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Energy bills will be £4,266 for a typical household by January, according to the consultancy Cornwall Insight, which had put the sum at £3,616 only a week earlier. Ofgem had decided since then to shorten the period over which suppliers can recover their costs. Gordon Brown, prime minister 2007-10, declared that Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, competitors to succeed him, must hold an emergency Budget to deal with the ‘financial timebomb’ of energy prices. ‘If they do not,’ he said, ‘parliament should be recalled to force them to do so.’ Liz Truss, in an interview with the Financial Times, said she would help people with the cost of living ‘in a Conservative way of lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts’. Sunak seized on the remark, saying: ‘It’s simply wrong to rule out further direct support at this time, as Liz Truss has done.’
The numbers waiting more than two years for routine operations in England fell from 22,500 at the start of the year, to fewer than 200, according to the NHS; overall waiting lists continued to grow. The proportion of people testing positive for coronavirus fell to one in 25 in England and one in 20 in Scotland (from one in 20 and one in 19 a week earlier), according to surveys by the Office for National Statistics. Archie Battersbee, aged 12, was confirmed to be dead after life-support treatment was withdrawn by the Royal London Hospital, where he had been in a coma since April; his parents had opposed court rulings for life-support to end.
Southern England was beset by hosepipe bans as drought dragged on under a hot sun; Thames Water, with 15 million customers, planned a ban in coming weeks. A strike by 6,500 members of the train-drivers’ union Aslef affected nine railway companies. Workers at Felixstowe, Britain’s largest container port, will strike from 21 August. Royal Mail workers would strike on days in August and September. June Spencer retired at the age of 103 from playing Peggy Woolley in The Archers, having appeared since the first episode in 1951. Dame Olivia Newton-John, the singer who starred in Grease (1978), died aged 73. Raymond Briggs, the illustrator and the author of Fungus the Bogeyman, died, aged 88.
Abroad
In Ukraine, according to the British Ministry of Defence, the heaviest fighting was shifting to a 200-mile front from Zaporizhzhia to Kherson. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, the biggest in Europe, continued to be occupied by Russia and there were fears about the dangers of fighting around it. Twelve grain ships set sail from Ukraine, one, the Maltese-flagged Rojen, carrying 13,000 tons of corn, bound for Teesport. The price of olive oil rose after hot weather affected the harvest in Spain, which produces nearly half the world’s supply.
Tayseer Jabari, the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was among Palestinians killed by Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip, said to have been launched preemptively to prevent attacks by the Iranian-backed group; hundreds of rockets were fired at Israel before a ceasefire. Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, the local head of the Palestinian militant group, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, was killed in an Israeli raid on a house in the city of Nablus in the West Bank. China cancelled co-operation with America on climate change and counter-narcotics in response to the visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. More than 80,000 tourists were stranded in the popular seaside resort of Sanya in China when authorities cancelled all flights and trains after 263 cases of coronavirus were detected. Twelve were killed after a bus carrying Polish pilgrims to Medjugorje in Bosnia veered off a road in Croatia. The Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake died aged 84.
Donald Trump, the former US president, said that his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, was ‘occupied by a large group of FBI agents’; in February, the National Archives had retrieved 15 boxes of papers from Mar-a-Lago, including letters between Mr Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Alex Jones, the American conspiracy theorist and radio show host, was ordered to pay £41 million in damages in a defamation case brought by parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, which he had said was a hoax. Mourners at a funeral in the Democratic Republic of Congo for ten protestors killed during anti-UN demonstrations blamed Monusco, the UN’s armed detachment in the country.
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