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The government won by 348 to 228 a Commons vote on limiting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners to those who qualified by poverty: 52 Labour MPs didn’t vote, one voted with the opposition; five MPs suspended from the Labour party also voted with the opposition. Three million people who began receiving the ‘new’ state pension after 2016 will be given £460 a year more from April 2025, in line with wage growth of 4 per cent. A bill was published to exclude the 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Mel Stride was knocked out of the contest for the leadership of the Conservative party; Robert Jenrick, with 33 votes from MPs, Kemi Badenoch, with 28, and James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat with 21 will address the party conference in Birmingham at the end of September. The Spectator was bought for £100 million by Sir Paul Marshall.
Thomas Birley, 27, was sentenced to nine years in jail for his part in attempts on 4 August to set fire to the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, Rotherham, where asylum seekers were housed. Up to the end of last week, there had been 1,380 arrests related to the disturbances of those days, and 863 people charged. The prison population reached a record 88,521. More than 1,700 were then released on one day under a Ministry of Justice emergency plan. Baroness Newlove, the Victims’ Commissioner, said that some victims were ‘unaware of their offender’s early release’. In the seven days to 9 September, 986 migrants arrived in England in small boats.
In a video, the Princess of Wales said she had completed her chemotherapy treatment and is now focusing on staying ‘cancer free’; the Prince of Wales said: ‘It’s good news but there is still a long way to go.’ Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the former leader of the Democratic Unionist party, pleaded not guilty at Newry Crown Court to historical sex offences; Lady Donaldson, his wife, pleaded not guilty to three charges relating to aiding and abetting. John Lewis reintroduced its slogan ‘Never knowingly undersold’. The cost of a first-class stamp will go up on 7 October by 30p to £1.65.
Abroad
As Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, visited London, fresh sanctions against Iran (including the cessation of airline flights), for supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for use against Ukraine, were announced by Britain, France and Germany. President Joe Biden of America was poised to lift a ban on Ukraine firing British Storm Shadow missiles into Russia. Russia said that its forces had captured Memryk and Novohrodivka, two villages within 15 miles of the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. The Israeli military said its aircraft had attacked ‘a number of senior Hamas terrorists’ south-west of Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip; Hamas said 19 people had been killed in the designated humanitarian zone. The Pope visited Papua New Guinea and then said Mass in Dili, East Timor, attended by 600,000 people, nearly half the population of the country.
President Emmanuel Macron of France appointed Michel Barnier, 73, as Prime Minister to succeed Gabriel Attal, 35. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, and Kamala Harris, the Democrat candidate, held a ding-dong televised debate, though there was no knockout; the betting markets gave the edge to Ms Harris. A week before his federal tax evasion trial was to begin, Hunter Biden, the son of the American President, pleaded guilty to all nine charges. The Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo González and his wife left for Spain, which had granted them asylum, having spent weeks in hiding. At least 26 people died after a wooden fishing boat carrying 100 migrants capsized off the coast of Senegal only two or three miles into its voyage to the Canary Islands. Sergio Mendes, who twice had a hit with ‘Mas Que Nada’, died aged 83. Nine children and an adult were reported to have been carried off and killed by wolves since mid-April in the Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
A Swiss appeals court convicted Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic academic, of rape, overturning an acquittal in 2023; the court ruled he must serve a three-year prison sentence, two of them suspended. A Boeing Starliner spacecraft returned to earth, but, for safety reasons, without the two Nasa astronauts that on 5 June it had left with; they will stay orbiting in the International Space Station until February, when it is planned to bring them back in a SpaceX Crew Dragon. James Earl Jones, the voice of Star Wars’ Darth Vader, died aged 93. CSH
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