Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary. Hundreds of lorries were stopped near Dover but Khalife wasn’t in any of them. Police had a look in Richmond Park, but he wasn’t there. Twenty policemen handcuffed a kitchen porter at Banbury station, but it wasn’t him. After three days Khalife got off a bicycle on the Grand Union Canal towpath at Northolt, Middlesex, when warned by a plainclothes policeman with a Taser; he had a Waitrose coolbag of groceries. The television impressionist Mike Yarwood died aged 82.
Abroad
Kim Jong-un, the ruler of North Korea, rumbled into Russia in his armoured train and held talks with President Vladimir Putin at a cosmodrome, before dinner of sturgeon or marbled beef. Mr Putin claimed that Britain was behind a plot to train Ukrainian ‘saboteurs’ to strike a nuclear power plant in Russia; ‘Are they trying to provoke us into retaliating against Ukrainian atomic power stations?’ he asked. The G20 statement on the war against Ukraine made no mention of Russian aggression but said states must ‘refrain from the threat or use of force to seek territorial acquisition’. A Russian strike at 2 p.m. on a marketplace in Kostyantynivka, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, killed 16 civilians. Elon Musk said he had refused to give Ukraine access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea to avoid complicity in a ‘major act of war’, intended ‘to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor’.
A storm brought floods to Libya, killing more than 5,000 and destroying areas of Derna. An earthquake in Morocco killed more than 3,000 people; the epicentre was in the High Atlas Mountains, 45 miles from Marrakesh. Ethiopia announced it had filled the reservoir at its hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile; Egypt called this a disregard for ‘the rights of the downstream countries’. Islamist militants attacked a boat in the river Niger 30 miles from Timbuktu, killing at least 49 civilians, the military junta of Mali said. Mexico’s supreme court decriminalised abortion in the country’s 32 states.
Apple shares fell after Chinese government workers were banned from using iPhones for work purposes. A chatbot called Ernie, launched by China’s search engine Baidu, was found to respond to the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre with: ‘Let’s talk about something else.’ The US House of Representatives, controlled by the Republicans, is to open an inquiry into Joe Biden that could result in a vote on his impeachment. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, founder of the Inkatha party, died aged 95; he played the role of his great-grandfather Cetshwayo in the film Zulu. CSH
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