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Sue Gray resigned as chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister. She will become Sir Keir’s envoy for the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. She was replaced by Morgan McSweeney, 47. James Lyons, a former political journalist who has more recently worked for the NHS and TikTok, was brought in to take charge of strategic communications. Sir Keir paid back more than £6,000 for gifts and hospitality, including six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and a clothing rental agreement with his wife.
More people in the United Kingdom died than were born in the year to mid-2023, according to the Office for National Statistics. Nonetheless, the population grew by 1 per cent to 68.3 million, because net migration was 677,300. In the seven days to 7 October, 1,368 migrants in small boats arrived in England – 973 of them on a single day: the most on any day this year. According to French authorities, a child was found to have died in a migrant vessel off Boulogne-Sur-Mer, and two men and a woman were crushed to death in a vessel off Calais. The High Speed 2 rail project will run to Euston in the centre of London, Louise Haigh, the Transport Secretary, confirmed, rather than ending at Old Oak Common, near Wormwood Scrubs. Ofwat ordered water companies to repay customers £158 million through lower bills next year after they failed to meet targets on pollution and leaks. Abu Dhabi wrote off its 9.9 per cent investment in Thames Water.
Russia’s ‘GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets’, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, said in his annual update of security threats. Tom Tugendhat was knocked out of the Conservative leadership contest, leaving MPs with one more to eliminate from Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch before a choice of two is put to party members. James Murray, the Treasury minister, said that VAT would be imposed on private school fees from January, despite warnings from unions and tax experts that it was too soon. Tesco in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis announced plans to open on Sundays. The Pope named Father Timothy Radcliffe, the English Dominican, as one of 21 new cardinals to be created on 8 December.
Abroad
Israel sent thousands of additional ground forces into Lebanon, seeking to root out Hezbollah and destroy its infrastructure. In a video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, urged Lebanon to free itself from Hezbollah to avoid ‘a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza’. He also said that Hashem Safieddine – the successor to Hezbollah’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah – had been killed. Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, reaching the city of Haifa on three consecutive days. Some 1.2 million people had been displaced, according to Lebanese authorities. An Israeli strike on a mosque and former school in Gaza, used by Hamas as ‘command and control centres’ according to the Israel Defence Forces, was reported by Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry to have killed 26.
Britain is handing over to Mauritius the Chagos Islands, including the atoll of Diego Garcia, which will still be used as a military base by the United States. Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, criticised the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, for making the announcement before telling parliament. Britain offered dozens of stranded Tamil migrants, held for years in a camp on Diego Garcia, a temporary move to Romania. An ocean-imaging ship of the Royal New Zealand Navy ran aground off Samoa, caught fire, capsized and sank; all 75 aboard were saved. Millions in Florida were told to leave their homes to avoid Hurricane Milton. TikTok was sued by 14 US states, which claimed that the social media platform contributed to a mental health crisis among teenagers.
Ukraine said it had carried out a strike on the large Feodosia oil terminal on the coast of occupied Crimea. Ukraine will not renew beyond the end of the year a contract with Russia’s Gazprom to allow transit of gas, Denys Shmyhal, its Prime Minister, told Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia – which, like Austria and Hungary, relies heavily on Russian gas. The European Union decided to raise tariffs on electric cars made in China from 10 per cent to up to 45 per cent for the next five years. China, which buys 99 per cent of its imported brandy from France, retaliated with tariffs on EU brandy. CSH
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