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Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, announced her resignation. Jeremy Corbyn will not be a Labour candidate at the next general election, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader said. A boy and girl, both aged 15, were charged with the murder of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl, at Culcheth, Cheshire. A revision of the Northern Ireland Protocol was predicted, under which goods from Britain destined only for Northern Ireland would not face physical customs checks; but bananas would face a tariff lest they be smuggled into the Republic. Six members of a gang, Michael Malik Ahmed, Roshan Clark, Kaijuan Henry, Zakariah Yusuf, Jessy Ouma and Joseph Opoku, who wielded knives and machetes to steal watches in Clapham and Chelsea, were convicted of robbery. Queen Mary’s Crown, made in 1911, will be used to crown Queen Camilla in May, with three Cullinan diamonds restored to it, but not the Koh-i-Noor. The Queen Consort, 75, caught Covid.
Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said that Britain had a ‘quick reaction alert force’ of Typhoon jets ready in case a Chinese balloon floated over. Fraser Sampson, the publicly appointed surveillance commissioner, warned that police are open to spying by using Chinese-made cameras. Erkin Tuniyaz, the governor of China’s north-western Xinjiang province, where Uyghur Muslims are persecuted, cancelled a visit to Britain. The Prime Minister said he did not want to ‘prejudge the outcome’ of an inquiry by the independent office for public appointments into the conduct of Richard Sharp, the chairman of the BBC, in arranging a meeting, when he was being considered for his BBC position, between Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and a cousin of Boris Johnson’s who was willing to act as guarantor on a loan for the then prime minister. Lilt changed its name after 50 years to Fanta Pineapple and Grapefruit.
The annual rate of inflation fell from 10.5 per cent in December to 10.1 per cent in January. The number of those of working age but economically inactive fell, mostly thanks to people aged 16 to 24 getting jobs; in that age range, the numbers fell from 178,422, in the three months to July 2022, to 122,397 in the last quarter of 2022. Ford is to cut 1,300 jobs, a fifth of its workforce in the UK, in the next two years. The Financial Conduct Authority is to be given new powers to regulate buy-now pay-later companies such as Clearpay, Klarna, Laybuy and Openpay. The FCA let the loans company Amigo off a £73 million fine, for failing to carry out proper affordability checks on loans, because it could not afford to pay it.
Abroad
The FBI examined parts of sensors recovered from a Chinese balloon that the United States shot down on 4 February, off South Carolina. The United States shot down three more objects: on 10 February a car-sized balloon over Dead Horse, Alaska; on 11 February another over the Canadian Yukon; and on 12 February one over Lake Huron in Michigan. But these seemed not to be Chinese. A series of pedestrians in Washington DC were robbed at gunpoint of their Canada Goose winter coats. The Mars Wrigley factory in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, was fined $14,500 after two workers had to be rescued after falling into a vat of chocolate.
Ukraine said that, in February, 824 Russian soldiers were dying per day in the war; the British Ministry of Defence said the figures were probably ‘accurate’. Fierce fighting continued around Bakhmut, where the Russian mercenary Wagner Group was active. President Maia Sandu of Moldova accused Russia of trying to stage a coup in her country as she appointed a prime minister to replace one who resigned last week. More than 41,000 people were believed to have died in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria on 5 February. Survivors were left without shelter in freezing weather. Uefa bore ‘primary responsibility’ for the chaos before last year’s Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid in Paris, according to an independent report, which said: ‘It is remarkable no one lost their life.’ Air India ordered 470 new aircraft from Europe’s Airbus and the US-based Boeing – a record number in aviation. India overtook France as the world’s biggest buyer of Scotch whisky, accounting for 219 million bottles in 2021, despite imposing a 150 per cent import tariff.
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