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Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, said that the party now had more members than the Conservatives. On Christmas Day, 451 migrants crossed the Channel; another 1,000 arrived in the next three days but three died off Sangatte. Lord Mandelson, having failed to be elected Chancellor of Oxford University, was appointed ambassador to the United States. Sue Gray, the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff, was made a peer with 29 other Labour nominations; among the six Conservative nominations were Nigel Biggar, a retired Oxford professor who has identified some good aspects of the British Empire, and Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union and an associate editor of The Spectator.
The economy of the United Kingdom had zero growth between July and September, according to revised official figures; it then shrank by 0.1 per cent in October. Annual inflation increased to 2.6 per cent. The Bank of England left interest rates unchanged. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that the taxpayer ‘simply can’t afford’ compensation for women (campaigning as Waspi women) hit by changes to the state pension age. Royal Mail was fined £10.5 million by Ofcom for delivering post late. The government approved the sale of Royal Mail’s parent company to the EP Group owned by Daniel Kretinsky, a Czech billionaire. At crown courts in England and Wales, 73,000 trials were unheard at the end of September, twice the figure in 2019. A woman found an 11lb giant puffball near Winslow in Buckinghamshire.
The government gave councils obligatory targets of 370,000 dwellings a year to be built in England; housebuilders pointed out a deficit of 20,000 bricklayers. Yang Tengbo, 50, a Chinese man barred from Britain, was ‘a close confidant’ of the Duke of York, the semi-secret national security court said. The duke did not join the royal family for Christmas at Sandringham. The King broadcast from the chapel of the demolished Middlesex hospital.
Abroad
An Azerbaijan Airlines aeroplane bound for Grozny in Chechnya was hit by Russian fire and came down over Kazakhstan with the loss of 38 lives. A Russian oil tanker split in half in the Kerch Strait in the Black Sea. Undersea cables between Finland and Estonia were broken when a tanker of the Russian ghost fleet was in the area. A Russian cargo ship, Ursa Major, sank between Spain and Algeria. Russia repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with missiles and drones, not least on Christmas Day. The White House said North Korean forces fighting for Russia against Ukraine had lost 1,000 men killed or wounded in a week in the Kursk region.
America scrapped a $10 million reward for the arrest of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which controls Syria; he settled into using his real name in place of his jihadist nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Julani (or al-Golani). Israel bombed Sanaa airport in Yemen. Luigi Mangione, 26, was charged with the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of United Healthcare. Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row prisoners. Jimmy Carter, US President from 1977-81, died aged 100. Denmark announced a huge increase in spending on the defence of Greenland, after Donald Trump, the US President-elect, repeated his desire to buy the territory.
A car driven into crowds at a Christmas market in Magdeburg in Germany killed four women and a boy of nine; a man originally from Saudi Arabia was arrested. A plane crashed in South Korea killing 179 people; two survived. The South Korean parliament voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol for declaring martial law in December. Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former Manchester City player, was made President of Georgia by the Georgian Dream party. President Emmanuel Macron appointed François Bayrou, 73, as Prime Minister. Dominique Pelicot, the 72-year-old former husband of Gisèle Pelicot, was jailed for 20 years for drugging and raping her, and inviting dozens of strangers to abuse her over a decade; 50 other men were jailed for between three and 15 years. A French court jailed seven men and a woman for their roles in a campaign that led to the beheading in 2020 of Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher, in a Paris suburb. Hundreds were thought to have died in a cyclone on Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. President Macron, visiting the island, a department of France, told a complaining crowd: ‘Si c’était pas la France, vous seriez 10,000 fois plus dans la merde!’ CSH
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