Portrait of the week: air strikes, train strikes and missile strikes

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Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the Foreign Secretary, said that the ‘red lights on the global dashboard are very much flashing’. He was speaking after Britain joined American air strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen. The Houthis, backed by Iran and allied with Hamas in Gaza, had been attacking merchant ships in the Red Sea. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, told the Commons it was ‘a necessary and a proportionate response to a direct threat to UK vessels’. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, supported Britain’s action, but said that future military interventions – especially sustained ones – should be brought before parliament. Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, announced that 20,000 British service personnel would be deployed in Europe in Nato’s Exercise Steadfast Defender 24. Rishi Sunak returned from a visit to Kyiv, where he announced £2.5 billion of military aid to Ukraine over the coming year.

Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith resigned as two of the five Conservative party deputy chairmen in order to vote, with 58 other Tory rebels, for Sir William Cash’s amendment to the Rwanda Bill. The Daily Telegraph forecast that on the basis of a YouGov poll, the Conservatives would win only 169 seats at the next election, leaving Labour with a majority of around 120. Two million British citizens who have lived overseas for more than 15 years are to be allowed to register to vote. The government committed itself again to building a series of nuclear power stations that could produce enough electricity by 2050 to meet a quarter of demand. Inflation rose from 3.9 to 4 per cent, fuelled by drink, pantomimes and cat food. Aslef, the train drivers’ union, announced strikes between 30 January and 5 February. Annie Nightingale, a DJ on Radio 1 from 1970 to 2023, died, aged 83.

Paul Patterson, the head of Fujitsu for Europe, which supplied a computer system to the Post Office, told the Commons committee investigating the scandal of the prosecution of sub-postmasters: ‘Fujitsu would like to apologise for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice.’