The Daily Telegraph — 11.10.2026

Sunday 11 October 2026

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Hastings being

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Trump: Zelensky must be ousted

White House's anger at strikes on fuel facilities threatens to deepen rift with UK

By Natasha Leake, Camilla Turner and Lily Shanagher

DONALD TRUMP has called for Volodymyr Zelensky to be ousted, saying Ukraine needs a new leader who can end the war with Russia.

Ukrainian strikes on Moscow's oil refineries provoked a furious response from the US president, who had agreed a deal to buy diesel from Vladimir Putin on Friday night.

Responding to the two drone attacks yesterday, Mr Trump said: “[Zelensky] better damn well stop. I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal.”

The US president's comments also threaten to deepen the rift between himself and Andy Burnham, who has offered Mr Zelensky his full support and pledged stronger sanctions on Moscow.

In a major break with Mr Trump, the Prime Minister expressed his “complete solidarity” with the Ukrainian leader, whom he is scheduled to meet in the coming days.

Mr Trump announced on Friday that Putin would “immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace”, followed by another 1.5 million tons before the end of the year.

The US president is facing pressure from voters over the cost of fuel before November's midterms as diesel prices have soared about 70 per cent since he launched a war against Iran. On Friday, a gallon of diesel cost \$6.28, up from \$3.68 a year ago.

Mr Zelensky was blindsided by the announcement and issued a rare public rebuke of the Trump administration, calling the deal a “gift to Putin” that would fund “further terror and perfidy” in his country.

A US official told Axios that Mr Trump had made the deal after the Ukrainian president ignored half a dozen requests to stop attacking Russian refineries. “Zelensky is misreading the room. By continuing to hit refineries, he is eroding the goodwill that he has built with Trump over the last six months,” the official said.

Addressing Kyiv's bombing campaign last night, Mr Trump said: "We told Zelensky, 'You can do whatever you want to Russia, but don't hit the refineries because that's a world problem'. And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel."

Moscow welcomed Mr Trump's call to oust Mr Zelensky, with a Kremlin spokesman saying the US president had joined “many who believe that Ukraine needs leadership actually focused on peace, not Zelensky’s warmongering”.

Mr Burnham spoke to Mr Želensky on the phone yesterday. A Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister began by recognising the last 24 hours had been difficult for Ukraine and reiterated his complete solidarity.

"The two leaders next discussed the importance of maintaining pressure on Russia: the Prime Minister made it clear that the UK would continue to strengthen its sanctions on Russia and to take further action to constrain the Russian war machine."

Mr Burnham has attempted to turn around Britain's relationship with Mr Trump. However, US-UK relations Continued on Page 2

Analysis: Page 13

Editorial Comment: Page 17

Scarlett Johansson attends the premiere of her new film Ray Gunn at the Royal Festival Hall during the BFI London Film Festival. The actress voices a space-age pop star named Venus Nova in the animated crime caper, which is being released in December.

Burnham rushes to axe photo IDs at elections

By Camilla Turner

SUNDAY POLITICAL EDITOR

ANDY BURNHAM is rushing through laws to scrap photo ID checks at polling stations amid mounting speculation he will call an early general election, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Prime Minister has been accused of forcing through the controversial changes, meaning people will be allowed to vote with just a bank card.

Under current laws, which were introduced by the Conservatives in 2023, voters are required to bring photo identification with them to polling stations. But the new proposals, drafted in the Representation of the People Bill, intend to expand the type of eligible ID to include bank cards with no photograph – a move that the Electoral Commission has raised concerns about.

The bill also includes a crackdown on political donations – which has raised

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'First in Makerfield and now in Holborn, Burnham has proved he can beat Reform and the Greens'

suspicions Labour wants to outlaw two donations Reform received from crypto billionaires – and the introduction of votes at the age of 16. It is due to enter Committee Stage in the Lords in the coming weeks.

Ministers are planning to rewrite large sections of the bill to make even more changes to the electoral system – while at the same time slashing the amount of time to debate it from 10 days to fewer than five.

Several of Mr Burnham's advisers are pushing for him to hold an election next year, with some arguing that a vote in spring would give Labour the best chance of another majority.

One senior party source told The Telegraph that Mr Burnham and those pressing for an early election “100 per cent” want the bill to go through before calling a snap poll. “First in Makerfield and now in Holborn and St Pancras, Andy Burnham has proved one way or another that he can beat them both,” they said, referring to the Reform and Green parties.

"Some people around him are talking [an early election] up," the source added.

Mr Burnham beat Reform in the Makerfield by-election earlier this year, paving his way to oust Sir Keir Starmer as Continued on Page 2

Editorial Comment: Page 17

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MATT

INSIDE

News Focus 20

Business 23

TV listings 30

Weather 32

Mauritius reignites Chagos row with threat to sue

By Camilla Turner

MAURITIUS has threatened to sue Andy Burnham over the Chagos deal impasse, The Telegraph has learnt.

'I've just seen the borrowing figures. If we're putting animals on the new banknotes a lemming might be appropriate'

Navin Ramgoolam, the country's prime minister, warned Jonathan Powell, the UK's national security adviser, last week that he was prepared to "take the legal route" unless the deadlock was "expeditiously resolved".

The intervention marks a significant breakdown in the relationship between the Labour government and Mauritius.

It will intensify concern in Whitehall that Britain could be pursued again at the International Court of Justice, where Mauritius could seek to enforce its claim to sovereignty over the archipelago.

Labour's plan to cede the Chagos Islands has stalled after Donald Trump made clear that he was unwilling to allow any deal that would see sovereignty transferred to Mauritius, because of concerns about the security of Diego Garcia – the joint British-American military base on the islands.

At the UN summit in New York last month, Mr Trump said he thought the “terrible” agreement should be scrapped and called on Mr Burnham to review it.

Last week, Mr Ramgoolam and Mr Powell met in London to discuss the future of the islands. The Mauritian prime minister “stressed” that his country’s claim over the sovereignty of Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, was “not negotiable”. He added that the “non-ratification of the treaty to date, rendered the status quo untenable”.

Mauritian cabinet ministers were briefed about the meeting between Mr

Ramgoolam and Mr Powell, and told that Mr Ramgoolam “made it clear that, although Mauritius was open to dialogue and diplomacy in order to resolve the issue, it would be inevitable that Mauritius would take the legal route unless the matter was expeditiously resolved.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "We have always been clear that an agreement with Mauritius must protect UK interests and command US support. As the PM has said, we continue to work with both the US and Mauritius to find a diplomatic resolution."

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Zoo visitor dies after 'jumping in tiger pen'

Victim reportedly tried to play with the animal inside its enclosure before it attacked him

By Samuel Montgomery

A MAN has died after being attacked by a tiger at a zoo in Yorkshire.

The unnamed man reportedly jumped into the enclosure at Yorkshire

Wildlife Park yesterday afternoon, with witnesses telling local media that they had heard shots being fired.

Footage shared on social media showed the man, wearing a black jumper, sitting on the ground in the centre of the enclosure as the tiger bit his chest and attempted to claw at his legs. Emergency services attended the incident, but the man was pronounced dead at the scene.

The park in Doncaster was evacuated shortly after the incident, and the site will remain closed for the rest of the weekend. A black screen has been erected around the enclosure.

South Yorkshire Police said it had received reports of a man entering the enclosure at 1.35pm, before being attacked by the tiger. The animal was uninjured and remained inside the pen after the incident.

Yorkshire Ambulance Service Trust said it had sent two ambulances and an air ambulance to the scene.

A statement released by the park also confirmed that a “serious incident” had occurred. “Our emergency response procedures were immediately activated and emergency services are currently attending the scene,” it said. “We are working closely with the authorities to ascertain exactly what happened.”

One visitor at the time of the incident said it looked “as if someone had jumped into the enclosure”, adding that it appeared the tiger had been shot.

“People are saying they heard a gun-shot, and they say someone either jumped in or fell in,” said Tia Hanson. “There was an air ambulance and police everywhere. We’ve all been made to leave.

"When you're leaving you have to walk past the tiger enclosure and they've put up all sort of black tarpaulin so you couldn't really see," she added.

“But there were loads of police and ambulance people and a stretcher in the enclosure as well.”

Another visitor told The Telegraph that the man had attempted to play with the tiger after jumping into the pen. Courtney Hatfield, who had been visiting the park with her friends and their children, said: "We got evacuated but from what I heard from staff and others who witnessed the incident, a man had jumped into the tiger enclosure and attempted to play with it."

She said staff had been assured that the animal was safe, having been “scared back into his cage”.

Yorkshire Wildlife Park advertises itself as the “UK’s no.1 walk-through wildlife adventure”. Its Land of the Tigers enclosure is described as a 980ft-long walkway, where visitors can “witness the majestic cats freely roaming their woodlands and grasslands or playing in their very own waterfall pool”.

In March 2025, the park welcomed Altai, a three-year-old Siberian tiger, to join its tigress Tschuna at the park.

Siberian tigers, an endangered species, are the largest big cats in the world, averaging between 25st and 30st for males and 17st to 20st for females.

Boris Johnson slams Trump's ‘sickening’ Putin deal

Continued from Page 1

have been under strain in the past fortnight after a series of threats to RAF bases also used by American forces. The American leader has also shared a tumultuous relationship with Mr Zelensky. However, relations had appeared to be improving since Mr Zelensky's visit the US in August 2025.

But the Ukrainian president responded furiously to Mr Trump's diesel agreement with Putin on Friday. "It looks like a happy birthday present for Putin – it looks absolutely terrible," he told Axios. The Russian president's birthday took place earlier this week. The outlet reported that Mr Zelensky had sounded "exasperated and dismayed" following the deal.

Following news of the diesel deal, drones struck oil refineries in Russia yesterday. Flames were seen coming from an oil-loading terminal operated by the Novoshakhtinsk refinery, in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

Another major oil facility was also struck hours later near Prosvet in the Samara region. It was believed to be one of Russia's largest hubs for receiving, storing and blending crude petroleum.

Last night former prime minister Boris Johnson criticised the US, writing on X that it was “sickening that the USA is now lifting sanctions on Russian fuel, and transparently ridiculous to blame Ukraine for the spike in prices that obviously began with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz”.

Mike Pence, Mr Trump's former vice-president, also criticised the deal. In a post on X, he said that Mr Trump had thrown a “lifeline to Putin’s war machine”, adding that Russia was losing the war against Ukraine.

Great Scott Blythe Scott has returned to her hometown of Glasgow for a major solo exhibition at the city's Annan Gallery. The show runs until Oct 25 and features more than two decades of the artist's work on her international travels.

Burnham ‘ramming through’ voter rules despite fraud fears

Continued from Page 1

prime minister. Meanwhile his Labour candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, saw off the threat of the Green leader Zack Polanski in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election last week, which was triggered after Sir Keir stepped down as an MP over the summer.

Mr Polanski now faces calls to quit, while Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, also faced a coup on Friday night as one of his own frontbenchers resigned in an attempt to oust him.

Cabinet ministers are understood to be split on the merits of calling an early election. One minister told The Telegraph they would be “tempted” to, given the splits on the Right between the Tories and Reform. But they noted that Baroness May’s 2017 snap election led to her losing her majority, adding: “The public don’t like it when they think you are doing it to benefit your self". Another Cabinet minister said that while the political conditions are currently good for Mr Burnham, the economic outlook is very weak and winning an election will not alter this.

Voter ID rules were brought in by Rishi Sunak's government, with voters first made to provide photo identification at the May 2023 local elections. It has since also been a requirement at last year's local elections and general election. During the last general election, 0.08 per cent of people who tried to vote were unable to because they did not have the right form of ID, according to data collected in polling stations by the Electoral Commission.

Government ministers have admitted in their responses to parliamentary questions that their plans to water down ID requirements at polling stations go significantly further than previously thought. Bank cards only need to display initials rather than the full first name of their owner, and they do not need to indicate the sex of the owner, one minister confirmed.

Lord Massey, a Tory peer and former Conservative party chief executive, said there is a “serious risk” to the integrity of the voting system, adding that the use of an initial only “means that the scope for fraud is even wider”.

He accused Mr Burnham of “deliberately diluting” the more rigorous identity checks on voters, saying: “It can only exacerbate the growing risk of fraud in elections and encourage those who want to perpetrate it. Northern Ireland will not be implementing this change because it is considered a security risk.”

Dr Vijay Rangarajan, the Electoral Commission's chief executive, warned the government earlier this year that he is “concerned about the bank cards proposal”. Giving evidence during a bill committee hearing, he said: “We do see growing public support for voter ID – 73 per cent of the British public are now in favour of it, up from 65 per cent in 2024 – and the way we have implemented it has broadly worked.”

Dr Rangarajan acknowledged that there is “a slight cost” to the policy as it “put off” some voters and meant that some were unable to vote.

He said: “Rather than continually changing the system, it would be helpful to allow a broad range of voter IDs—which should probably stay with the existing security standard to maintain public trust—and give some stability to the system. In time, people will get used to it; we are already well above 90 per cent of people knowing that they have to bring voter ID.”

Lord Hayward, a Conservative peer and election guru, said the government was “ramming through” the legislation but without “giving adequate consideration to what they are proposing”.

He said: “I am very concerned indeed about where we are heading – particularly on effectively the process by which we protect our democracy. The biggest single concern is that on the financing of both political parties and elections in general, the retrospectivity of parts of the proposals seems to run counter to the basic principles of English legislation. We have always taken the view that you can’t make legislation retrospective.”

A Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister has ruled out an early election." A government spokesman said: "The bill is going through the proper parliamentary process, giving MPs and peers the time and opportunity to examine and debate its measures. These reforms will strengthen our democracy and ensure the electoral system remains secure, fair and accessible."

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Bishop's ‘great privilege’ after Pope appointment

The new Bishop of Brentwood has said it was a “great privilege” to be appointed by Pope Leo XIV.

The Pope appointed Bishop Timothy Menezes, to become the eighth bishop of the diocese of Brentwood, which was erected in 1917.

Bishop Menezes, 56, who previously worked as an auxiliary bishop in Birmingham, succeeds Bishop Alan Williams who resigned after turning 75 in March.

Bishop Menezes was ordained a priest in July 1995, and in August this year, he was critical of the assisted dying bill and encouraged Catholics to contact their MPs. He will be formally installed on Dec 3.

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More Salmonella cases found in Ukrainian eggs

A warning has been issued to consumers and businesses not to eat or sell some eggs imported from Ukraine after salmonella was identified.

Food Standards Scotland and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said the eggs originate from Yasensvit Ltd, based in Kyiv, and are stamped with the code 3UA1012066.

They may have been supplied to catering businesses or sold through smaller retail outlets.

The eggs may have been repacked by UK businesses and sold under different business names, making the stamp code the most reliable way to identify them. The eggs should be safely disposed of, the FSA said.

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Four held for alleged murder of teenager

Four people have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a teenager died in Stoke-on-Trent on Friday night, Staffordshire Police have said.

Officers were called to reports of violence in Brookhouse Road in Meir at 11.45pm on Friday.

A man in his late teens, who has not yet been named by police, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Another man in his late teens was taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries and remains there in “a critical but stable condition”, the force said.

A 17-year-old boy, two 18-year-old men and a 20-year-old man, all from Stoke-on-Trent, have been arrested. All four remain in police custody.

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Flatley describes pain at losing 'lady of the dance'

Michael Flatley has described “never feeling pain like it” at the funeral of his wife, Niamh O’Brien.

The Riverdance star had the couple's son Michael St James at his side as he tearfully paid tribute to their “lady of the dance”.

Ms O'Brien, 52, died at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin last week after an illness. Mourners from across the world turned out to attend her funeral at Church of St Thérèse, Mount Merrion yesterday.

They included former Riverdance lead dancer Padraic Moyles and actor Patrick Connolly Bergin.

Ms O'Brien performed the lead role of Saoirse in the Lord of the Dance shows alongside Flatley.

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Chinese artefacts smash at British Museum

Qing dynasty relics found mysteriously broken inside their case, prompting diplomatic row with Beijing

By Steve Bird

A QING dynasty porcelain bowl and ceramic box have been smashed in a mysterious fall at the British Museum, threatening to open up a diplomatic row with China.

The artefacts, part of the Sir Percival David Collection, were damaged when the bowl suddenly fell from its mount in its display cabinet and landed on the box below.

Staff at the London museum have analysed CCTV but remain baffled why the bowl fell. The mount was not damaged and there was no one in the room when the incident happened on Oct 4. British Museum staff are continuing to investigate what caused the damage.

Photographs of the broken ceramic were posted on social media by Chinese visitors to the display in Room 95 of the museum.

The pictures show numerous shards of the shattered ceramics strewn across the lower shelf. The room was closed once the damage was discovered. It has since reopened and a card has replaced the bowl, stating that the porcelain is undergoing “restoration”.

The breakages have triggered anger in China in both the national media and on social media.

Under the headline “Cracks in security?”, the South China Morning Post, which has faced accusations of being influenced by the Chinese government, claimed the damage has “sparked debate on Chinese social media over

A Qing dynasty porcelain bowl, right, smashed at the British Museum

how museums should protect fragile works".

It quoted Pan Jinyu, a Chinese-speaking tour guide in London, who said: "I am more concerned with why the accident happened, how the artefacts will be restored and how similar incidents can be prevented in the future." It went on to reference the 2003 theft scandal, which led to the former director resigning and his deputy "stepping back from his duties" after they failed to uncover the theft of more than 1,500 objects.

Elsewhere, The Shanghai Daily, a state-controlled paper, described the bowls as being among “one of the most important collections of Chinese ceramics outside China”.

A British Museum spokesman said: "The shelf and mount show no sign of failure but we will continue to investigate how this happened.

“Both objects are already with our expert conservation team for complete restoration. We take the care of objects incredibly seriously and have stringent measures in place within cases to protect from such incidents

'The bowls are one of the most important collections of Chinese ceramics outside China'

occurring." The museum refused to say how much the artefacts are worth. The bowl and box were not on loan but instead are part of the museum's own collection.

A museum source added: “CCTV shows that no one was in the gallery at the time when the bowl fell from the shelf. The mount on which the bowl was held is in perfect condition with no sign of failure at all and was well back on the shelf. The shelf is in perfect condition with no sign of failure.

"Subsequent investigations have

“We own the building works were happening on site at the time which could have caused the bowl to fall.”

Both ceramics date to the Kangxi period (1662 to 1722) of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and originate from Jingdezhen in China's Jiangxi province.

An ode to a phantom who's captivated us for decades

Dominic Cavendish

CHIEF THEATRE CRITIC

Theatre

Phantom of the Opera (40th anniversary) His Majesty's Theatre, SW1

★★★★★

THE Phantom of the Opera – Lord Lloyd-Webber's masterpiece and one of the most successful entertainments of all time, reputed to have grossed more than \$6bn – has turned 40.

Judging by Friday's super-slick, note-perfect gala performance – boasting a special anniversary cast and filmed for cinema release next year – it looks good for another 40. As adapted into a through-sung spectacle stuffed with imperishable tunes, Gaston Leroux's 1910 thriller of obsessive passion at the 1880s Paris Opera has been seen by some 160 million people worldwide. But it all began on Oct 9, 1986 at Her Majesty's theatre – now, of course, His Majesty's.

The icing on the birthday cake on the big night, an occasion of high emotion, was a post-performance coup de théâtre as sensational as that famous swooping chandelier, part of a confetti-bombarded coda of speeches and surprises. Michael Crawford, the original Phantom, reunited on stage with Sarah Brightman, the original Christine, the young chorus girl whom the disfigured Phantom, haunting the Opera, schemes to elevate and captivate.

“Thank you, without you Phantom would never have happened,” Lord Lloyd-Webber told Brightman, his second wife, in a moving tribute to all those who enabled the show’s triumph, including the late director Hal Prince and choreographer Gillian Lynne.

There were gasps of astonishment when Crawford and Brightman made their shock entrance, towards the end of a bespoke rendition of the rock-operatic title song. A succession of past Phantoms and Christines delivered the number in a sort of duet-relay, each couple in turn evoking the shadowy, thrilling descent to the Svengali-like anti-hero's candle-lit lair below the opera house.

Then, amid billowing mist, who should be steering the gondola, but the 84-year-old Crawford? Frail but exuding a forceful, stirring presence in his tuxedo, his impressive vocals wove together with Brightman's leather-lunged soprano; she hit that glass-

The superb Jordan Donica and Beatrice Penny-Touré, above, were joined on stage on Friday night by Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, the original Phantom and Christine, as well as Lord Lloyd-Webber

shattering high E at the song's climax, her eyes wildly possessed. The two of them looked sweetly overwhelmed by the rapturous applause.

That was ample to write home about, but Crawford also led an exquisite rendition of The Music of the Night that saw him joined by five other Phantoms, including the current, superb incarnation, Jordan Donica. In a lovely meeting of generations, Donica sang “You alone can make my song take flight” with Crawford

completing the line, "Help me make the music of the night".

In a sense, that goes to the heart of why the Phantom has endured while so many other musicals have fallen by the wayside. It offers immensity of scale and old-fashioned lavish entertainment – a replica elephant adorning the scene of the pastiche grand opera Hannibal, the masquerade ball a living picture-book, moments of stage-magic as when the Phantom materialises in a mirror. Yet it's also

intricately detailed, expertly crafted. You come for the theme-park ride, stay for the themes. American director Seth Sklar-Heyn honours every beat of the labyrinthine score, with its mesmeric internal echoes. When Donica sings the serpentine, predatory number Stranger Than You Dreamt It, he slithers on all fours towards Beatrice Penny-Touré's Christine – repelled yet attracted by this unloved recluse.

For all the hokey ingredients, the consummate artistry honours the

Phantasmagorical The musical's lasting legacy

There have been more than 15,000 performances of the musical on the West End stage, and it has been seen by more than 160 million people worldwide. John Owen-Jones, right, the Welsh actor and singer, has taken on the role of the Phantom nearly 2,000 times – more than any other performer in London's West End.

Phantom of the Opera premiered at Her Majesty's Theatre in the West End on Oct 9 1986 – and had its Broadway debut at the Majestic Theatre in 1988 – with Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Sarah Brightman as Christine, left. The show was written by Lord Lloyd-Webber during his marriage to Brightman – with

the role

specifically

written for her

voice.

fable's dark truths about our lives and longings. Princess Diana was one of the show's fans (or "phans"), but Phantom speaks to anyone caught in a romantic bind or suffering unrequited love.

As Lord Lloyd-Webber once told me, even supermodels identify with the Phantom – and many of us hide an outcast's agony behind the expected social mask. As we age, are we not apt to look in the mirror and see that figure staring back? The show finally arrives at a lonely, pitiable sight of abandonment.

A tearjerker for all time? Maybe so. Seeing the key people and alumni on stage, the endearing diffident Lord Lloyd-Webber, 78, hugging the producer Cameron Mackintosh, 80 this month, the auditorium was engulfed by gratitude and fondness, and intimations of mortality. This show, and these people, changed the British musical. Have we taken Phantom for granted? It's time we didn't.

Booking to July 2027; the 40th anniversary cast remain until Nov 21

Protect our wonderland: Cotswolds at war over plan for Carroll's favourite hotel

By Robert White MONEY REPORTER

IT WAS at Cowley Manor where Lewis Carroll is said to have witnessed a rabbit disappearing down the hole of a Cotswolds hedgerow, prompting an idea that would lead to one of the most enduring adventure stories of all time.

But now villagers living in the shadow of what is today a five-star country house hotel are waging a war to protect the wonderland that inspired the author's writing.

Locals are opposing plans submitted by Cowley Manor Experimental - which hosts wed

which hosts were

dings, spa retreat

and pool parties -

for a substantial

expansion of the

hotel.

It has lodged a planning applica

planning application to increase the number of rooms from 36 to 75 across seven different locations on the grounds, as well as plans to extend the spa. Planning documents show that the net internal floorspace from the development would rise by nearly 29,000 sq feet, with an additional 15 staff needing to be employed if the proposals were approved.

Residents believe the application, which also includes proposals to install two heat pumps, build an electricity substation and an emergency generator, and secure valet parking for 100 cars at a remote site, would shatter the tranquillity of the village.

They argue that the grounds, a designated conservation area, should be protected, as Cowley comprises just 50 homes and narrow roads.

David Thompson, who has lived in the village for eight

years, believes the plans for valet parking to cope with the expansion are

Cowley Manor is said to be where Lewis Carroll saw a rabbit jumping down a hole that inspired his character in Alice in Wonderland, left

“flawed”, given that it is a single-track lane that has potholes and floods every year. He said: “The whole thing has been sold to the village on the concept that the changes will restore the listed grounds to their previous glory.

“They can do what they like inside the grounds, but if they don’t sort out the car parking and the lorries and vans coming to service the hotel, then it will result in chaos within the village.”

Theo Jordan, who has lived in the village for 23 years, told The Telegraph: "We're in a conservation area and an area of outstanding natural beauty, and yet they're going to build a car park on a field used by a cricket club. And then they're talking about using electric vehicles to bring the people from the car park to the manor, but we're a small village... so I'm not sure how that's going to work."

The estate markets itself as a “rural sanctuary underlined by luxury”, allowing guests to explore the “natural splendour and historic charm” of the Cotswolds.

But in one report submitted to the planning application, a council biodiversity officer wrote that it did “not appear that all ecological impacts have been fully considered and assessed”.

Stuart Drysdale, the chairman of the parish council and a resident of Cowley for 30 years, said the changes would harm both the heritage and the ecology of the site.

He told The Telegraph: "The plans are going to change the experience of visiting the historic gardens and house, and the development – as proposed – is just too expansive for the site in comparison to the village.

"The River Churn is an important wildlife corridor leading up the whole valley, which is one of the pleasurable things about the area, but there's a total disrespect for the existing wildlife that's there in the plans."

Ray and Betty Goodwin, a married couple in their 90s who have lived in Cowley since 1971, said guests had parked in driveways of residents, including their own.

Mr Goodwin told The Telegraph: "They put their car there and disappear into the manor, and you're lumbered with it until they decide to come out.

“That’s only going to get worse with the expansion.

A spokesman for Cowley Manor Experimental said their priority was to ensure the long-term future of the estate. "We are committed to ensuring that Cowley Manor Experimental remains a significant and positive part of the local area."

A spokesman for Cotswold district council said it recognised the concerns raised by residents, adding that the application remained under consideration. A decision is expected by Oct 15.

-BELINDA JIAO FOR THE TELEGRAPH-

Britain's Benefits Streets living off handouts

Benefit Britain

Areas where more than half of working age population is claiming out-of-work benefits

A man who gave his name as Froggy, 65, from Sparkbrook in Birmingham, above, says he gets £120 a week in Pip payments

In thousands of areas across the country, more adults are claiming welfare than working

By Charles Hymas and Samuel Montgomery

MORE than half of adults in thousands of neighbourhoods across England and Wales are on out-of-work benefits, a report has found.

In a major analysis of Britain's welfare system, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has identified 3,369 neighbourhoods where the majority of working-age people are on out-of-work benefits.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of Universal Credit and founder of the CSJ think tank, said millions of Britons had fallen back into a welfare trap because of health-related benefits that give them no incentive to seek work.

The 3,369 “welfare hotspots”, each comprising on average 250 residents, are collectively home to 850,000 people. On some streets, as many as 80 per cent of households are on out-of-work benefits.

On top of that, there are 19,000 neighbourhoods across England and Wales where more than a third of the working-age adults are claiming out of work benefits. Together, these areas account for almost six million people.

The findings are the result of a year-long investigation by the CSJ into the ballooning cost of welfare. A 250-page report, entitled State of Dependency, will be published on Tuesday.

Sir Iain told The Telegraph: “Britain is now living with levels of worklessness that would once have been treated as a national emergency. Yet because much of that worklessness is recorded as incapacity rather than conventional unemployment, it has gradually become accepted as a fact of life since the pandemic. This is not good enough. Lives are being ruined and yet this issue hides in plain sight.”

Birmingham tops the table with 166 neighbourhoods where more than half of working age adults are claiming out of work benefits. It is followed by Liverpool with 112, Sheffield with 82 and Bradford with 81. The Telegraph visited Sparkbrook in Birmingham where some of the highest concentrations of people on out-of-work benefits live.

Karol Krawczyk, 47, said he had been unable to secure work since an injury five years ago. “When I got sick, I lost everything,” he said. “I had a knee operation and now I cannot walk properly, it makes me look drunk.”

He moved to the UK from Poland around 20 years ago for work and found regular employment on construction sites as a welder and forklift operator.

“I want to go back to work but nobody can give it to me. I have lots of experience,” he said, adding: “I did some work and they didn’t pay me. It is better for me to do nothing for four weeks for £400 of benefits. It is a struggle.”

He added: "I lived in London and Clacton-on-Sea. My mistake was

coming here... I am thinking of going back home." Mr Krawczyk, who now lives in a hostel, said he had applied for Pip twice and been rejected both times.

About 6.7 million people across England, Wales and Scotland receive at least one out-of-work benefit, up from 3.9 million in 2019 and equivalent to one in six (15.8 per cent) working-age adults.

Blackpool has the highest share of “welfare hotspots”, representing 15 per cent of neighbourhoods, followed by Hartlepool (12 per cent) and Redcar and Cleveland (8 per cent).

In total, around 22 per cent of neighbourhoods in Liverpool and 18 per cent in Birmingham have out-of-work claimant numbers equivalent to at least 40 per cent of the working-age population, compared with just 2 per cent in London. The CSJ report aims to lay the groundwork for reforms to cut back health-related benefits, which have been blamed for a near 60 per cent rise in the welfare bill to £136.1bn in 2026-27 since the Covid pandemic.

The hotspot analysis focuses on Universal Credit including its health-related element and legacy incapacity benefits but does not include data on personal independence payments (Pips), which many UC families also claim.

The report, which analysed Office of National Statistics data of 190,000 areas across England and Wales, found that worklessness increasingly appears as “incapacity” rather than unemployment.

Mental health is a key driver, with 3.2 million more working-age people reporting a mental health difficulty than in 2012.

Cameron Lucas, who lives in Birmingham, said he had given up trying to find employment after applying for a hundred jobs and not hearing anything back. “I have tried working a few times but it hasn’t gone well because of my mental health,” the 25-year-old said, adding: “I worked 12-hour shifts in warehouses, something to keep my mind occupied.”

Mr Lucas, who now receives Universal Credit, has thrown in the towel, saying: "I don't see the point in working because half the time the payments can mess up your schedule. Universal Credit is more reliable."

A 29-year-old woman, who wished to remain anonymous, said the high levels of unemployment were

“noticeable” in the area. “When you go into Somali town, as we call it, you just see people outside in the cafes,” she said, gesturing down the road, before adding: “It annoys me, they are loitering around and doing nothing.”

A 65-year-old man, who gave his name only as Froggy, said he had been out of work for 40 years. "I used to do painting and decorating. The money they gave you is a waste of time. Now

I am on Pip, I get £120 a month. Everyone else is getting more," he said.

The incapacity benefit caseload has risen by 61 per cent – making Britain an international outlier – while the prevalence of disability among the working-age population increased by 16 per cent. Since 2019, the number of working-age benefit claimants facing no requirement to seek or prepare for employment has increased by almost 1.7 million.

A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said: “These statistics show that for far too many years, worklessness has been entrenched in many communities and ill-health increasingly used as a reason to be left behind, resulting in the broken welfare system we inherited. We are already reforming the welfare system across the country by narrowing the gap between Universal Credit standard and health rates, restoring face-to-face assessments, and investing £3.5bn in employment support. We’re putting work and opportunity at the heart of the system, and the final recommendations from the Timms and Milburn Reviews will lay the foundation for sustainable reform.”

Mock Tudor style could tip owners into mansion tax trap

By Camilla Turner

MOCK Tudor homes are to be targeted for inspection by John Healey's mansion tax police.

Government officials will arrive at properties with a checklist of architectural styles to help assess whether the homeowner is liable to pay thousands of extra pounds in tax.

Inspectors will also be told to look out for “ornate” features surrounding windows and doors when valuing properties, as well as for “fake traditionalism” such as “mock Tudor” details.

The Telegraph revealed earlier this year that His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) agents will be able to demand entry to people's properties to assess their value for the new levy.

Under the mansion tax, which Rachel Reeves announced in her final Budget, properties worth more than £2m will be hit with a surcharge of between £2,500 and £7,500 a year, depending on their valuation.

Guidance documents reveal inspectors are told to look out for “fake traditionalism”, noting that “during the 1980s and 1990s, external decoration had followed a trend towards fake traditionalism, mock Tudor, mock Georgian and the like”. “Architectural style and characteristics are nearly always more important than size or accommodation," the guidance says.

However, it adds that mock Tudor “embellishments” should not automatically “be mistaken for improvements in the property’s quality”.

The 55-page document, which the Conservatives obtained under freedom of information laws, reveals that HMRC inspectors will be told to assess the “architectural style and characteristics” of homes they visit, to work out which group the property belongs in.

Inspections will be carried out by agents from the Valuation Office Agency, a part of HMRC, with staff expected to record details of each house and feed them into a computer model to provide an estimated value.

'Ornate' features and mock Tudor beams will be evaluated by the HMRC

It will deploy a new AI-powered database, which was developed for the Welsh Labour government so it could carry out a council tax revaluation.

Katie Lam, the shadow housing secretary, said: “Labour’s family homes tax risks turning owning a home into a source of anxiety, with hard-working people facing huge tax bills simply because of the appearance and character of their home.

“Even Labour ministers admit that HMRC inspectors will be snooping around bathrooms and bedrooms. The level of intrusion by the state this policy entails is appalling.”

She said the Conservatives would scrap the mansion tax.

A Government spokesman said: "HMRC's approach to valuing homes is well-established and already used to ensure fair and accurate valuations for millions of homes for council tax."

HMRC officials added that in the “vast majority” of cases, they will be able to make banding decisions using existing information without the need to visit a property.

The welfare system is an economic opiate, numbing pain of stagnation

Iain Duncan Smith

MORE than 20 years ago, I founded the Centre for Social Justice because the benefit system kept people afloat but often made escaping their circumstances extraordinarily difficult.

By 2009, we had a bewildering system of 51 different benefits. Some people trying to improve their position through work lost more than 90 pence of every additional pound they earned.

The CSJ's Breakdown Britain and Breakthrough Britain reports established the case for change. Our subsequent work produced the blueprint for Universal Credit, a simpler system designed to make work pay and help people towards independence. Introducing it was a long, difficult battle. There were setbacks, fierce arguments and plenty of people who said it could not be done.

But it worked. Before the pandemic, Britain had reached a record low in workless households. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of children

growing up without a working parent fell by three quarters of a million. Youth unemployment halved, and a million more disabled people entered employment. In today's money, almost £28bn was saved from the benefit bill.

I will never forget a letter from a man who bought his mother flowers every Friday. He described what it meant, for the first time, to buy them with money he had earned. That was the purpose of reform. Behind the statistics were people gaining a wage, a routine, colleagues and the chance to build a different future.

Then Covid struck. Universal Credit withstood an extraordinary surge in demand, demonstrating the strength of the system we had built. But the pandemic exposed weaknesses elsewhere, particularly in health-related claims, and progress against worklessness began to unravel.

Subsequent decisions compounded the problem. Conditionality was weakened and face-to-face assessments all but disappeared as all parties called for higher and higher spending. Government either ducked the issue or reached for hurried savings without a serious plan for reform. It has been reported that ministers are once again delaying

action until after the upcoming Budget. We should not stand by while years of progress go to waste.

That is why I agreed to chair the CSJ's Welfare 2030 inquiry. Nearly two decades after the CSJ's original work, we needed to examine what had changed and establish what the next generation of reform must achieve. Its first report, State of Dependency, will be published on Tuesday.

Today, startling figures we have unearthed show why this mission is urgent. The analysis finds that in over 3,000 neighbourhoods across England and Wales, out-of-work benefit claimants now exceed half of the working-age population in the latest official estimates. Together, these places are home to almost 900,000 people, larger than the population of Leeds.

The state is paying to sustain dependency rather than create prosperity. The welfare system emerges as an economic opiate, numbing the pain of stagnation, leaving its causes untouched and ultimately worsening the condition.

Rt Hon Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP served as leader of the Conservative Party from 2001-2003

Healey backs down on warehouse tax after high street warning

By Camilla Turner

SUNDAY POLITICAL EDITOR

JOHN HEALEY has ruled out a “warehouse tax” raid ahead of the Budget, The Telegraph understands.

The Chancellor is believed to recognise that a tax increase on warehouse space could be detrimental to high street shops and family businesses.

Jason Tarry, the chairman of John Lewis and Waitrose, had warned that a tax raid on retailers would trigger a wave of catastrophic closures and “harm our high streets”.

Mr Tarry said concern was mounting that Andy Burnham would fund his promise to cut business rates for pubs and music venues by “piling more costs” on to large stores with a so-called “warehouse tax”.

However, The Telegraph has been told that the Chancellor will not present plans for such a tax in his maiden Budget later this month.

Mr Healey is expected to host retail and hospitality chiefs in Downing Street this week to hear their concerns.

The Prime Minister had previously signalled that Labour would ramp up a tax on warehouses to help fund a tax cut for “businesses that bring social benefit", such as pubs and restaurants. UK businesses already face some of the highest property taxes in the industrialised world.

Labour has increased business rates on large warehouses, with changes that came into effect in April this year. This has increased costs for larger properties with a rateable value above £500,000.

Other senior figures in business and finance have also intervened to warn the Chancellor against burdening high streets and hospitality businesses with further taxes.

Lord O'Neill, an influential economist and a former adviser to Mr Burnham, urged the Chancellor to rule out “stupid” extra wealth taxes and higher business levies to avoid hurting the economy.

Stuart Machin, the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, described Labour's previous two budgets as “disasters” and a “crushing disappointment”.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Mr Machin urged the Chancellor to “get Britain growing by taking the handcuffs off business and putting money back into people’s pockets”.

Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, said imprudent tax and spending plans could trigger a repeat of the Liz Truss crisis of 2022. Taxes on business have soared since Labour came to power in 2024, including when Rachel Reeves raised employers' National Insurance contributions by about £25bn a year to pay for government spending plans.

Other rising costs under Labour, such as increases in the national minimum wage, have been blamed for employers' reluctance to take on young workers, triggering a spate of closures across Britain's high streets.

City trade associations also sent a letter to Mr Healey on Friday, calling for a commitment not to impose any new bank taxes. An HM Treasury spokesman said: "We want Britain's retailers to thrive, and the Chancellor has been clear that the way to tackle cost pressures in the long term is through growth. That is why he is focused on creating the conditions for businesses to invest, expand and create jobs in every postcode – and we are already backing firms through business rates cuts, a cap on corporation tax and a £4.3bn package to help businesses manage costs and keep investing.

"As has always been the case, decisions on tax are a matter for the Chancellor to set out at fiscal events."

We didn't know the nurse treating our son wasn't a doctor until he was dead

Parents demand changes at A&E after child was sent home with flu only to die when appendix burst

By Janet Eastham

ON THE day Dylan Cope, nine, was due to play a reindeer in his school Christmas play, his parents were watching him die.

Dylan loved science, coding and Lego. He was fascinated by the gears on his bicycle, and would always persevere with a Rubik's cube.

At home in Rhiwderin, Newport, he would drop everything and come running whenever the family Alexa announced: “Free hugs available in the lounge.”

"He was really unique, loving," his mother, Corinne Cope, said. "He was an unusual mix of sensitive, but also had a strong sense of justice."

His father, Laurence Cope, described him as “very funny, intelligent, inquisitive”, and someone who “would go far in life”.

Instead, on Dec 14 2022, Dylan died from septic shock caused by a ruptured appendix.

Eight days earlier, his GP had sent him to A&E with suspected appendicitis. There, he was examined by a woman in dark blue scrubs whom his father believed was a doctor.

“All night I thought she was a doctor,” Mr Cope said. It was only “some time after” their son’s death that they learnt the truth.

The woman, Sam Hayden, was a paediatric nurse practitioner who has since qualified as an advanced nurse practitioner (ANP). She wrongly attributed Dylan's abdominal pain to flu, and he was discharged from the Grange University Hospital in the early hours of Dec 7 without receiving a documented examination by a doctor.

Laurence and Corinne Cope want all children sent to A&E by a GP to be checked over by a senior doctor before they are discharged

Mr Cope later this son's inquest that, had he known Ms Hayden "was not a doctor", he probably "would have asked if a doctor could see Dylan, particularly given that his GP had already assessed Dylan and was concerned

A tribute to Dylan in the family's kitchen. His mother described him as 'really unique, loving'

that he may have an issue relating to his appendix."

Caroline Saunders, the senior coroner for Gwent, found that had the registrar on duty – a senior doctor training to become a consultant – examined Dylan, he would have been kept in hospital for further tests and undergone surgery before developing sepsis. His death would have been avoided.

She said there was a “gross failure of basic care” by hospital staff and concluded that their neglect contributed to his death.

Now Dylan's parents are calling for all children referred to A&E by a GP with a suspected serious illness to receive a documented, face-to-face examination by a senior doctor before discharge. "We don't want to villainise any group of clinicians at all. We just want to keep children safe. It's too late for us, but it's not too late for others," Mrs Cope said.

The NHS's reliance on non-doctors has prompted growing concern, with Freedom of Information figures showing that nearly half of NHS trusts use advanced practitioners to fill medical rotas, despite NHS guidance that they “should never replace the role of doctors”.

Advanced nursing and midwifery posts have more than tripled since 2015 to more than 11,300 last year.

It was only after Dylan's death, once an investigation had begun, that his parents learnt that Ms Hayden had never read the GP referral warning of suspected appendicitis.

At Dylan's inquest in May 2024, Ms Hayden said it "wouldn't be unusual" for her to assess children without reading their GP's referral.

"I found it shocking that she openly said that, and that she clearly thought that was OK, when her job was to only see children who had been referred by their GP," Mrs Cope said.

Ms Hayden reasoned that practitioners "shouldn't be led directly" by a GP's assessment.

"I've heard no good reason why she did not consider this

important document," the coroner concluded, finding the omission "below an acceptable standard of

care.

She also

found Ms

Hayden's

physical

News

examination “inadequate”. The nurse admitted that she “probably should have took more time to ask – more time to ask Dylan to describe the pain”.

When a nasal swab tested positive for influenza A, Ms Hayden declared "problem solved! He's got flu," Mr Cope said. She explained that flu could cause abdominal lymph nodes to swell, which explained Dylan's pain, and said he would receive a discharge letter and could go home.

At the inquest, Dylan's parents learnt that every child was supposed to receive a “senior review” before discharge from A&E. But this could mean anything from a brief conversation between staff to an in-person examination by a doctor.

For Dylan, the distinction was fatal. A “breakdown in communication” between Ms Hayden and Dr Lianne Doherty, the senior registrar on duty, meant that Dylan went home without such an examination.

The clinicians gave conflicting accounts of their conversation. Ms Hayden insisted she had mentioned Dylan's abdominal pain, but the registrar recalled being told only that Dylan had flu, and nothing about suspicions of appendicitis.

‘We just want to keep children safe. It’s too late for us, but it’s not too late for others’

Throughout the night, Mr Cope repeatedly challenged the flu diagnosis, asking multiple staff members whether Dylan could have appendicitis instead. But everyone he spoke to agreed with Ms Hayden's assessment.

“I even asked the nurse who discharged us, ‘Are you sure it’s not appendicitis?’ ‘Yep, flu. He’ll be fine by Saturday’.”

Dylan was sent home in the early hours of Dec 7 with a coughs and colds leaflet. At the inquest, the coroner addressed Mr Cope directly, absolving him of any responsibility for taking Dylan home.

She said: “That decision had been made for him and Dylan by others and he had no choice in that matter.”

When Saturday came, Dylan was worse, not better. Mr Cope repeatedly called the emergency number on the discharge letter, getting through on what he estimated was his 19th attempt, only to be told to call NHS 111.

After two hours on hold, he was promised a call back from a doctor. But Dylan was deteriorating so rapidly that his father didn't want to wait. He drove him straight back to A&E.

The emergency team “swooped in and took over”, Mr Cope recalled. Dylan was transferred to intensive care in Cardiff, where surgeons discovered his appendix had burst, causing widespread infection.

By Dec 13, his parents were told he was on “double the life support”, “exceeding the maximum of everything”, and that doctors were “not winning”. Dylan died the next day.

Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, which runs the Grange, told The Telegraph they had admitted responsibility for Dylan's death, that they remained “profoundly sorry” for the failings in his care, and that they had made “significant” improvements.

"But that's just one hospital," Mrs Cope said.

When approached by The Telegraph, neither the UK nor Welsh governments would commit to the parents' request for children referred to A&E by their GP to receive a documented physical examination with a senior doctor prior to discharge.

The Welsh Government said children should be reviewed by clinicians with the “appropriate level of seniority and expertise” before discharge, while the Department of Health and Social Care said there should be “appropriate senior clinical oversight”.

Civil servants paid £170m to dead pensioners in benefits blunder

By Matt Davis and Joe Wright

CIVIL servants paid out £170m to dead pensioners in a record benefits blunder last year.

Almost half of the sum, which comprises state pension and pension credit payments, has not been recovered.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has written off £16.5m of the 2025-26 debt, and is attempting to recover £67m.

In the past five years £673m has been paid to dead pensioners, and just over half of it, £348m, has been recovered.

Figures released under freedom of information rules show the £170m lost last year was the highest on record.

Grieving families are under no legal duty to hand it back, so officials can only write and ask for repayments. Debts that cost more to chase than they are worth are written off. Almost £240m has been written off as unrecoverable in the past five years.

Shimeon Lee, a policy analyst at the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "Taxpayers will be shocked that hundreds of millions have been paid into the accounts of people who had already died.

“Even if these losses are a small share of the pension bill, the scale of unrecovered cash points to serious weaknesses in the system.”

Ministers have previously told MPs that unrecovered sums represent only

The amount paid to pensioners who had died in the past five years. Only £348m, just over half, has been recovered

about 0.1pc of the annual £150bn pension spending.

Sir Steve Webb, the former pensions minister, now of LCP, said: “The reason why this happens is that there can be a gap between someone dying and the family registering the death and notifying DWP.

someone has died. There is no legal power for DWP to force people to repay this money, and many people would be upset if DWP took a heavy-handed approach to the recently bereaved.”

Sir Steve warned that as pension rates increase and the size of the pensioner population grows, the amount sent to deceased people each year will probably rise.

Deaths must be reported within five days, or eight days in Scotland. However, the person's final state pension payment still often includes payments for days after they died.

Where someone fails to report a death or gives misleading information, the DWP treats the cash as a formal overpayment recoverable by law and logs it as fraud or claimant error.

A DWP spokesman said: "It is DWP policy to recover all debt where it is reasonable and cost-effective to do so.

“We encourage anyone who has recently lost a loved one to use our Tell Us Once service, which makes it easy to notify us and other government services of a death in one simple step.”

Criminals leaving jail early must be tagged, urges victims' chief

ging prisoners before their release. That's the most important thing.

until Oct 5, and was jailed for eight months the following day.

By Charles Hymas

HOME AFFAIRS EDITOR

OFFENDERS freed early from jail must be electronically tagged when they leave the prison gates, the victims' commissioner has told the Government.

Claire Waxman said there were too many delays in fitting the tags to criminals once they were in the community, leaving their victims and the public at risk.

Nearly half of offenders are not tagged “promptly” on release, with one in 10 waiting up to five months before a device is fitted, an investigation by watchdogs found.

The tags enable offenders' movements to be tracked so that the police or probation services can step in if offenders breach victim exclusion or restriction zones.

Last week, The Telegraph revealed how a prolific shoplifter freed early from HMP Wandsworth in south London on Oct 1 went on a series of shop thefts within hours of being released without a tag. He was not rearrested

Ms Waxman and Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation, said there also needed to be quicker detection of – and quicker responses to – breaches or offences by electronically monitored criminals.

---

‘It feels like a false sense of security without the reassurance the offender has been tagged in time’

"It almost feels like a false sense of security because [victims and the public] don't have the reassurance that the offender has actually been tagged in time and how quickly, how well, agencies will respond to a breach of the tag," said Ms Waxman.

"We are tagging them post-release, so they're coming out and there are delays in getting the tag on them. I would say the Government needs to work at speed to make sure we're tag-

“Then, if there is a breach of the tag, the issue you have is the delay in notifying probation and the delay in notifying the police.”

Mr Jones said the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) should be aiming to tag nearly all offenders released early in tranches, as happened last Thursday when 700 criminals were freed. A second tranche of 650 is due to be freed early on Tuesday. He added: "There may be issues with routine releases which may be spread out throughout a week

“But where you know there is a surge of releases as a result of the early release tranche, it should be feasible to tag most prisoners who are on a GPS or alcohol tag as they leave the prison or on their first probation appointment.”

An MoJ spokesman said: “We inherited a justice system in crisis after years of under investment but are taking the tough decisions needed to fix it.

"This includes the biggest ever expansion of electronic monitoring in British history."

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EDUCATION EDITOR

challenge "unfair" A-level and GCSE or changed its stance in the face of a

ble to appeal against results in

lieve students are incorrectly marked

selling being used to calculate the

wake of the Scottish results fiasco

ted grades were downgraded by the

ity.

Graph revealed that head teachers in pupils faced being handed a "life owed to appeal.

Id break loose" on A-level results day permitted.

lations and Examinations Regulation has softened its stance.

Education Secretary, said he welcomed system, adding that no pupil should receive unfair grades.

h exceptional circumstances are no...

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Mr Motivator

Boris Johnson works out at The Gym in his Uxbridge constituency after urging people to 'have the confidence' to return to their workplaces, and to send their children to school to aid the UK's economic recovery

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1 Chazan IN PARIS

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BBC reporter glorified the murder of Jews

Layla Bashar al-Kloub called Palestinian killers ‘martyrs’ and defended TV presenter accused of Holocaust denial

By Gordon Rayner ASSOCIATE EDITOR

A BBC Arabic reporter who wrongly described terrorists killed in Gaza as “journalists” has a history of glorifying the murder of Jewish people, The Telegraph can disclose.

Layla Bashar al-Kloub has described Israel's Jewish population as “terrorists” and asked Allah to “strengthen” a Palestinian TV presenter who had been labelled a Holocaust denier.

She has also described Palestinians who have been killed after murdering Israelis as “martyrs”.

Last month, The Telegraph reported allegations of BBC bias after finding that 53 people it had described as “journalists” killed in Gaza had links to Hamas or other armed groups.

Some were alleged to have taken part in the Oct 7 attacks, while others had expressed support for violence against Israelis or been claimed as members by militant organisations. The BBC responded by saying it was reviewing its coverage after the findings.

Most of the names appeared on a list compiled by Ms al-Kloub, which was published on the BBC Arabic website in 2023 and updated periodically.

By the time Ms al-Kloub wrote the list, she had an established history of anti-Israeli posts on social media.

In 2014, she wrote on social media to an Israeli citizen that “before 1948 it was Palestine, before YOU (Terrorists) came to our land”, adding: “There’s no problem for us to die for Palestine, you don’t, because it’s NOT YOURS.”

Two years later, she tweeted: “The Zionist entity does not recognise any international law or agreement, their entire [legal] proceedings are infringements of human rights treaties. They are the terrorists, not us.”

In 2017, she suggested that Israel should not exist by posting that the land “from the river to the sea” – referring to the whole of Israel and the Palestinian territories – was “Arab, Arab, Arab”.

In 2018 and 2019, she described Ahmad Jarrar and Omar Abu Leila as “martyrs”. Both had murdered Jewish civilians before being killed.

Layla Bashar

al-Kloub has a long

history of

expressing

anti-Israel

sentiment online

In 2021, she paid tribute to Muna Hawwa, a Palestinian presenter at Al Jazeera who was disciplined by the channel after producing and sharing a video on X asking: "How true is the #Holocaust and how did the Zionists benefit from it?" Ms Hawwa contested claims that she was a Holocaust denier.

She was banned by social media platforms but was later allowed to rejoin, prompting Ms al-Kloub to write: "My dear Muna ... there was a great victory for you, yourself specifically, the free word, and the victory of exquisite journalism, you have proved [to] everybody you are capable of confronting large institutions by yourself, may Allah strengthen you."

In April last year, the British Council gave Ms al-Kloub an award for being part of the BBC Arabic team that led the coverage of the war in Gaza.

Yet dozens of the “journalists” killed in Gaza had been members of Hamas and other terrorist organisations.

They included Abdullah Darwish, who was described by BBC Arabic as “a cameraman for Al-Aqsa TV”.

He was later removed from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) list after it emerged he had participated in the Oct 7 attacks as a member of Hamas's Al-Qassam brigades. He had also been photographed wearing the unit's distinctive green headband. He was killed in an air strike in December 2023.

Twelve of the names have been removed from a casualty list kept by the CPJ, an independent US-based organisation that defends the rights of journalists in combat zones and elsewhere.

The CPJ, whose senior advisers include Dan Rather, the veteran American news anchor, decided they were either “not journalists or media workers” or that they had “participated in combat”. Terrorist groups have also claimed some of those killed as their own in published obituaries.

Ms al-Kloub's tweets were highlighted by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera).

A Camera spokesman said: “Layla Bashar al-Kloub won a British Council award partly because of her coverage of Gaza. Surely the research underlying her work went deeper than simply Google-searching each of the individual ‘killed journalists’ identified by the CPJ?

“But given her worrying social media record, could she really have been

'The Zionist entity does not recognise any international law. They are the terrorists, not us'

trusted to report on any of the dozens of social media indications that some of these individuals were in fact terrorists, had she encountered them in real time?

“She should not have been allowed to cover this subject on behalf of the BBC, let alone receive an award for doing so.”

A BBC spokesman said: “This BBC Arabic report was last updated in August 2025 and covers the deaths of journalists over the course of the conflict, in Gaza, Lebanon and Israel, regardless of their media outlet’s political affiliations.

"The story was based on the information available at the time it was published. In light of the CPJ's June 2026 update, we are looking at those included in the piece, and in our wider reporting as relevant."

Referring to Ms al-Kloub, the BBC spokesman said: "We have made it clear that we take allegations of breaches of our social media guidance very seriously and we took urgent action to investigate. We do not comment on individual staff matters, however, if we find breaches we take the appropriate action."

Ms al-Kloub was approached for comment.

'Give the children a kiss for me, won't you? I can't write anymore'

In tracing my family's past, I saw the brave fight against Holocaust denial

Samuel

Montgomery

“OH, my darlings, when will I see you again?,” Hennie Seijffers-Cohen wrote as she held her children tight on a train bound for destinations unknown.

“You can imagine how I am feeling, my darlings, but with God’s help, perhaps we will return,” she said, adding she was thankful the family had all secured seats for the journey.

My Dutch ancestor would be murdered soon after disembarking the train at Sobibor extermination camp on 28 May 1943, along with her eight-year-old daughter Rozetta, her son Salomon, 13, and daughter Nettie, 15. By then, her mother, father, and husband had already been killed by the Germans at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

More than 80 years later, the conservation team at Auschwitz are having to battle harder than ever against an onslaught of Holocaust distortion and denial borne out of the rising tide of anti-Semitism.

“We are preserving history,” said Christine Rosse, head of conservation at Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, as she traced the tears in a crumpled suitcase. “They are not just artefacts, they are historical evidence of the crimes which happened here.”

In the years 1940 to 1945, the Nazis murdered more than 1,100,000 people at Auschwitz, 90 per cent of whom were Jewish.

As the number of survivors dwindle, researchers fear the spread of unmoderated social media clickbait, rising anti-Semitism and rabble rousing political commentators are filling the void.

“We don’t have enough hands or labs to find everything – it is not possible to preserve everything,” Ms Rosse told The Telegraph, holding aloft one of the 14,070 letters written by Holocaust victims in the museum’s possession.

Lukasz Janiga, of the collections department, said conservators were inspecting the pipes with special cameras and had recently found a pack of cards wedged into a ceiling in one of the barracks.

Researchers hope Auschwitz's inventory of 110,000 shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 470 prostheses, 40kg of eyeglasses, 12,000 pots and 246 prayer shawls confiscated from Jews as they arrived at the camp can offer a lasting testament to the suffering.

Only the 2,000kg of human hair kept by the Nazis has been left to disintegrate.

Earlier this year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) sounded the alarm over “rising” anti-Semitism fuelling conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial in classrooms around Europe. “Hate speech, notably anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial,

has reached levels not seen since World War Two," warned Khaled El-Enany, the director general, as he shared a study which found 61 per cent of teachers surveyed across 23 European Union states were encountering Holocaust denial and distortion among their students.

Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, said children were facing a barrage of misinformation from social media and popular culture, which was undermining education.

“Kids receive their first smartphone at nine or 10 years old – that means they receive access to everything completely unprepared,” he told The

Piotr Cywiński, of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland; The site is where Henny Seijffers-Cohen with her children, inset, were killed during the Second World War

Telegraph at the International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust (ICEAH) in Oświęcim, Poland. “We are living in times when the fictions arrive and build some narratives about Auschwitz,” he said, adding that too often a work of literary fiction is published claiming to have undergone intensive research yet the author had never visited the camps.

“They are full of absurdities,” he said of some popular titles such as The Librarian of Auschwitz. “It changes the vision of Auschwitz. It is in my opinion dangerous.”

The ICEAH has been working to bolster its educational output – building a hostel to house volunteers and publishing 116 titles last year. “For me the only capacity to defend is historical truth,” Mr Cywiński said, vowing to robustly defend Auschwitz from political pressure.

“I already survived a quite far-Right government. It’s not easy,” he said “If they would like to change anything about what really happened here, it would be the last moment of my work here.... I am working for the victims.”

Last month, the European Parliament stripped Grzegorz Braun, the Polish far-Right leader, of legal immunity to face charges in his homeland of Holocaust denial, an offence that carries a potential prison sentence of up to three years.

In July last year, Braun declared that “Auschwitz with its gas chambers is unfortunately a fake” and said that claims of their use were a “propaganda narrative” supporting a “quasi-religious cult”.

"He is the leader of the most stupid Polish party on the right," Dr Piotr Setkiewicz, head of the Research Centre of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, told The Telegraph, adding that he would be attending Braun's trial next week.

Dr Setkiewicz, who received a “light of remembrance” – the highest award of the Auschwitz Memorial 2024, said political commentators were also trying to distort history, citing Tucker Carlson’s suggestion that Britain made a mistake by joining the Second World War. “The fact of the Holocaust cannot be disputed – any more than the fact that the Earth is a sphere – even though there are people in both cases inclined to believe the opposite", he said.

On display in Block 27 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is the “Book of Names”, a painstakingly researched compilation of every known Jewish Holocaust victim.

Here, I trace the names of more than 50 of my ancestors – branches sawn off our family tree.

“It’s a shame, my dears; I had so many kisses for you,” my ancestor Hennie wrote after she was rounded up and put on a train by the Nazis.

In letters kept by my family, Hennie told of working 13 hour shifts in a factory followed by two hours of roll call in the rain and the cold, separated from her children by barbed wire.

“I did everything I could to stay,” she wrote, adding: “I don’t know when I’ll be moving on, or what they will do with the children.”

“We are doing well, though it isn’t easy,” she would initially write from Westerbork – the transit camp in Drenthe where she was kept before her final journey to Sobibor.

After weeks of “back breaking” work and ritual humiliation, she would later write: “They have taken everything from us.”

Resigning herself to her family's fate, she thanked in writing those who had helped them along the way, adding, "Give the children a kiss for me, won't you? I can't write anymore."

Flydubai co-pilot took boxing lessons to prepare for hijack

By Alexandra Snow

THE co-pilot accused of hijacking a Flydubai flight took private boxing lessons and watched extreme terror videos to prepare for the attack, the UAE attorney general has said.

Hamam al-Hammami, 29, is accused of using an emergency axe to try to hijack an Israel-bound flight in an attempted terror attack. The attempt failed after passengers took control of the plane.

motives and how he planned the attempted hijacking.

Hamad Saif al Shamsi, the UAE attorney general, said the suspect had allegedly prepared himself by "intensifying his exposure to material promoting terrorism and training in boxing under a private coach". Mr Hammami, an Omani national, had begun reading extremist literature and watching online content glorifying terror while studying in Australia in 2017, said prosecutors.

The suspect confessed that while studying in Melbourne, he became acquainted with people associated with an Islamic centre called MyCentre, which was managed by Samir Mohtadi, a preacher also known as Abu Hamza.

Last year, Mr Mohtadi, whose family is of Lebanese descent and who grew up in Australia, described Zionists as “scavengers” and “bloodsuckers” and declared that Australia was waging a war against Islam, according to The Australian newspaper.

Mr Shamsi said that Mr Hammami had admitted his decision to pursue an aviation career had been linked to his desire to carry out an attack similar to that of 9/11.

After examining Flydubai's recruiting procedures, Mr Shamsi said the suspect had met all professional and security requirements, including providing a certificate of good conduct.

“However, none of the procedures revealed any indications of his extremist views or his intention to carry out a terrorist plot," he added. Royal Air Maroc said Mr Hammami had undergone three months of training with the airline last year, but his application to work for them afterwards was rejected.

The investigation confirmed that the intended target of the foiled attack was Ben Gurion airport, Israel's busiest international airport.

The attempted hijacking on Sept 30 fell during Sukkot, a seven-day Jewish autumn harvest festival that begins five days after Yom Kippur.

The co-pilot is believed to have acted as a “lone-wolf” extremist, according to the UAE investigation.

Writing group expels Jewish comedian for views on Israel

By Patrick Sawer

A JEWISH comedian was expelled from a north London writers' group after he admitted being a Zionist.

Harry Deansway was thrown out of the Offbeat Writer's Group after Ruby Sullivan, its organiser, questioned him about his views on Israel.

When he explained that he was “Jewish and a Zionist”, but that he supported Palestinian rights and opposed actions that caused suffering to the Palestinian people, she replied: “I don’t think there is a place in the Offbeat Writers’ Group for you because of this.”

Mr Deansway, whose real name is Joshua Rinkoff, claims that Ms Sullivan went on to accuse him of holding beliefs that supported “the massacre of an entire population”.

The stand-up comic, filmmaker and writer had been a member of the group, which brings together writers living near Islington's Holloway Road, for six months without any untoward incident taking place.

But he said he found himself ostracised as a result of being made to explain his Zionist belief that the Jewish people had the right to a state in their ancestral homeland.

The dispute led to Ms Sullivan and other members of the group pulling out of an evening of short fiction readings, organised by Mr Deansway, that was due to take place at Bar Gemist on Tuesday. Mr Deansway has claimed that the planned boycott led to Bar Gemist's owners cancelling the ticketed event, and his having to issue refunds to the audience, which left him out of pocket.

Bar Gemist said it had cancelled the event “due to material changes and a lack of communication surrounding them”.

Mr Deansway said: “I can be a Zionist, which at its core is to believe in the right to Jewish self-determination in their ancestral land, and still be against the government of the country and anyone’s actions that makes that a possibility at the expense of the suffering of another people.”

Ms Sullivan, who received a formal legal letter detailing the allegations on Oct 6, declined to comment. Marion Zoelle and Uroš Dezutelj, the directors of Bar Gemist, stated: "We categorically reject any suggestion that discrimination played a part in our decision."

News

GETTY IMAGES/BROOK MITCHELL

Up in arms Protesters at the National March For Palestine in London yesterday call for the UK to cease arms exports and impose further sanctions on Israel. Thousands of Palestinian supporters faced off with a small group of pro-Israel counter-protesters stationed outside the Met Police headquarters.

Greens bound by Zionism vote for two years

Polanski under pressure to resign over his failure to condemn motion that labels many Jews racist

By Pieter Snepvangers and Sabrina Miller

THE Green Party will not be able to overturn its controversial decision to define Zionism as a form of racism until 2028 at the earliest, The Telegraph can reveal.

Zack Polanski is under growing pressure to resign over his failure to condemn the motion, which implicitly called for the abolition of the state of Israel and defined the right to Jewish self-determination as racist ideology.

On Friday, Mr Polanski refused five times to say whether Israel had a right to exist.

However, the Green leader said he would seek to amend the policy's demand for a “single Palestinian state” at the “earliest possible opportunity” arguing that any decision should be made by those in the region. He told the

BBC: “At the earliest possible opportunity, I do want at a conference motion to see us go back to a process where Israelis and Palestinians decide the future of their region.”

The Greens' next opportunity to pass a motion comes next March during the party's spring conference in Leeds. However, internal documents uncovered by The Telegraph show party rules mean the policy cannot be “significantly” amended for the next two years.

Under the Standing Orders Committee rules, an internal body that approves or rejects motions, any change motion would be deemed invalid if it seeks to “significantly amend the principles passed in a policy motion or voting paper less than one year and nine months previously”.

This means the Zionism is racism policy cannot be overturned or “significantly” altered by members until the party’s autumn conference in September 2028 at the earliest, unless Mr Polanski sought to change the party’s rules. It is understood Mr Polanski, who has been criticised for his failure to show leadership by party grandees, will not intervene to influence the Standing

Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, lost Thursday's Holborn and St Pancras by-election

Orders Committee. Sources close to him reiterated that it was up to the committee to decide whether any motion to alter its Zionism is racism stance complied with the party's constitution.

However, party insiders said it was “obvious” that changing the party’s new position for a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital" would amount to a "significant" change.

Another source warned anti-Zionist activists who have entered the party en masse in the past 12 months would turn on Mr Polanski if he was deemed to be involved in trying to change the policy.

Mr Polanski is battling to keep control of his fractious party following his defeat in Thursday's Holborn and St Pancras by-election. He won 33 per cent of the vote but lost to Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali, who won 45 per cent.

Former leader Caroline Lucas said Mr Polanski's decision to skip the party's Zionism is racism vote at last weekend's conference in Brighton because he was campaigning in the north London constituency was a “mistake”.

Ms Lucas is one of many senior Green figures who believe Mr Polanski has been too weak to challenge Islamists within his party, many of whom have joined in the past 18 months.

Yesterday, Ellie Chowns, one of five Green Party MPs, said there had been a “lack of leadership” from Mr Polanski on the Zionism motion, which had been “disappointing”. The MP, who is also the Green Party’s leader in the House of

'He has massively increased the size and relevance of the Green Party and challenges to his leadership are misguided'

Commons, claimed she does not know whether there are “extremists and rac- ists” in her party.

Speaking to Chris Mason on the BBC's Today programme, Ms Chowns said: "I don't know if there are extremists and racists in my party, but I want to make sure that my party isn't vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists."

Under Green Party rules, Mr Polanski will face a leadership challenge next September after serving two years in the role. However, The Telegraph understands some members of the party's council are considering a recall petition to replace him sooner.

A spokesman said: “He has massively increased the size and relevance of the Green Party and challenges to his leadership are both misguided and opportunistic. The Green Party is an anti-Zionist party. The only major party in full support of Palestinian liberation from Zionist occupation.”

A spokesman for Mr Polanski said: "Any member can submit a motion to change existing party policy, to be voted on by the membership. It is up to our Standing Orders Committee to rule motions in or out."

Polanski's party on collision course with the law over anti-Semitism

Gideon Falter

WHEN a political party descends into anti-Semitism, it usually denies it. That was certainly the case with Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.

Campaign Against Antisemitism had to submit hundreds of pages of legal argument to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to convince them that Labour was unlawfully discriminating against Jews. In the case of the Green Party, its mask has not so much slipped as been forcefully thrown aside. In passing its “Zionism is racism” policy, the extremists in the Green Party have provided clear evidence of unlawful discrimination, with serious implications. First, the British public dislikes extremism and racism. Raging anti-Semitism in Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was a significant factor in his loss of support. Greens disappointed by Zack Polanski’s failure in last week’s by-election will be taking note.

a collision course with the EHRC. It may also face legal action from its Jewish and Zionist members who are contacting us to take up our offer of free legal representation.

Second, the party now faces a major schism. The environmentalist Green Party of old always had extremists

within it, but previous Green leaders understood that their supporters wanted recycling and renewable energy, not rampant Jew-hatred.

Mr Polanski's celebrations at growing party membership from 60,000 to 230,000 now look braggadocious as attention turns to whom he has attracted into the party.

Mr Polanski's predecessors are unnerved by the party's changing membership and stance. Former leader Siàn Berry took a pause from berating the Jewish state to plead with Green members to “stay and let us fix this together”. Her predecessor, Caroline

Lucas, went further, lamenting the policy crosses “a very significant red line” and warning the party is “woefully exposed” to entryism and “vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists”.

These first two implications of the Greens' new policy pose serious problems for the party, but the most challenging one of all might be the third: the illegality.

It was the lack of brazenly hateful policy that meant Campaign Against Antisemitism had to instead analyse the actions of Labour figures such as Ken Livingstone to persuade the EHRC that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party had illegally discriminated against Jews. It took years and detailed legal argument because Labour had never admitted its discrimination.

That is not so of the Green Party, which expressed its hatred of “Zionists” in pages of vehement exegesis, which it openly published and formally voted to adopt. The debate itself added yet more clarity, as delegates voted down amendments protecting Jews attending "Zionist" synagogues. Had they visited any synagogue on the day of the conference for the festival of Simchat Torah, they would have heard a reading opening with God telling Joshua to cross the Jordan River into Israel.

'The extremists in the Green Party have provided clear evidence of unlawful discrimination'

Not only is the policy brazenly discriminatory, but the Greens' rules prevent them from amending it until 2028, meaning that the party is now firmly committed to discriminating against Jews and Zionists. Even though the voting public and remaining old-school environmentalists in the party may detest this policy, it is now on

Mr Polanski seems to have thought his comrades' “Zionism is racism” debate was something he could sit out. Now, his party has adopted an unlawful policy he cannot change, sections of his membership are asking us for help in suing the party, the environmentalist Greens are trying to fend off Islamists and Leftists in plain view of the British public, and the party faces investigation and potential legal action by the EHRC at our behest.

It seems Mr Polanski thought he could appease the extremists in his party and let them pass this policy without facing the consequences. We aim to prove him very wrong.

Gideon Falter is the chief executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism

Ofcom urged to strip Iranian television channel's licence over praise for Hezbollah chief

By Camilla Turner

OFCOM is under pressure to strip the broadcast licence from a London-based television channel accused of being the “propaganda arm” of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The broadcast watchdog has been warned that LuaLua TV has disseminated “a significant quantity of pro-Hezbollah content” in recent weeks.

These include several social media posts commemorating the death of the “martyr” Hassan Nasrallah, the former head of Hezbollah, whom Israel assassinated in September 2024. The posts have been referred to counter-terror police as the British Government has proscribed Hezbollah.

Alicia Kearns, the shadow national security minister, has said Ofcom's failure to revoke LuaLua's broadcast licence is “nothing short of shameful” and “suggests a strong apathy towards the scourge of anti-Semitism”.

The IRGC, known as the Ayatollah's “terror army”, has played a leading role in the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in Iran. More than 3,000 people were killed in nationwide protests last December and January, according to Iranian state media, with demonstrators shot dead in the street.

On its online broadcasts and social media channels, LuaLua TV regularly heaps praise on senior Hamas and Hezbollah commanders. The station has promoted a sermon by Ali Khamenei, Iran's former supreme leader, in which he claimed that “the resistance in Lebanon and Gaza will triumph”.

LuaLua TV is a member of the Islamic Radios and Television Union, which the US Treasury department sanctioned in 2020 for being “owned or controlled by” the IRGC Quds Force. The US department of justice closed down LuaLua TV’s website in 2021.

In a letter to Dame Melanie Dawes, the chief executive of Ofcom, Ms Kearns said: "I do not need to remind you that Hezbollah is proscribed – in its entirety - under the Terrorism Act 2000, and that LuaLua TV's activities likely constitute criminal offences, for which they have been referred to Counter Terrorism Police. Ofcom's deliberate refusal to use its powers and revoke LuaLua's licence is nothing short of shameful and suggests a strong apathy towards the scourge of anti-Semitism at a time when the Jewish community are facing unprecedented attacks, including terrorism sponsored by the very state LuaLua has such a strong affinity for."

A Counter Terrorism Policing spokesman said: "Any allegations relating to possible terrorism or national security-related offences are passed to officers within Counter Terrorism Policing, who will assess the details and take any further action as appropriate. More broadly, we do not comment on who may or may not be subject to any counter terrorism investigation."

A spokesman for Ofcom declined to comment. LuaLua TV was approached for comment.

In the firing line

Soldiers from

Belgium's Battalion

Chasseurs à

Cheval/Jagers te

Paard during the

attack phase of

Exercise Cambrian

Patrol in the

Brecon Beacons,

South Wales. A

total of 140 groups

entered the

exercise, which

is known as

Nato's toughest

patrolling test.

CPL PAUL SQUIRES/UK MOD CROWN COPYRIGHT

ADVANCED THREAT PROTECTION, ONLY FROM THE UK'S BEST BROADBAND

FRAUD

PROTECTING BRILLIANT THINGS

Reform pledges to scrap Mahmood's refugee scheme

By Sabrina Miller

WHITEHALL CORRESPONDENT

REFORM will “immediately end” Shabana Mahmood’s refugee resettlement scheme and deport anyone who has arrived in Britain under it, if the party is elected into government.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, will announce the policy alongside a number of plans for managing immigration, including a review of Britain's Afghan resettlement schemes.

The leader of Reform UK plans to publish the cost of these programmes as well as the “full impact” of criminal behaviour from Afghan migrants.

The party also wants to revoke the right to remain of anyone not considered to be in danger in their home country and deport anyone considered to have “taken advantage” of Britain.

It also plans to publish details of secret asylum contracts and HMO lease agreements to “expose” businesses “cynically profiting from the invasion of Britain”.

Speaking to The Telegraph ahead of his speech next week, Nigel Farage said: "Britain is not obligated to take in more migrants, and under a Reform government these people will not be able to stay. If Labour are so sure the public wants their open borders policies, they'd call a general election to get a mandate. Without it, Andy remains unelected, and his government's policies remain illegitimate."

Reform also told The Times they would impose tariffs on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, Sudan or Somalia if they refused to take back illegal immigrants and foreign criminals from those countries in the UK.

Last month, Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, reopened a legal and safe route for refugees to settle in Britain, which prioritised Afghan women and girls and Palestinians.

In response the Jewish Leadership Council wrote to Ms Mahmood requesting further information about the "identity and security checks" that the plan will use and the number of people expected to arrive under the scheme. They also wanted to know whether “extremism and anti-Semitism” would be explicitly addressed as part of the “cultural orientation” lessons.

Tomorrow, Nigel Farage will unveil plans for a “full audit” of Government migrant records and publish a complete list of the number of people who have arrived in Britain since 2010, along with their nationality and route of entry.

The party will also pledge to use local authority and NHS data to produce the first official estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in Britain in more than 20 years.

Any illegal migrants identified through this audit process will then be “detained and deported”, the party is expected to pledge.

Nigel Farage will set out Reform's migrant reforms tomorrow

King praises cyber agency for safeguarding British democracy

By India McTaggart

THE KING has warned that Britain is under an ever-evolving threat from “malicious actors” online.

In a message to mark the 10th anniversary of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the King said that “strong cyber security is fundamental to making the online environment safer and more resilient” in the face of “threats to our international order”.

He added: “Disinformation and other forms of hostile online activity present real challenges to trust and security in the digital age, and malicious actors continue to evolve their tactics by using automated technologies.”

The King hailed the UK's cyber agency, saying: "You have defended this country against cyber attacks, safeguarded our democratic institutions and protected the critical infrastructure upon which daily life depends."

The NCSC, an arm of GCHQ, was established in 2016 but officially opened by Elizabeth II in February 2017. It was designed to make the UK the safest place to live and work online.

Marking its success so far, the King continued: "You have built resilience across our public services, businesses and communities, equipping us all to prosper in our ever-evolving digital world. I know only too well what risks are posed to our economic well-being and, indeed, those values and institutions we hold most dear."

He added: "The work you do is central to ensuring that people and organisations continue to benefit from digital technology with confidence, whilst protecting our democracy, economy and the critical systems on which we rely every day."

The King celebrated the success of NCSC less than a month after he convened leaders from the world's AI companies at Dumfries House in Ayrshire to urge that the “existential dangers” of the emerging technology must be tackled.

Echoing recent warnings from some working in the field, he said AI “risks developing darker capacities” to the extent that it may “perhaps even take life”.

He told the tech giants: "There seems urgency in adequately considering the existential dangers of such technologies falling into the wrong hands, and being used in potentially catastrophic ways. Surely, we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late."

Parents want bursaries cut as school fees rise

Call for reduction in support for poorer pupils at Dulwich College as families struggle with costs

By Janet Eastham

DULWICH COLLEGE has become embroiled in a bitter row with parents, who are demanding cuts to bursaries for poorer pupils, The Telegraph can reveal.

Labour's VAT raid on private schools has left many families struggling with rising fees, which now exceed £32,000 per year at the south London boys' school. Governors at the independent school have now opened the door to reviewing bursary provision amid mounting pressure from parents paying full price.

At a meeting in June, a group claiming to represent around 250 families demanded that governors “look more aggressively at efficiencies” and “reassess the scale of bursary provision”, according to a confidential note prepared by the school and seen by The Telegraph.

It reveals that some parents warned they could no longer be sure they could afford their sons' education, while others felt “trapped” between rising fees and uprooting their children.

It also revealed some parents feared the school was becoming the preserve of the very wealthy, pricing out families on “professional incomes”.

In response, governors reported that the school's master, Robert Milne, who took up his post last September, is overseeing a reassessment of its long-term financial strategy.

In a letter to parents dated June 22, governors said the assumptions underpinning the school's financial plan were being reconsidered to reflect mounting pressures on families, and recognising that they "need to prudently adapt".

It followed a meeting in which the governors acknowledged that “future bursary provision could form part of

Fees can exceed £32,000 a year at Dulwich College, the former school of Nigel Farage

wider strategic discussions" and that "the current approach reflected priorities established under previous leadership and that the college was already reviewing its long-term direction".

They stressed that existing bursary recipients would continue to be supported. Dulwich spent £5 million on bursary support to 192 pupils in 2024-25, just over 10 per cent of all students.

Parents were told that bursaries were currently funded entirely through endowment income and the school's wider activities, rather than fee income.

However, governors acknowledged in their letter that “it is not the case that in the future these costs will always be funded in this way”.

Fees at Dulwich have risen by 30 per cent in three years, from £8,231 per term in 2023 to £10,706 this September.

Governors have admitted that fee increases in the past three years have significantly outstripped inflation, blaming “unprecedented disruption in the UK independent school sector” and “significant shifts in Government fiscal policies”. They also cited higher employers’ National Insurance contributions and the loss of charitable business rates relief.

They said the school had absorbed almost half the cost of Labour's 20 per cent VAT on fees, limiting the initial increase passed on to parents to 10.6 per

‘It is not, and never has been, in the interest of the college to price parents out’

cent. “It is not, and never has been, in the interest of the college to price parents out,” governors insisted.

However, the dispute threatens to set full-fee-paying parents against families whose children depend on bursaries.

One concerned parent who wants bursaries to be protected said she fears any cuts to the provision of financial support would undermine the character of the school.

She said that demands for bursary cuts had intensified since the June meeting, with some parents now calling for bursaries to be “cut completely” in order to slow the pace of rising fees.

“What makes the school truly special is the diversity of parents. There really are people from all walks of life, and this is only made possible through the bursary scheme,” she said.

A spokesman from Dulwich College said: “Dulwich College has a long-standing and continuing commitment to widening access to its education through bursaries, which are funded from sources other than parental fees.”

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Cambridge inclusivity talk criticises man with Tourette's

By Albert Tait EDUCATION EDITOR

A TOURETTE'S sufferer who shouted the N-word at the Baftas was criticised for his apology during University of Cambridge “inclusivity training”.

John Davidson, who inspired the Bafta-winning film I Swear, involuntarily shouted the N-word in February as Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented an award during the Baftas ceremony in London.

The Tourette's campaigner said afterwards he had always been “deeply mortified if anyone considers my involuntary tics to be intentional or to carry any meaning”.

His apology was used this week as an example of a “microaggression” during a “mandatory” inclusivity training course for undergraduate students at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. The course leader claimed that Mr Davidson’s comment “doesn’t speak to how [Jordan and Lindo] might have felt” about his outburst and urged students to “take ownership of the things we say” rather than to “explain away things”.

Microaggressions are defined as comments or actions that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally express a prejudiced attitude toward a

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‘We were told that his statement was insufficient in terms of acknowledging the harm he had done’

member of a marginalised group. The term grew in popularity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Tourettes Action, the UK's leading support and research charity for people with Tourette syndrome and their families, said it was “deeply disappointed” that Mr Davidson's case had been used as an example of a microaggression.

Emma McNally, the charity's chief executive, said that it risked "reinforcing misunderstanding" about involuntary tics.

Ava Foyle, 19, a second-year undergraduate student at Gonville and Caius, who attended the training, said it was “appalling” to use Mr Davidson’s case as an example of a microaggression.

She said: “Despite the fact that we were shown Davidson’s public apology, clarifying that often Tourette’s compels him to say the least appropriate words at any given time, we were told that this statement was insufficient in terms of acknowledging the harm he had done.”

In response to the criticism, Prof Richard Gilbertson, the master of Gonville and Caius, said that attendees of the inclusivity course had been encouraged to “engage with, discuss and challenge different views”.

An email, which The Telegraph has seen, said it was “mandatory” for undergraduate students to attend one of two 90-minute sessions last Monday, although the college has since clarified that its use of the term “mandatory” was incorrect.

Mr Davidson's representatives and Stop Hate UK were approached for comment.

Step up George Clooney, the actor, and his wife Amal attend the Albies at the Natural History Museum in London. The awards were created by the Clooney Foundation of Justice to honour human rights defenders, journalists and activists.

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Beard: Scrap the focus on battles to make history less ‘bloke-ish’

By Anita Singh

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR

HISTORY teaching in schools has a “bloke-ish” fixation on dates and battles that is putting children off the subject, according to Dame Mary Beard.

The Cambridge University academic said children should be taught more engaging stories about how ordinary people lived and that the rote learning should come later.

A connection to history comes from the realisation that we have much in common with people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, she said, citing one of her favourite details from the ruins of Pompeii: the discovery of graffiti that reads “Atimetus got me pregnant”.

Asked at the Cheltenham Literature Festival whether schools were failing to engage children with history, Dame Mary replied: "My heart says yes. I think we are terribly fixated on dates and battles, what I would – don't get upset, gentlemen – call bloke-ish history.

“I’m being a slight hypocrite because the other part of me has spent years examining students’ essays on Roman history and if they said that Caesar was assassinated in 43 BC [it was 44 BC] I would put a red line

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‘We are terribly fixated on what I would – don’t get upset gentlemen – call bloke-ish history’

through it and say, 'No, one mark off.' In the end, to do history well you've got to do some of that basic stuff but it is presented to people as if that's all it is, that once you've got all the battles in your head you can then do 'Atimetus got me pregnant', whereas I think it [should be] the other way around.

Dame Mary also argued that museums should open cases and encourage visitors to touch the exhibits.

In her new book, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, she recounts visiting the British Museum when she was five and seeing a 4,000-year-old piece of bread from Ancient Egypt.

She said a passing curator had seen her struggling to see the bread on its shelf and took it out of the case. “I have to say, it was total magic. Close to time travel is what it felt like,” she recalled.

“What is the job of the museum curator, or the academic? It is to open museum cases for kids. That’s how you make a difference. You get things out for them. You let them get close.”

Dame Mary added: “We will lose the connection to the past if we always put it off limits.” However, she added: “If you touch leather shoes from the Roman world, there very soon won’t be a leather shoe left. There are certain conservation rules.”

She said the “please do not touch” instruction for ancient artefacts was only brought in during the late 19th century. “It probably goes along with the democratisation of the museum. When only the posh were allowed in, they were allowed to touch. When you let the great unwashed in, they weren’t.”

Christian history teacher fired after telling pupils she is ‘pro-life’

By Cameron Henderson

A CHRISTIAN teacher at a state school was fired after telling students that she was pro-life.

Anita Meston, a 63-year-old history teacher at Biddick Academy in Sunderland, was dismissed in March after a pupil asked her for her opinion on the abortion debate.

Hours later, Ms Meston was summoned to a meeting with the school's headteacher, who admonished her for expressing personal views in the classroom and said that her contract would be terminated.

It is understood the school had faced complaints about her conduct from parents and students.

The teacher is now suing Biddick Academy for discriminating against her Christian faith, which she argues counts as a protected characteristic under the

Equality Act 2010. Ms Meston told The Telegraph she was “profoundly shocked” by the school’s decision, which she said amounted to “censorship”.

She said: “I do not believe it is a teacher’s role to impose beliefs unrelated to the lesson. I merely acknowledged my students’ questions and provided truthful answers before redirecting them back to the lesson at hand.

"If our education system continues to claim to foster inclusion and tolerance, this must include tolerance of perspectives with which others disagree.

“In a free and just society, teachers should not be fired for honestly expressing their deeply held beliefs in response to questions in the classroom. What happened to me is nothing short of censorship, and this precedent cannot be allowed to stand.”

Ms Meston, who has been a teacher for 28 years, joined Biddick Academy in

'I provided truthful answers to my students' questions before redirecting them back to the lesson'

October 2024 as a French teacher and Year 10 form tutor.

During a history lesson in March last year, a student asked her whether she was “pro-abortion”, to which she responded that she was “pro-life”.

Asked to elaborate on her position, Ms Meston explained that she held this view because she was a Christian and knew women who had undergone abortions and regretted the decision.

A student replied that she knew women who had abortions without regretting them, to which Ms Meston responded: “Fair enough.”

The following day, the school's headteacher told her that a complaint had been submitted over the comments, and asked what had happened.

Ms Meston said she had only shared her personal views in response to a direct question from a student about her stance on abortion. During the lesson, which focused on the 1945 bombing of Dresden, she also asked whether similar moral issues surrounded the current Israel-Palestine conflict, in an attempt to engage the class.

In response to a student's question, Ms Meston said she was "pro-Israel", but lamented the deaths of innocent people in Gaza caught up in the conflict.

Documents seen by The Telegraph show that she was dismissed for “sharing personal opinions on political issues with pupils”.

The school's headteacher said there was a "real concern" that Ms Meston would continue to "cause harm or distress to pupils".

Her dismissal followed four incidents in which the school had raised concerns with Ms Meston about her behaviour breaching national guidance, and had given her additional training. During her time at the school, a group of stu-

‘When political issues are taught, they must be presented in a balanced manner’

dents repeatedly asked for her views on Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, to which she responded briefly that they were both popular politicians.

The Teachers' Standards, set by the Department for Education, state that teachers “should generally avoid sharing personal political views unless they are entirely confident it will not be seen as promoting that viewpoint”.

The guidance adds: “When political issues are taught, they must be presented in a balanced manner.”

The UK Equality Act prohibits discrimination against another on account of a “protected characteristic”, which includes “religion or belief”.

A spokesman for the North East Learning Trust, which oversees the school, said: "We have a clear staff code of conduct, which is consistently applied to protect the safety and wellbeing of our children at all times."

'You're butter on my toast,' prison guard told inmate

By Telegraph Reporter

A PRISON officer in an “improper” relationship with an inmate told him he was “the butter on my toast” and “the milk in my tea”.

Lindsay Wilson ended her letter to the HMP Deerbolt prisoner with: "Happy Valentine's Day."

Wilson, 46, from Colburn in North Yorkshire, received an 11-month prison sentence suspended for 18 months at Durham Crown Court on Friday after admitting to a charge of misconduct in public office.

The romance was discovered after a police dog handler made a search of a BMW parked outside the prison near Barnard Castle in County Durham on Oct 26, 2024.

Neil Jones, the prosecutor, said the search focused on whether phones or drugs had been passed to inmates, but no evidence of this. He said officers initially questioned Wilson about whether she had passed contraband to inmates.

They also found the affectionate letter. It carried the prisoner's fingerprints.

Mr Jones said an iPhone was also found in a handbag behind the passenger seat. Wilson said the phone was old, and refused to say whom she had spoken to on it. However, the court heard Wilson appeared to suggest she was “talking to a married guy”.

Mr Jones said the relationship with the serving inmate appeared to be consensual, if also illicit.

He said Wilson's actions represented a breach of trust and damaged confidence in prison staff more widely.

Pedigree chums Pet pooches bring their owners along to the annual dog swim at Sandford Parks Lido in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire yesterday.

Councillor sues over gay sex library stall row

Reform representative had to undergo training after complaining about adult display in Devon library

By Robert Mendick, CHIEF REPORTER

A COUNTY councillor is suing his local authority after being censured for criticising a stall that promoted gay sex.

Michael Fife Cook, the leader of Reform UK on Devon county council, was ordered to apologise and undergo a good-conduct training course after raising concerns over the stall's proximity to the children's art and colouring area at a library in the county.

The stall contained advice about “chemsex” – where gay and bisexual men engage in sexual activity while under the influence of dangerous drugs – and displayed a large purple prosthetic penis.

Mr Fife Cook is refusing to apologise and has instead begun legal action against his council. The case threatens to cost local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees.

The legal claim was launched after an event at Exeter library last year as part of the city's Out There Queer Fest, marketed for young people as a “bold celebration for LGBTQIA+”.

The Eddystone Trust, a local sexual health charity, was given a stall in the library's foyer that contained “sexual paraphernalia” on full view, according to Mr Fife Cook's legal complaint.

The charity's table included “quite a large purple prosthetic silicone penis” and “a penis-measuring device”. The charity also stocked literature that referred to “chemsex”, according to the legal complaint.

The Eddystone Trust was asked for a comment but had not responded by the time of going to press. On its website, the charity offers advice and support for men who are “part of the chemsex scene”. The charity also offers “chemsex safety packs”.

Mr Fife Cook raised his concerns over the display while the library was still open to young children.

In an internal email to a senior council official, copying in councillors who had raised similar concerns, he wrote: "I think this makes it clear our council officers can't be trusted in safeguarding children ... any normal person would look at what was on show at this event and would believe it was not appropriate for young children."

The email prompted two senior county council officials to make a complaint against Mr Fife Cook, accusing him of breaching its code of conduct and alleging that he had bullied staff.

In July, Mr Fife Cook was found guilty by the county council's standards board of failing to show respect to officials and bringing the council into disrepute. He was ordered to make a written apology and undertake "bespoke one-to-one training".

Mr Fife Cook, a 72-year-old great-grandfather, said: "This is an attempt to gag me, but I won't be gagged. I won't let them. I am here to speak for the people, and that has to be the priority over everything else."

His only way to challenge the standards board decision is by seeking a judicial review in the High Court. Were the case to go that far, it could cost an estimated £800,000, he said. “They [the council] have brought this on themselves,” he added.

The Free Speech Union will begin crowdfunding to pay for Mr Fife Cook's legal claim. His lawyers have argued that his concerns about safeguarding were a “political expression” in the public interest.

Lord Young of Acton, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, said: "It beggars belief that a councillor has been penalised for bringing his council into disrepute for raising safeguarding concerns about an LGBTQ event at which a dildo was displayed in front of children at a public library.

Julian Brazil, the Lib Dem county council leader, previously acknowledged that what happened with the event “wasn’t as we would have hoped” and “lessons have been learnt” but said that children were a top priority for the authority.

An investigation by Libraries Unlimited, the charity that operates the library in Castle Street in Exeter city centre, found “no specific safeguarding incidents have been found to have occurred at the event”.

A council spokesman said: “We have full confidence in Libraries Unlimited to run safe and appropriate events.”

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CIA ‘gave journalist Viagra’ after he was freed from Russian jail

By Anita Singh

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR

WHAT does the CIA think a man needs after a long spell in captivity? A tablet of Viagra.

Evan Gershkovich, the US journalist who spent 16 months in a Russian prison accused of espionage, has revealed the unusual contents of the “recovery kit” he was issued after being freed in a prisoner swap in 2024.

On the flight home to the Andrews military base in Maryland, US, he was handed a small package.

He said: "Typically, it's the State Department who put together the recovery kits, but it was the CIA who put together these recovery kits, and in mine they put Viagra.

“Maybe it’s a smart thing – a traumatised person comes home and sees his wife for the first time in years or whatever.

“Or is this what the CIA brings along for its missions abroad? We couldn't figure it out.”

Gershkovich said he had saved the pill as a “memento” of his release.

His mother told the State Department that he would like a drink of whisky on the flight home, and an official from the Office of Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs presented him with a bottle of High West Campfire.

However, the CIA forbade him from drinking it, saying that he must be sober to meet Joe Biden, the president, when he touched down in the US.

The Wall Street Journal reporter was speaking at the Cheltenham Literature

Festival to promote his memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land.

He was arrested by the FSB in 2023 and later sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony, accused of being a CIA spy.

Sixteen months later he was released as part of the biggest prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War.

Gershkovich said he was able to cope in prison awaiting trial by setting up a routine that included reading, note-taking and backgammon. “Human beings are adaptable. You create a life,” he explained. He admitted that, when told that he was about to be released, he did not feel ready to leave because “it’s really difficult to become normal again”.

After 16 months of incarceration, he had 16 months of therapy to recover and was diagnosed with PTSD.

Gershkovich was asked if he was still looking over his shoulder, fearing more unwelcome attention from the FSB. But he said that he had fulfilled his purpose for the Russians as “a useful geopolitical trading chip” and now feels safe.

Pensioner dies after being stuck in barbed wire

By Telegraph Reporter

A GRANDFATHER died after getting tangled in barbed wire on a mountain walk, an inquest heard.

Malcolm Kitts, 92, was found trapped in the fence on Maerdy Mountain, in south Wales, on Sept 22.

He had celebrated his birthday with his family just days earlier, before going on one of his regular walks from his home.

His family raised the alarm when he failed to return home in Cwmdare, south Wales.

A search party comprising mountain rescue teams, police and volunteers went in pursuit of Kitts, and he was found on the mountain the next day, suffering from hypothermia. A helicopter airlifted him 31 miles to hospital in Cardiff, but he died the following week.

A coroner's officer said: "He was located by police on Maerdy Mountain

'He was hypothermic, caught in a fence and had barbed wire wrapped around his leg'

... He was hypothermic, caught in a fence and had barbed wire wrapped around his leg.

"He was conveyed to the University Hospital of Wales for treatment, but despite best care, he passed away on Oct 1."

A post-mortem examination heard that Kitts had suffered pneumonia and acute renal failure.

Andrew Morse, the coroner, adjourned the Pontypridd hearing to a date to be fixed.

Speaking after Kitts was found, Joyce, his wife, expressed gratitude to those who had gone looking for him.

"I'd like to thank, first, the police force. They were wonderful, from liaising with me to coordinating a search and rescue," she said. "The mountain rescue who found him were also essential in coordinating and giving out information for searches and, ultimately, the rescue."

French turn noses up at British adding acid to wine

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English winemakers allowed to artificially acidify their product after hottest summer on record

By Cameron Henderson

FRENCH champagne producers have turned their noses up at a rule change allowing British winemakers to add acid to this year's vintage.

The Government has permitted British winemakers to artificially acidify their wine for the first time in order to compensate for “exceptional” weather conditions after the country faced its hottest summer on record.

Temperatures this summer reached an average of 21.3C, beating the previous record of 21C set in 1976. Hot weather accelerates the breakdown of natural malic acid inside grapes, raising the pH of wine.

Without enough acid, wine loses its crisp flavour and is at risk of spoilage as harmful bacteria and yeast can thrive, causing the wine to oxidise.

However, the change has raised eyebrows among some French winegrowers who said it goes against their belief in the importance of “terroir” – the environmental factors that give wine its distinctive character and taste – and should only be used as a “last resort”.

Charles Philipponnat, whose family has been growing vines in the Champagne region for over 500 years, told The Telegraph: "I personally don't think it's the right thing to do.

“I think it goes against the objective one may have to produce natural wines that are as close as possible to what the terroir may offer.”

In typically hot regions such as California, Australia and Argentina, it is common practice to add tartaric acid to wine to lower the pH, creating a protective barrier against contamination during and after fermentation. Until now, the practice has not been sanctioned in the UK, where vineyards are categorised as zone A and B – Europe's two coolest wine-growing regions.

However, soaring temperatures this year have left some English wine growers clamouring for a special dispensation, drawing scepticism from purists.

Although the practice is permitted in France, it is frowned upon by traditional growers who place a premium on not artificially intervening in the flavour of the wine, instead using growing techniques to manage the acidity in their end product.

Mr Philipponnat said: “We pride ourselves on not acidifying nor de-acidifying because we reckon it is entering an artificial or industrial process.

"We don't want that because we want

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‘In 27 years we haven’t done it. We have always lived with the acidity that nature or God has given us’

our wines to be true vintages. Vintages may vary, but we don't want to compensate for that.

“In 27 years we haven’t done it even once. We have always lived with the acidity that nature or God has given us. I think any good winemaker that pays attention to their terrier operates with the same philosophy.”

The Department for Environment, Farming and Agriculture (Defra) released a notice on Oct 2 allowing winemakers to add up to four grams of tartaric acid per litre of wine.

Stephen Skelton, a master of wine, said: “Traditionally, we have not needed and not been able to add acidity to wine.” But with rising average temperatures in the UK, he said that the practice was becoming necessary for some winegrowers in order to create a reliable product year in year out.

Defra was approached for comment.

OLIVER DIXON

Pick of the crop Elspeth MacDonald checks over the squash and pumpkins at RHS Garden Rosemoor in Devon as part of Flavours of Autumn, celebrating the seasonal harvest.

Truffle prices to mushroom after long hot summer

By Patrick Sawer

SENIOR NEWS REPORTER

THE long, hot summer means truffles will be harder to find this year – and even more expensive.

Truffles, which are buried just beneath the ground's surface and require trained dogs to sniff them out, need regular rain to grow. But in the wake of this year's dry summer, those who grow truffles and forage for them have predicted there will be up to 700kg less than usual as well as fewer wild truffles.

Some of the country's top chefs have warned they could be forced to raise prices on their truffle dishes if wholesale prices rise dramatically because of the shortage.

Prof Paul Thomas, an expert in fungus cultivation at the University of Stirling, who forages for truffles with his dogs Rue and Tweed, has noticed that there are far fewer truffles to be found.

He said: “Above ground mushrooms grow quickly and don’t consume as

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'Truffles bring everything to the dish – flavour, smell, even an aphrodisiac quality, they are the best'

much moisture. But truffles grow slowly and are dependent on a large amount of moisture. Because we've had a long, dry spell it will really impact yields in England, though Scotland and Wales will probably fare better."

Prof Thomas added: "Harvesters say they are getting only a few truffles per site, where previously they would fill baskets.

“That will mean wholesale prices going up, which might mean the price of dishes with truffles going up.”

Alzo Zilli, a chef, told The Telegraph: "This year they will be very expensive and very short because of the weather. The best Italian truffles, the Alba white truffles, which are top end, normally fetch £3,500 a kilo. I think they will now go up to £5,000 a kilo. British black truffles will also go up in price.

"It's been a terrible summer for their growth all over Europe because of climate change."

But he said there would always be diners prepared to pay the price for the increasingly rare ingredient. “Truffles bring everything to the dish,” he said. “Flavour, smell, even an aphrodisiac quality. They are just the best.”

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Palestinian leader pulls plug on elections

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Abbas delays first vote in 20 years in move that further weakens the authority's credibility

Our Foreign Staff

MAHMOUD ABBAS has postponed what would have been the first Palestinian elections in nearly 20 years.

The vote was due to take place next month but Mr Abbas, the Palestinian leader, delayed the poll, blaming Israel and the security situation in the Palestinian territories,

The election is now scheduled for September 11, 2027, according to Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency.

Presidential elections, which have not taken place for more than two decades, are scheduled for the same day.

The postponement leaves entrenched Palestinian leaders unchallenged and threatens to further erode the Palestinian Authority's credibility among ordinary Palestinians and donor countries who fund it.

The internationally backed body is dominated by Mr Abbas' party, Fatah, and has administered semiautonomous parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank since agreements reached in the 1990s.

It has grown increasingly unpopular throughout Mr Abbas's presidency. Many Palestinians view it as corrupt and criticise its security co-operation with Israel.

The decree came after a committee of top Palestinian officials met yesterday to discuss postponing the vote. The

Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee, which Mr Abbas heads, said in a statement that conditions in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not conducive to holding elections, noting that Israel had not allowed election materials or international observers to enter Gaza.

The move was expected after Palestinian factions across the political spectrum met in Cairo for talks on delaying the vote, Islamic Jihad deputy secretary-general Mohammed al-Hindi told The Associated Press earlier this week.

Palestinians have not held a legislative election since 2006, when Hamas won a majority of seats. Israel and Western countries then boycotted its government, fueling months of unrest that led to the Hamas takeover of Gaza the following year. Power has been divided between Gaza and the West Bank in the two decades since, with Hamas in control of Gaza and Abbas's Palestinian Authority in power in the West Bank.

The West Bank has grown increasingly violent in recent years as Israel has expanded settlements and outposts.

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'Abbas is terrified by the electoral alliance of opposition factions that reject his leadership'

Settler attacks on Palestinians and Israeli army raids on cities under the authority's control are both regularly reported.

Though the US-brokered ceasefire plan reached last year outlined a future role for the authority, its immediate role was left mostly undefined as Hamas has continued to govern and the technocrats under the Board of Peace remain in Cairo awaiting permission to enter Gaza to transition power.

Before the postponement, leading factions had not registered slates to contest the election. But behind the scenes, veteran officials had been in talks to join forces and take aim at Abbas.

An unlikely alliance had emerged between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and a bloc led by Mohammed Dahlan, the former Fatah security chief. Dahlan had previously been driven from Gaza by Hamas and was exiled in 2010 after a falling-out with Abbas.

“Abbas is terrified by the electoral alliance bringing our faction together with opposition factions and forces within Fatah that reject his leadership," Dimitri Dilliani, a spokesperson for Dahlan's faction, said in a statement.

Mr Abbas committed to the November election timetable in his address to the UN General Assembly last month.

He also committed in writing to Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to hold presidential and legislative elections as part of France's recognition of a Palestinian state in September 2025.

France's foreign ministry said on Thursday that holding the elections was essential and it welcomed the launch of an EU election observation mission.

On Friday, Gideon Saar, Israel's foreign minister accused Abbas of “fooling the international community” by planning to postpone legislative polls.

Race to survive

Wounded residents are pulled from the rubble by rescue workers in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, after an apartment block was hit during an overnight Russian air strike.

Trump's threats will not deter Kyiv from employing its biggest weapon

Ben Farmer

SHORTLY after Donald Trump blindsided Volodymyr Zelensky by announcing the US would import diesel from Vladimir Putin, a fierce orange glow erupted over the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

A large blaze had broken out at an oil-loading terminal operated by the Novoshakhtinsk refinery, after it was reportedly hit by drones.

The refinery is said to supply the Russian military, but also exports petroleum products such as the diesel Mr Trump desperately seeks to cut prices at US pumps.

Ukrainian drones hit the facilities last month as part of a wave of attacks on refineries to try to choke off oil revenue for the Kremlin's war economy. Hours later, it emerged another major oil facility, near Prosvet in the Samara region, had also been struck, setting alight one of Russia's largest hubs for receiving, storing and blending crude petroleum.

Such attacks and the damage they inflict on Russia's economy have become one of Kyiv's most potent weapons in its four-year resistance against Putin's invasion.

But the strikes have also angered Mr Trump, who has called for Mr Zelensky to be ousted for contributing to climbing global fuel prices, which are expected to cost the president dearly at next month's US midterm elections.

Yesterday, Mr Trump said Ukraine “better damn well stop,” striking Russia’s oil infrastructure. “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal,” he said, referring to Mr Zelensky.

Mr Trump reportedly made his shock decision to upend US sanctions policy and import diesel from Putin after Mr Zelensky ignored his requests to stop attacking Russian refineries.

Mr Trump announced on Friday that Putin would “immediately supply

more than 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace", followed by another 1.5 million tons before the end of the year. The flames rising above Rostov-on-Don and Samara in the early hours yesterday may have now given an early answer to one of the most pressing questions that Mr Trump's decision has thrown up.

Analysts had questioned whether Mr Zelensky would be forced to stop blowing up Russian refineries, because it would jeopardise Mr Trump's deal and alienate the White House further.

Yet the language from Kyiv after the deal and the latest strikes instead suggest Mr Zelensky is not planning to relinquish one of his strongest cards against the Russians.

A senior Ukrainian official told the Financial Times that Kyiv would continue its long-range drone strikes on Russia's energy facilities. “We will burn their refineries,” the official said.

Sir Bill Browder, who formerly headed the largest foreign

investment fund in Russia before spearheading a global campaign against Kremlin corruption, said: "Just as Ukraine was changing the direction of the war by inflicting real economic pain on Putin by hitting his oil refineries, Trump steps in and agrees to buy Russian diesel. Now Trump can say that Ukraine is bombing American interests and they better stop."

He said the diesel deal had accomplished “three very ugly things”.

First, Mr Trump could “threaten Ukraine if they bomb any more of Putin’s oil refineries” and, secondly, it could be “used as a pretext for why Trump insiders can do dirty business deals with Russia”.

He said the deal could also potentially open the door for more sanctions relief for Putin.

If the deal does go ahead and Russia is able to export diesel to the US, then Ukraine fears the money flowing into the Kremlin coffers will only prolong the war. The US treasury is suspending sanctions on Russian diesel exports until April 7 as part of the deal, but other assets such as those in American banks are still frozen.

Yesterday, Mr Zelensky predicted the extra money would go towards producing more missiles and jet-powered Shahed drones, which have been bombarding Ukraine. With Ukraine's air defence batteries largely depleted, the country's infrastructure is taking daily beatings and civilian casualties are climbing.

Mr Zelensky said: “Every additional billion dollars they earn from exports will be spent on nothing but sourcing and importing critical components and equipment to manufacture weapons, upgrading Shaheds, producing missiles and recruiting even more mercenaries to fight at the front. Russia’s choice is war. And they will be ready to end it only when they feel that their ability to drag the war out is diminishing.”

Yet analysts are unsure if Russia will be able to deliver the promised

---

Russian military spending

quantities of diesel. In July, Russia stopped diesel exports because of the Ukrainian blitz against its refineries.

Edward Fishman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The New York Times he doubted Russia could supply what it had offered.

He said: “The reason Russia imposed an export ban was that Ukrainian strikes had degraded its refining output, necessitating fuel rationing. This strikes me as classic Putin – empty promises aimed at sowing further divisions in the transatlantic alliance.”

However, the deal would allow Russia to offload its summer-grade diesel for the heavier winter and Arctic grades needed in the coming months, Clayton Seigle, an energy expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said. He added: “I don’t think it’ll be enough to materially lower prices in the US or Europe, but it does certainly let Moscow off the hook in terms of revenue squeeze.”

Mr Trump's decision is also likely to anger other nations who are being sanctioned for their role in buying Russian oil. India has been hit with tariffs because of its purchases.

One Indian news outlet asked: "What makes an American purchase of Russian fuel acceptable while an Indian purchase invites economic punishment?"

Ireland ‘living in la la land’ on defence cuts

By Lily Shanagher

IRELAND has been accused of living in “la la land” after it proposed slashing EU security spending by 13 per cent.

must be affordable for those who bear the brunt of its financing," he said.

The Irish EU presidency proposed an overall 8 per cent cut in the European Commission's budget plan for 2028 to 2034, to win over a group of “frugal” member states led by Germany and bridge deep division in the bloc.

The proposal sets out a 3 per cent cut in spending on regional development, agriculture and fisheries, and a 13 per cent reduction in spending on competitiveness and security.

The plan was immediately rejected by Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, who said the overall budget cuts were not enough. "It does not provide a basis for an agreement. The EU budget

“Everyone must contribute to the necessary adjustments” and agree to “prioritising and modernising”.

Siegfried Muresan, the European People Party's budget negotiator, said the budget “cuts defence as threats multiply, reduces investment in competitiveness as Europe loses ground globally and leaves farmers and regions underfunded”.

Ireland's long-standing neutrality policy and its low defence spending have both come under scrutiny as it holds the rotating six-month presidency of the Council of the EU.

Neutrality is a cornerstone of Irish foreign policy, but defence commentators have questioned whether Dublin is doing enough to stand up for European defences. Ireland's own defence spending is the lowest in the EU at just 0.2 per cent of gross domestic product in 2025, compared with the EU-wide level of 2.1 per cent.

Meanwhile, EU leaders said the overall budget was still too high.

"The overall volume must come down significantly," said Jessica Rosencrantz, Sweden's Europe minister.

An EU diplomat condemned the proposals as a “disappointment and not even close to a landing zone”.

The official told Politico: “The steep increase in Multiannual Financial Framework spending compared to today is unaffordable and financially not viable. This negobox is no basis for an agreement among member states.

“We urgently need more financial realism and less financial la la Land.”

I don't want Kamala to run again, says husband

By NATASHA LEAKE

KAMALA HARRIS's husband has privately expressed a wish for her not to run for president again.

Doug Emhoff, 61, told people that he would prefer the former vice-president not to launch another White House bid, The Wall Street Journal reported. However, sources told the newspaper that he would support her if she decided to run.

Ms Harris has yet to declare whether she will seek the Democratic nomination in 2028, but has indicated that she is considering another campaign.

In July, she refused to rule out a presidential run when Rev Al Sharpton asked her at the National Action Network conference in New York. "Listen, I might," she replied. She added: "I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. I know what the job is, and I know what it requires."

A second campaign could prove divisive for the Democratic Party, with some within it believing it is time to put forward a fresh candidate after Ms Harris's defeat by Donald Trump in 2024.

In her memoir, 107 Days, which chronicles her abbreviated 2024 campaign, Ms Harris portrays her husband as a supportive and self-sacrificing partner. When she was selected as Joe Biden's running mate in 2020, Mr Emhoff gave up his job at a legal firm to avoid any suggestion of a conflict of interest.

“He made a huge sacrifice, gladly and without bitterness,” she wrote. “He knew it was essential that there be no appearance of conflicts of interest in our new roles. So that was his last day at his law firm."

Mr Emhoff later returned to work as an attorney at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP in Los Angeles. The couple live in an \$8m (£6m) home in Malibu overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Gavin Newsom, the outgoing governor of California, is among those widely tipped as a contender for the Democratic nomination in 2028. In September, Mr Newsom said he would not run if Ms Harris entered the race, describing the prospect of challenging her as a “waste of everyone’s time”.

“I wouldn’t run if she ran,” he told Jake Tapper, of CNN.

"I wouldn't do that to her. I wouldn't do it to me. I wouldn't do that to you. I wouldn't waste everyone's time," he said.

'Cockroach' leader arrested on his way to Delhi protest

By LILY SHANAGHER

POLICE have arrested the leader of India's “Cockroach” student protest movement before a march in New Delhi.

Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta party, was among thousands of protesters detained as authorities deployed a sweeping security crackdown across the Indian capital yesterday.

Protesters were preparing to march after millions of people were removed from the electoral roll by Narendra Modi's Hindu-nationalist government.

Touted by organisers as a demonstration to “save democracy”, protesters were calling for Gyanesh Kumar, the country’s chief election officer, to quit over the revision of voters lists, claiming they favoured Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

On Friday, police said they had denied permission for the protest because the request had been submitted too late.

Mr Dipke, along with co-leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, was detained at Delhi airport after he flew in from Mumbai, and reportedly asked to call off the protest. Other Cockroach movement leaders were detained before arriving at the protest.

Jantar Mantar – the designated protest site in the heart of New Delhi – was barricaded, while anti-riot vehicles equipped with tear gas launchers were stationed along key routes. Authorities also imposed restrictions on mobile internet and access to some areas.

Some protesters were dragged away before they could reach Jantar Mantar, bundled into police vehicles and taken to temporary detention centres.

Authorities' response extended beyond the protest venue, with police stopping buses, cars and other vehicles at checkpoints on routes into the capital and searching for demonstrators.

The protests centre on India's election commission's special intensive revision, a move the opposition says has disenfranchised eligible voters.

Protesters are demanding that the government reverse the measure, which has removed more than 130 million names from voter lists so far.

The election commission and the government reject allegations of voter manipulation, saying the revision is intended to eliminate duplicate and ineligible entries.

Police detain people heading to protest against the removal of millions of names from the electoral roll. Police had refused permission for the demonstration in New Delhi

AP/SUBHASHPAUL

Missile hits passenger plane at Riyadh airport

By Our Foreign Staff

A SUSPECTED Houthi missile has struck a passenger terminal at Riyadh's main airport, killing at least 12 people and wounding 309.

Ambulances were seen rushing in the direction of the Saudi facility which was evacuated yesterday afternoon, according to two regional officials, after the latest in a series of attacks on the site.

Flights to Riyadh were still being diverted away from the country late last night as the kingdom found itself on the front line of the Iran war, according to the tracker Flightradar24.

Kuwait Airways said it was cancelling flights to the airport, and Canada's embassy advised citizens to avoid all travel to the site, noting “ongoing military activity”.

King Khalid International Airport has been targeted several times since a Saudi-led coalition launched a major military offensive against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen. The Houthis claimed responsibility for the earlier attacks, including one on Wednesday that killed a Sudanese national.

There was no immediate Houthi statement yesterday. The Saudi government-run Center for International Communication, which oversees foreign media in the kingdom, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Riyadh resident, Ahmed Sayed, told the Associated Press he heard at least two loud explosions that rocked the capital.

Fighting in Yemen between the Houthis and Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces has escalated, with the Saudi-led coalition providing air support for government forces in an attempt to reverse recent Houthis gains along the Red Sea.

The rebels' gains gave them better surveillance of shipping on a corridor that's a crucial alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has been attacking ships.

The Saudis have sought support from Washington and other allies as its airports, military facilities and oil infrastructure have come under attack.

Officials said US assistance has included intelligence sharing, target identification and planning for the latest offensive.

Soaring prices open a new front in the Iran war

Akhtar Makoi

Trump's economic warfare leaves many on their knees but Tehran insists it won't be squeezed into surrender

IN THE Caspian coastal city of Sari, Akbar, 43, breaks metal and hauls loads around a scrap yard for less than £4 a day.

His meagre salary is worth about half what it was a year ago.

Akbar recently started using the little money he had left over each day to store food before another possible American bombing campaign.

But two weeks ago he started raiding those supplies in desperation.

"We can't even afford our daily things," he said.

“And it’s not just me. It’s the same for most people I know, so I can’t even

borrow from them, because they're struggling too."

Akbar's quiet humiliation is the face of a slower and grinding kind of warfare now bearing down on Iran.

The bombing of major cities may have stopped, but another war has taken its place – one aimed directly at ordinary Iranians.

Washington has sanctioned all of the country's airlines, throttled its border crossings and made it all but impossible to import medicine, food and fertiliser, as part of a US Treasury campaign called Operation Economic Outcast.

In September, it blacklisted 27 Iranian carriers and aviation bodies, cutting off access to spare parts, maintenance and safety checks.

Tehran, in a complaint to the UN Security Council, described the measures as “economic terrorism” and “collective punishment” of civilians.

The success of the US blockade of Iran's ports is also taking hold, with almost all Iranian exports shut off.

The oil getting out belongs to Arab neighbours in the Persian Gulf – much to the chagrin of Iranian armed forces who have restarted attacks on tankers this week. Before the US-Israel war on Iran began on Feb 28, the Strait of Hormuz typically handled about 125 large commercial vessels a day, and shipments through it accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the world's crude and liquefied natural gas.

Seven months into the original blockade, The Telegraph spoke with ordinary Iranians as well as officials, clerics and analysts across the country.

They described a nation ground down by the economic siege, with a currency in freefall.

They spoke of day labourers who are now eating through their emergency supplies, of small businesses with no customers left, of pharmacies searched end to end for a single strip of codeine, and flu vaccines that can no longer be found.

They told of a creeping despair among young people who said their futures are being stripped from them by the day, and at least one who said she wished only for it all to end.

Even within the Islamic Republic, the strain is showing.

Generals and clerics admitted a fear that the government supporters filling the streets and calling for revenge could be pushing the system towards collapse – and that it may not survive the pressure with a supreme leader who has all but vanished from view.

The leadership, meanwhile, called the war a victory publicly. Its president told the UN that Iran had “come out with our heads held high”, its commanders have declared the Islamic Republic triumphant, and the state has summoned hundreds of thousands to enlist in a mass mobilisation it holds up as proof of a nation unbowed.

The interviews revealed how Donald Trump, having failed to force Iran to its knees in war this year, is now playing a longer game and is tightening a naval blockade and economic siege designed to crush the Islamic Republic from within.

In Tehran, Reza, 36, ran a small online shop until the orders dried up.

"I haven't made money for weeks," he said.

“During the war there was no internet, and I thought when it came back things would improve. They only got worse – people have no money to buy anything.”

"There too it's bad. People aren't buying. At least he keeps ahead of inflation by not holding tomans [a colloquial unit of money] – he turns them into stock."

With no savings, he now works in a relative's store.

The Iranian rial has sunk past 2.7 million to the dollar. Food inflation, by some figures, has blown past 125 per cent.

parents and relatives. He cannot afford to.

Jalal, 38, drives a taxi in Karaj, west of the capital, and has decided to give up and move to Shiraz to be near his

“Two months ago a truck to move my things cost 10 million tomans.

“Last week they told me 35 million” – diesel is scarce and drivers charge what they like.

“You should just hope you never need a doctor,” he added.

“I went to at least 10 pharmacies to find some codeine. Even flu vaccines are hard to find.”

The despair runs deepest among the young.

Taraneh, 29, a student in Tehran, said life sank “deeper into misery every passing day”.

She has a little more freedom now in how she dresses because of more relaxed rules, she said, “but what use is it when we can’t even afford a coffee with friends?”

More than once, she said, she had reached the point of simply wishing it would all end.

Shoppers in Tehran are struggling to afford food owing to the effects of the war

Behnaz, an 18-year-old female student in Isfahan, was more resigned than angry. “I’m not on anyone’s side. I just think about my future, which is being taken from me every day. It feels like no one cares about us – it's all politics and we are stuck."

That sentiment – that the people have become the battlefield – is being discussed at the top.

---

Iran's economy shrinks at sharpest rate in 38 years

In interviews with The Telegraph, generals and clerics acknowledged a fear that the Iranians now filling the streets could be dragging the system towards collapse, and that some inside the system knew it.

Each night, crowds of the Islamic Republic's supporters have gathered in city squares, chanting for revenge against the United States and Israel and vowing to fight on.

Much of that anger is now turned inward as the demonstrators warn the government's own negotiators against any deal with Washington, framing talks to end the war as betrayal.

The nightly rallies, an offshoot of the mass “Jan-fada” mobilisation, have become a show of hardline strength just as hunger tests the wider public’s patience and stand as a threat to Tehran’s diplomats that the price of compromise could be steep.

Iranian officials and clerics who spoke with The Telegraph argued privately that there must be talks with the Americans, unsure whether Trump is simply waiting for the economy to break.

Personal

And they voiced an anxiety rarely spoken aloud that the Islamic Republic may not weather the strain with a supreme leader who has remained almost entirely out of view.

“It is clear Trump is playing the longer game now, waiting for the system to reach a point where it is forced to give concessions,” one analyst in Tehran said.

“But that may take a long time, because Shia ideology is all about resisting. When people are hungry, though, it is another case.”

Among analysts, the debate is whether the blockade is an alternative to war or a prelude to one.

Sadegh Maleki, a former diplomat, said the two could not be cleanly separated.

“We are in a fluid situation in which war is near and so is peace,” he said. America, he added, failed in its war to win what it now seeks through siege, and is betting that economic pain and the rising cost of living will erode Iranian society’s endurance.

The way out, he added, runs “step by step, from understanding to agreement and then towards normalisation”.

Ali Bigdeli, an international affairs scholar, said Trump's priority, for the moment, was the blockade rather than a new war he can ill afford before US midterm elections, with his popularity sliding and fuel prices a live political danger.

“Opening a new front could be costly,” he said, “especially as past conflicts brought Washington no final victory.”

Iran's leaders insist they will not be squeezed into surrender.

At a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States this week, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, framed his country as an indispensable corridor linking Central Asia to open water through the Gulf port of Chabahar. He warned that sanctions on Iran damage the whole region's trade and energy.

“Negotiation in the shadow of force is not negotiation,” he said. “It is coercion.”

On the ground, the siege bites in humbler ways where convoys of Iranian trucks are halted at one border crossing after another, unable to move goods out by land.

Birthdays

For now, the long game is measured not in territory but in the texture of ordinary life.

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Akbar, the metal breaker, said he was too embarrassed to go to a recent wedding because he didn't want to turn up empty handed without a gift.

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On the streets, he said: "You see few people laughing. Everyone, everywhere, is complaining – and no one knows who to blame."

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Rogue AI contacts police with fake tip-off about unsolved murder

By Emily Blumenthal in San Francisco

AN AI model made by Anthropic submitted a fake tip about an unsolved murder to police in Philadelphia, but the developer did not detect the incident for more than two months.

Anthropic said its Claude Haiku 4.5 model had landed on a police website for unsolved homicides during a test where it was instructed to complete an online form but stop short of submitting it.

The Philadelphia police department said the AI had posed as a person with knowledge of a case when it made the submission on July 18 on phillyunsolvedmurders.com, which features a list of murders and a police tip form.

In a publication detailing failures in alignment, or the extent to which the model follows commands by a user, Anthropic said Claude had been told not to “submit anything destructive”, but still sent in the sensitive form.

"I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant," the model wrote.

The website, however, had never included a description of the alleged perpetrator.

Claude had been given what Anthropic described as “ambiguous instructions” that “did not rule out form submissions”. The developer said its model had left the contact information sections of the form empty and submitted it. Philadelphia police said the tip was flagged as spam and never forwarded to its officers for investigation.

After discovering the incident on Sept 28, Anthropic ceased the faulty automated testing process and strengthened guardrails on its technology to stop it from recurring. But the developer did not report the lapse to the force until Oct 7, police said, at which point the two sides held a meeting the next day.

"The two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident to the City is unacceptable," Philadelphia police said.

When approached for comment, Anthropic referred The Telegraph to its report.

Teachers in Denmark allowed to use physical force

Rise in violence in the classroom sparks reform to allow staff to restrain or remove disruptive pupils

By Lily Shanagher

DANISH teachers will be granted permission to use physical force in classrooms amid complaints of rising violence.

A reform proposed by the centre-Left government this week will allow teachers to use physical restraint to remove disruptive students from August next year. This means “holding a student, keep them in place, or take them to another room against their will”.

Currently, teachers are only allowed to use force if a student poses a danger to themselves, others or school property. The law, written by the ministry of education, follows calls from the national teachers' union, which has long said it is growing more difficult to manage disruptive students. The bill states that physical intervention may

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'No teacher should fear being fired for stepping in when necessary in a violent situation'

only be used in exceptional circumstances and must be proportionate.

Parents and the municipal council must also be notified in any case of physical force. Magnus Heunicke, the minister for education, said: "Teachers must not be left in doubt about what they are allowed to do when a situation escalates. And no teacher should fear being fired for stepping in when necessary in a violent situation."

For nearly 60 years, the use of force in schools has been effectively banned in Denmark, which outlawed corporal punishment in 1967.

But Danish teachers are grappling with rising violence among children, particularly in the younger years, and say they fear repercussions if they intervene. A survey published by the ministry of education on Oct 1, found that physical violence between pupils was reported at least once in 55 per cent of classes during 2025, with incidents occurring at least once a month in 36 per cent of those. Physical violence was reported in 75 per cent of classes in the youngest grades of 0 to 3 (Reception to Year 3), falling to 59 per cent in grades four to six and 27 per cent in grades seven to 10.

Most violence was concentrated among a small number of pupils, with 60 per cent of classes with reported incidents claiming just one or two children were involved. The study found no general association between pupils' ethnicity and higher levels of violence or aggressive behaviour.

“Over the past year, one in three teachers refrained from using physical contact to restore calm in the classroom, out of fear of negative repercussions,” said Gordon Orskov Madsen, the president of the teachers’ union.

The law was originally drafted by Mattias Tesfaye, the former education minister, last autumn.

Mr Tesfaye had said he wanted to prioritise returning “discipline” and “authority” to his schools and had condemned parents who had given their children a “pissedarligt opdragede” – meaning “s---- upbringing”.

The bill attracted controversy, with more than 500 education experts and non-governmental organisations previously signing an op-ed protesting against the reform. Rasmus Kjeldahl, the director of the National Children's Rights Association, said he was concerned the “bond of trust between students and their teachers will be broken if teachers act like police officers”.

The bill echoes legislation in England, which states teachers can use reasonable physical force to prevent disruption but never as a punishment.

Staff are allowed to use minimal, necessary force to prevent injury to students or staff or restore order.

Corporal punishment is still allowed in 15 US states.

The most recent data from the US department of education's civil rights data collection reports 32,000 instances of corporal punishment being used on children between five and 18 in the 2021-22 school year – around one reported incident per 2,000 students.

According to NPR, Mississippi had the highest rate of corporal punishment that year.

The American Psychological Association says such punishment can lower a child's self-esteem and have chronic consequences, such as creating in the child “the impression that he or she is an ‘undesirable person’”.

Katie Zacharia, 41, will replace Karoline Leavitt as the White House press secretary. She is currently a senior communications adviser to the president's media company

Trump picks Fox News commentator as next press secretary

By Poppy Wood US CORRESPONDENT

DONALD TRUMP has chosen a conservative commentator to replace Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary.

Katie Zacharia, who often appears on Fox News as an expert on the Trump administration, will replace Ms Leavitt following her departure from the role in August.

Ms Zacharia is currently a senior communications adviser to Trump

Media and Technology Group, the president's US media company, which owns his Truth Social platform.

She had a brief stint working as a spokesman for Kristi Noem, at the time the secretary at the department of homeland security (DHS), who earned the nickname “ICE Barbie” for her frequent photo opportunities alongside immigration agents.

Ms Zacharia was reportedly hired to act as the face of the embattled DHS following deadly shootings of two anti-ICE protesters that stoked widespread backlash. The 41-year-old, from Los Angeles, only worked for Ms Noem for six weeks until March 2026.

At the time, Ms Zacharia denied reports in the Daily Beast that she had left because she was an ally of Corey Lewandowski, Ms Noem's chief adviser. Mr Trump had fired both Ms Noem and Mr Lewandowski just weeks earlier.

Following her exit from the DHS in March, Ms Zacharia said that she had joined the department “with a genuine passion for supporting [Mr Trump]” and looked forward “to continuing that work in other capacities”.

Ms Zacharia's pick as the president's top press liaison marks another promotion by Mr Trump based on on-air loyalty to the administration.

In a post on Truth Social on Friday, the president praised her for her “unblemished record of support”, saying she had “been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning”.

We need change – Why Sweden scrapped its push to be cashless

By Lily Shanagher in Stockholm

SWEDEN was predicted to become entirely cashless by 2030.

As the country developed its own mobile payment system, called Swish, banks slowly stopped handling cash, and tills disappeared from shop counters.

With Sweden's cash circulation the lowest as a share of GDP in the world, its progress was lauded, and observers wondered how it had forged so far ahead of the rest of Europe so quickly.

Then Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine and it all changed.

Realising that reliance on an electronic payment system left Sweden vulnerable to blackouts or sabotage, the Riksbank – Sweden's central bank – urged civilians to keep 1,000 Swedish kronor (£80) at home per adult.

The government issued a brochure entitled “If Crisis or War Comes” to every household, advising Swedes to use cash regularly to “strengthen preparedness”.

Erik Thedeen, the Riksbank governor, told The Telegraph that Sweden takes the threat of Russian hybrid attacks seriously.

ELINDA JIAO FOR THE TELEGRAPH—

“We should do whatever it takes to safeguard Sweden in various aspects, both military and civil. It’s very hard for anyone to be against that, given where we are in those security situations. I think the pushback has been very limited,” he said.

In July, the bank announced that essential shops such as grocery stores and pharmacies with staffed checkouts had to accept physical cash.

While some Swedes welcomed the return of cash to reduce barriers for the elderly, the majority say they will not be changing their digital habits.

According to data from the Riksbank, only 5 per cent of consumers said they paid cash for their last in-store purchase in 2025, compared with 10 per cent in 2023.

compared with 10 per cent in 2020 and 40 per cent 15 years ago.

Doctor Anna Chotigasatien says Sweden has always embraced new technology but sometimes there are down sides

This fits the Nordic model. Only 2 per cent of people in Norway and 8 per cent in Denmark reported using cash for their most recent in-store purchase, a Riksbank survey from the end of last year found. In the euro area, cash is still the most common method of payment in shops.

now the law says we should. Annoyingly," Stefan Blomvurst, a Spanish deli shop assistant, said. "I understand you would need cash "We don't handle cash but now the law says we should.

if you go to the pharmacy or big supermarket, but we are a speciality store so I don't think we should have to accept cash.

"It's a lot to handle and it's also unsafe. I just feel like it's silly and outdated. I think maybe in a few weeks we'll have to get a cash register in. Nobody's going to use it."

The majority of the deli's customers pay by card, Mr Blomvurst, 44, says and cannot remember the last time he used cash and feels no urgency to do so despite the Russian threat. "But I'm also quite naive, to be honest," he admits. "I don't even have a card. I lost it. Apple Pay is all I have."

Meanwhile, Mr Thedeen was able to practise what he preached during a trip to the supermarket recently, he said. The bank chief explained: “The cashier said, ‘We can’t take any cards

because the system has broken down, but we could accept cash'.

"I was the only one standing in the line after that message. But I actually had cash. I could pay for my food and go home. It is actually good sometimes for resilience reasons, and I do use it sometimes, but not very often."

The country takes inspiration from Ukraine, which rapidly adapted to a new digital system under war conditions. Statistics from the National Bank of Ukraine show that nine out of 10 card transactions are cashless, raising the question of whether a return to cash is the answer.

"The Ukraine example is interesting," says Mr Thedeen. "You first saw people withdrawing more cash, then it became a little impractical so people started to trust the electronic system, although they were in war."

In a country so digitalised, where parking tickets are paid for via apps and “no cash” signs are pasted over shop windows, it will take a lot more for Mr Thedeen to convince Swedes that cash is truly king.

“I give it to my kids as a weekly allowance, but I don’t use cash ever,” says Anna Chotigasatien, a 41-year-old doctor.

“I think businesses will be frustrated by the change because I think the risk of robbery and the risk of things going wrong currently is much less.”

However, she says that with the rise of AI and uncertainty surrounding the digital age, there could be negative repercussions from leaving physical currency behind.

“Sweden is the kind of country that always wants to be developed when something new comes, like we were quite early with iPads in school,” she says. “Now they have seen that’s actually not very good, that kids can’t write and use, like, scissors because they don’t use their hands. We have tried to be a little bit too developed.”

Concerns over excluding the elderly, who tend to rely more on cash, were brought into debates during the country's general elections last month, with the hard-Right Sweden Democrats calling for more merchants and banks to accept cash as a means of payment and declaring: "We oppose a cashless society."

According to the Riksbank, almost half of respondents in a survey from September 2025 considered the decreasing use of cash as a somewhat or very negative development.

People outside big cities and over the age of 65 are more likely to be negative about the decline in cash use. The proportion is significantly higher than in 2022, when it was at 36 per cent. This is probably because of an increase in crisis awareness.

“Cash is king,” one elderly man tells The Telegraph. “When something is based on electronics, it will break sooner or later.”

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ESTABLISHED 1961

Trump's disgraceful actions will fuel Putin's war

Donald Trump's decision to call for Volodymyr Zelensky to be removed from office is as shameful as it is absurd. Speaking to reporters yesterday, the US president hit out at Mr Zelenksy, declaring that the Ukrainians should “get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does”.

The US president's outburst is seemingly in response to Mr Zelensky's justified criticism of his disgraceful decision to import millions of tons of Russian diesel. Mr Trump clearly thinks he will get some political benefit from this measure in advance of the midterm elections – prices at the pump have soared since he launched the war on Iran. But the agreement, which the Ukrainian president declared a “gift to Putin”, pumps money into the Kremlin's war machine and makes a mockery of Western resolve in the face of sustained threats.

Mr Trump insists that Mr Zelensky could have settled this war “many times”. Such a claim bears little relation to reality.

In November last year, Mr Trump presented Ukraine with a 28-point peace plan which had been shaped in tandem with the Russians. It reportedly demanded that Ukraine accept limits on its military and cede territory. Signing up to such a deal – or any deal like it – would be to hand Vladimir Putin the very prizes he sought when he launched his brutal full-scale assault on Ukraine's sovereignty in 2022.

Mr Trump's comments will come as music to Moscow's ears. Removing Mr Zelensky, who has proved an exceptional wartime leader, has long been an aim of the Kremlin.

Putin listens only to strength. If any evidence were needed that such concessions are seen as a green light to continue waging war, it came in the form of Russian strikes on the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia mere hours after the oil deal, killing at least eight people including three children,

and wounding 16 more. Mr Trump's comments are unlikely to be received as anything other than a victory in Moscow.

What is the United States trying to achieve? Less than a month ago, Washington imposed sweeping sanctions on the Kremlin, designed to choke its energy revenues. Now it has agreed to buy Russian fuel, propping up its ailing economy, and is demanding the defenestration of a popular war leader.

On entering the White House for the second time last year, Mr Trump predicted that he would end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. Instead, almost two years on, his actions are fuelling it.

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Electoral system at risk

Andy Burnham's plan to vandalise this country's electoral rules is one of the most short-sighted and misguided to emerge yet from Labour's time in office.

Mr Burnham inherited the woeful Representation of the People Bill from Sir Keir Starmer. But under the new Prime Minister, it has been made even worse. Now it has emerged that Mr Burnham is trying to rush it into law, fuelling fears that he is about to call an early election.

The bill is chock full of the Left's worst ideas. Chief among them are proposals to water down the vital safeguards that ensure the integrity of our elections. Perhaps most significant is the plan to reverse the requirement that voters present photo ID at polling stations, introduced by the Conservatives.

Quite why Labour wants to make electoral fraud easier to commit is unclear. At the last election, there was no evidence that this measure dampened turnout in any

meaningful way. And while a “papers, please” culture is antithetical to this nation, many aspects of British life, from opening a bank account to renting a flat, already require simple proof of identity. It is hardly an affront to suggest that such an important task as choosing the government should also be shielded from fraud.

Then there is the utterly foolish proposal to lower the voting age to 16 for all UK elections. Sixteen-year-olds can't drive, buy alcohol or even purchase fireworks. On almost every measure, the trend has been towards infantilising them further. In recent years they have been barred from leaving education, getting married or accessing swathes of the internet. So why does Labour think they are suddenly responsible enough to determine who governs the country?

Labour also plans to meddle with the rules surrounding political donations. These changes appear deliberately intended to damage Labour's opponents, in particular Reform UK, which relies on a few wealthy people to fund its operations. Curiously, Mr Burnham shows little interest in addressing the role that trade union money plays in our politics, with just three unions having donated around £150m to Labour since the turn of the millennium.

Why, then, is Mr Burnham so keen to ram this ill-considered bill through? Does the Prime Minister have his eye on calling an election, despite his protestations to the contrary? This law would lay the groundwork for one. With the vile Green Party tearing itself apart and the Liberal Democrats at loggerheads, perhaps Mr Burnham thinks now is his chance to unite the Left.

Our electoral system is at risk of being grievously undermined by a Labour Party obsessed with playing politics.

LETTERS to the EDITOR

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To succeed like Thatcher, Badenoch must take on the Blob

SIR – It was exhilarating to watch Kemi Badenoch channelling Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, as she lambasted her political foes on Left and Right (“Badenoch doesn’t care what the BBC thinks; that changes everything”, Comment, October 8).

However, having defeated Labour, Mrs Thatcher went on to fight the real battle, which was with the unions. They were strangling the country. Her victory secured the future for many years but also earned her the visceral hatred of a large section of the population, which persists to this day.

Mrs Badenoch, in her turn, must first defeat Labour, then take on the Blob, including the Civil Service and the health and education unions, and all the other bodies that are sapping the lifeblood of this country.

Does she have the determination needed for this, and the courage to withstand the avalanche of rage that will fall upon her, win or lose? It will not be pretty.

SIR – Kemi Badenoch has demonstrated that she is a politician of real integrity and conviction – a rare commodity in today's political landscape.

The publication of her pamphlet, The Right Way, is an important start, but she needs explicitly to distance herself from the failures of 14 years of Conservative rule, proving to the voting public that she is leading a new party. Merely holding Andy Burnham's feet to the fire, which she does with consummate ease, will not be enough to persuade floating voters. She has the personality and rhetorical skills for the job; let's hope she gets it done.

Jonathan Hall

Oaksey, Wiltshire

SIR – Regardless of what Kemi Badenoch promises, we all know that the 1922 Committee runs the Conservative Party. If the Tories were ever to regain power, the Committee would simply push its old outdated agenda once again.

Steve Churchill

Shrewsbury

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Trump and Putin

SIR – In buying diesel from Vladimir Putin's Russia, Donald Trump shows yet again that he has no morals (“Trump agreed to Russian oil deal after Zelensky defied him”, telegraph.co.uk, October 10). Everything he does is transactional; who may suffer as a result is of no consequence to him.

It reflects badly on a once great nation that it chose to elect this infantile narcissist as its President. Malcolm Webberley Shillingstone, Dorset

SIR – Vladimir Putin is quite clearly targeting civilians in Ukraine. On Thursday, he killed at least 33 people in an attack on a bus stop (report, October 8). It is barbaric. Putin should be under enormous pressure from the international community. Instead, he has been invited to join the G20 in Florida. That will be an abomination.

Jim Sutherland

Lauder, Berwickshire

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Dogma and discourse

SIR – I write in response to Howard Jacobson's article, “I am obsessed with the ignorance of the Jew-haters” (Comment, October 4).

It is important to understand how most discourse works these days. One must start from a position, whatever it is, and the next stage is to find articles that support it. The nature of the internet means that these are always available, and plausible ones that look authoritative can generally be found.

We know from the political realm that the most grievous sin is to change an opinion: the moment any politician performs what is labelled a U-turn, their days are numbered, as their views are thereafter considered impure. Sadly, the notion of shifting one's position on the basis of reading or reflection is deeply unfashionable.

This attitude is fostered in universities, where diversity of opinion is no longer encouraged. Lecturers have failed to promote the ideals underpinning reasoned debate. All we get are contests of who can shout the loudest, with the shouting eventually condensed into catechism. Robert Davis Edgware, Middlesex

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Schools' verdicts

SIR – Paul Whiteman, of the National Association of Head Teachers, argues that the school inspection system relies too heavily on “blunt labels” that often do not tell parents about what a school does well or how it can improve (Letters, September 27).

During my nearly 20 years in education, I have endured countless reporting cycles throughout the academic year, during which staff were contractually obliged to produce discursive and subjective reports for every pupil they taught, as well as those for whom they held pastoral responsibility. These reports followed a prescribed format, ensuring that parents were informed of both their child's progress and targets. While there was undoubtedly an element of corner-cutting brought about by the increasing prevalence of AI, staff diligently invested considerable time in communicating each pupil's attainment and developmental trajectory across both academic subjects and wider areas of school life.

I do not know a single colleague who would refuse the opportunity to replace these lengthy narratives with a one-word judgment. I am confident that parents, whether fee-paying or not, would quickly object to the pigeonholing of their child through such a reductionist assessment.

Why, then, is there such debate over schools receiving an equally reductive appraisal following inspection?

Charlotte Rule

Ashtead, Surrey

---

AI threat to jobs

SIR – The news that HSBC could shed up to 20,000 jobs as a result of the increased use of AI (report, October 7) does not bode well for future UK employment or fiscal policy. It is all very well saying that some jobs will be lost but others will be created; we all know that the number of new jobs will be significantly lower than those lost.

With a growing UK population, this raises two questions: first, how will people survive financially? Little thought appears to have been given to this, and there is no plausible long-term government strategy. Secondly, if there are fewer jobs, income tax receipts will dwindle. At the same time, the already out-of-control benefits bill will increase.

This represents a perfect storm for the Exchequer. One solution is for the Government to increase taxes on corporations and AI developers. However, that is easier said than done, as many will be located overseas, beyond the reach of HMRC.

All political parties should be setting out their strategies and policies to combat this potential economic crisis.

Dr Alf Crossman

Rudgwick, West Sussex

SIR – I am about to embark on a simple journey involving a short flight and a train journey. I have my tickets. What more do I need? Well, both the airline and train operator seem to think it necessary to bombard me with endless emails containing banal advice: get to the station on time; don't forget your baggage. All of this correspondence demands time and attention, to ensure that an important message is not missed. Just because AI can do tasks, that doesn't mean it should. Aren't our lives already cluttered enough? Charles Holden Micheldever, Hampshire

SIR – In Somerset we have to sort our recycling into four types: metals and plastic in one container; cardboard and paper in another; food waste in a third; soft plastics in a separate bag.

Next door in Wiltshire, residents put metals, plastics, paper and cardboard into one wheelie bin. The council does not collect food waste or soft plastics.

These councils, geographically similar, have made calculations and come up with different answers. Surely this is exactly the sort of problem that AI should be solving.

Keith Macpherson

Clevedon, Somerset

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British Museum access

SIR – I read with interest your report (October 4) about disabled access to the British Museum's Bayeux Tapestry exhibition.

My adult son is a wheelchair-user. Having seen on the news the visit of the King and Queen, I realised that the tapestry is displayed flat. I contacted the museum, asking for the height of the display and whether there was any assistance for wheelchair-users to ensure that they could properly view the exhibition. After several weeks, I have had no response to repeated voicemails and emails.

We will now not try to buy a ticket. The lack of consideration and information for disabled visitors is shameful at such an organisation.

Heather Kennedy

Ormskirk, Lancashire

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Nighttime mowing

SIR – When naming our robotic

lawnmower (Letters, October 4), my

family voted for Sir Prancealot: he

works hard at night, headlights on full

beam, not only mowing but also

keeping the marauding, ever-hungry

deer out of the garden.

Lyndi D'Ambrumenil

Zeals, Wiltshire

SIR – I call my robotic mower Repton, after Sir Humphry Repton. However, a friend of mine calls his Mellors, after the gardener in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

John Townsend

Rimpton, Somerset

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Hallowe'en horrors

A lesson in tourism from the Eternal City

People pleaser: the Colosseum Archaeological Park had 14.7 million visitors in 2024

SIR - We left our hotel in Rome on Thursday after a three-day visit. The tourist tax came to 45 euros. Rome was heaving with tourists, and one can only assume that the Roman authorities are making a fortune. We should absolutely be introducing such a tax.

Jane Hide

SIR – It makes no sense that foreign tourists can visit our national museums and galleries free of charge, while British tourists visiting similar institutions abroad

Malmesbury, Wiltshire

October 4) is not until the end of this month, our road already has many skeletons, one of them 12ft high, huge black spiders and many ghoulish witches. As the youngsters take all this in their stride, there can be no need for trigger warnings for books, films and plays.

Dr Bernard Lamb

London SW14

SIR - With a shortage of pumpkins, I recommend using a watermelon for Hallowe'en carvings. The blood-red interior makes a fantastic display, especially with a candle inserted, and it's much easier to persuade children to eat the discarded innards. Vivien Parsons

SIR – In her report on Middlesbrough's descent into lawlessness (Business, September 24), Eir Nolsøe refers to Mischief Night. In Yorkshire, this takes place on November 4, on the eve of Bonfire Night.

Ashington, West Sussex must pay. I appreciate that the UK needs tourism, but visitors won't mind paying to see the sights.

L Sequeira

Croydon, Surrey

SIR - Years ago, walking past St Paul's Cathedral, I was amused to see a group of Japanese tourists taking photographs. They were lined up on the steps. One took a shot then rejoined the group; another took a shot, and so on. They have, by now, probably finished.

Greig Bannerman

Frant, East Sussex

the door handles of two neighbouring terrace houses together with string, knock on both doors, and then quickly retire to a safe distance to watch the outcome.

At that time, fireworks were freely available for children to buy. When a dustbin lid was placed on top of a "penny banger", the explosion was powerful enough to lift the lid a couple of feet off the ground. It then fell with a very satisfying metallic clang.

Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire

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Comment

ZOE STRIMPEL

The Nobel Peace Prize is utterly discredited

Netanyahu says the choice of Navi Pillay shows the committee has lost its moral compass. I'm not sure it's had one for a long time

Many of us have long lost any respect for or trust in international organisations that bill themselves as concerned with peace, human rights or international law.

From the International Criminal Court (ICC) to the United Nations and Amnesty International, their unifying obsession with spouting lethal lies about Israel to strip it of its legitimacy, and Jews of their homeland, has eaten them all away from the inside out.

Now when I hear “peace”, I know that what is actually meant is “anything to legitimise destroying Israel”, while “international law” and “human rights” generally translate to “blood libels against the Jewish state”.

Turns out, there truly is no level of august prestige that can insulate an international organisation from this relentless, rabid toxin, as this year's Nobel Peace Prize award to Navi Pillay, announced on Friday, has made clear.

The peace prize has been a dubious, if not a downright perverse honour since 1994, when it was awarded (jointly) to Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who did everything in his power to prevent peace with Israel and ensure bloodshed for years to come.

Its perversity in singling out people who seem to hate human dignity and peace has reached a 21st-century nadir with this year's award to someone wrapped in the labels of respectability and gravitas but whose ignobility on the world stage knows no bounds.

Pillay, 85, is a jurist, former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, and heavily garlanded for being the “first non-white judge of the high court of South Africa”. And yet...

Her true agenda, and the evidence of her vast un-deservingness for any peace prize worth its salt, is most evident in her flirtations with anti-Semitism.

In her years at the head of the UN Human Rights Council, more resolutions condemning Israel were issued by that body than about the rest of the world combined.

Pillay is a virulent genocide-libeller. It's her life, actually: she was the one who oversaw a report that accused Israel, falsely, of committing genocide in Gaza after October 7. The damage she has done by sending this libel into the world parcelled as a UN report is incalculable and will be felt for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Even pre-October 7, she repeatedly campaigned hard, as a supposedly impartial investigator, to smear and punish Israel before looking at any evidence. She chaired a UN Commission of Inquiry into alleged Israeli crimes, but had previously signed a manifesto calling on governments to: “Sanction Apartheid Israel.”

The mask slipped still further in July 2022, when Pillay rushed to the defence of her fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari after he railed against “the Jewish lobby” and questioned Israel’s right to be a member state of the UN. It was such an outlandish thing to do that an event planned in her honour at a Berlin town hall in 2022 was cancelled.

This Nobel winner was chosen from a field of 287 candidates. How can the committee justify this egregious, and incredibly brazen, piece of complicity with anti-Jewish malignancy?

How can the Nobel committee justify this egregious, and brazen, piece of complicity with anti-Jewish malignancy?

The way they all do, of course, with dishonest, pseudo-pacifist references to international law and peace. "At a time when the number of wars and conflicts is rising, and when judges and institutions of international law are under political attack, the Nobel committee wishes to issue a reminder that the ability to resolve conflicts without force or violence is dependent on the international rule of law."

Benjamin Netanyahu put it more succinctly, saying the Nobel Prize committee had “lost its moral compass”. I’m not sure it’s had one for a long time, though perhaps this is the moment its mask has well and truly dropped.

To order prints or signed copies of any Telegraph cartoon, go to telegraph.co.uk/prints-cartoons or call 0191603 0178 ♦ readerprints@telegraph.co.uk

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JANET DALEY

Good riddance populism, welcome back Labour vs the Conservatives

The fall of

the Greens

and the

troubles

of Reform

could herald

the return

of two-party

hegemony

So that's the Greens finished. Whether or not Zack Polanski is forced out as leader, they are exposed as an unapologetic front for the Palestine lobby, a relationship which seemed to involve some personal connections to its terrorist wing. This is undisguised sectarian politics of a kind not seen in Britain, beyond Northern Ireland, for centuries. It will not – must not – survive.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

Now what about the other end of our new multi-party spectrum? Reform has conducted an investigation into its own financial irregularities and solemnly pronounced itself innocent of all charges. You don't say. But, whatever the real judgments on its funding arrangements turn out to be, the party will remain in the public discourse because it is engaging in the debate which has always been at the heart of this country's politics. If anything, that defining issue – social class – has come into greater focus than it has been for 40 years. Yes, “40 years” – that totemic historical span which Andy Burnham's reincarnated Old Labour has proclaimed a lost era of backward social attrition.

Reform is now explicitly bidding for Red Wall voters on the grounds that they have been abandoned by the party which had once been their protector and champion. With its failure to tackle immigration, which the working-class communities of the North and Midlands see as both a cultural and economic threat, Labour has made space for an emerging new Right. Reform, a party which can make outrageously simplistic proposals because it has never had

the responsibilities of national government, is pushing Labour's rhetoric into a class consciousness which had become deeply unfashionable after the party emerged in its meritocratic New Labour phase.

Oddly enough, and contrary to Reform's intentions, this pressure for Labour to become the voice of the old proletarian heartland might actually help to restore the traditional two-party hegemony. Once again, mainstream party leaders are arguing about things that genuinely divide the political landscape. Burnham has resurrected the old class-war axioms, implying that inequalities of wealth and the profit motive itself are inherently wicked: that it must be the mission of socialist government to correct the injustices created by capitalist endeavour.

That leaves Kemi Badenoch free to revivify the antidote to that suffocating ideology. So here we are again. Who would have thought that a generation later, we would once more be taking on that peculiarly childlike depiction of the “wealthy” as monstrous vultures devouring the remains of the innocent poor? Reform is taking up this chorus from the Right with even greater enthusiasm than Labour because it is actively engaged in a battle for working-class support – which, as all the parties know, is not necessarily socialist or even particularly Left-wing. (It embraced Thatcherism with enormous enthusiasm.)

Reform and Labour will pile in happily on what they claim to see as the Tory embrace of those pantomime villains, the wealthy, who have robbed the masses of their rightful share of

prosperity. Mrs Badenoch's proposed reform, which would exclude the family home from inheritance tax, is in their sights as the embodiment of this shameless return to medieval inequality. But who exactly are the wealthy as defined by this Tory proposal? My own household (and quite possibly, yours) would fall into this category, even though our only “wealth” consists of the value of the house we bought when we were much younger and property was much less overpriced.

My husband and I, struggling artist and writer respectively, purchased a semi-detached house in a north London suburb for £47,000 which is now worth, depending on the vagaries of the property market, roughly £1m. So on paper, we are millionaires – or to put it more precisely, we are joint owners of a £1m asset. That has almost no bearing on our actual standard of living or disposable income. We could, if absolutely necessary, borrow on the value of it at today's high interest rates, but that would be a desperate move.

When Labour and Reform point out that only a small percentage of affluent households are presently subject to inheritance tax, they miss the point. That it is the most hated form of tax, even though it directly affects a minority of relatively well-off people, is actually a reflection of the British belief in fairness. You should not be taxed when you are dead for an asset you paid for with earnings that had already been taxed.

This is a moral debate as much as a fiscal one. It goes to the heart of the relationship between state power and individual ownership. What are, or

should be, the limits of democratic government to seize or expropriate the value of an individual's property? Can a governing party simply decide that you have a disproportionate advantage in terms of income or assets – even if you have earned them in a lawful way – and confiscate them? This is precisely the kind of argument that political parties should be (and used to be) engaged in.

The heat that is generated by the inheritance tax controversy is clear proof that voters are deeply affected by abstract ideas and principles: that they see politics very much as a battle of good and evil, an ongoing public debate about the nature of social virtue. And indeed, that they see the debate itself as edifying and worthy. They want to believe that their political leaders care about the higher ethics of civic life, and the purpose of government itself.

That is why they have become so bitterly disengaged with electoral politics that they are turning to populist extremism at both ends of the divide. That new pejorative label, the uniparty, is an iteration of this exasperation. British politics is usually characterised as pragmatic rather than ideological. But the electorate has rightly sensed that practicality still needs values at its heart. The tweaks and managerial adjustments which seem to constitute the business of governing now will no longer do. Voters want a bravely stated commitment to a set of ideals toward which all these promised policies are leading. And they want those ideals to be thrashed out in heated arguments between passionate, but plausible, political leaders.

---

SIMON HEFFER

France is flirting dangerously with the end of capitalism

In a lunatic

Leftism

contest,

Mélenchon

would beat

Corbyn –

and now

he has a

path to the

presidency

Never in the 68 years of the French Fifth Republic has a presidential election – the first round of which is barely six months away – been preceded by such an outbreak of anarchy as witnessed in recent days.

France's secondary education system is a mess, its clients have revolted, and the government of Sébastien Lecornu, Emmanuel Macron's latest reluctant prime minister, hasn't a clue what to do.

Plenty of money is spent on French schools, but is spent badly, as state systems do. Hence the pictures of sagging ceilings and scurrying rats. Teachers are crushed not merely by outbreaks of mindless indiscipline, against which they have few meaningful sanctions, but in some urban areas by pupils who speak no French and are uninterested in learning any.

Absenteeism among pupils and teachers is rife. The baccalaureate qualification has a pass rate of 80 per cent, making it scarcely worth having. The system exemplifies a France that, under M Macron, is badly run, profligate, unaspirational, demoralising and deeply divided. With debt at 119 per cent of GDP, it is a rare supposedly advanced nation that makes us feel good about ourselves, being even more bureaucratised and living further beyond its means than we are.

The riots that have broken out around France are not, though, about education at all. The teenagers of St Denis, Rennes and Lille have obligingly become the useful idiots of France's hard-left party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) under the leadership of the septuagenarian Jean-Luc Mélenchon. For those of you unfamiliar with M Mélenchon, he has been a professional politician all his life, working for Leftist groups when not holding elected office at various levels. Never having had a proper job, he is

untainted by the evils of capitalism. Were he to compete with Jeremy Corbyn in a lunatic Leftism contest, Mr Corbyn would lose.

He desperately wants to get into the second and final round of the presidential elections on May 2, because he believes he can win it. He hasn't a prayer of topping the first round on April 18. That honour will, barring a significant shift in her fortunes, fall to Marine Le Pen of the so-called hard-Right Rassemblement National, or National Rally: I say "so-called" because among Mme Le Pen's economically unrealistic policies is cutting the already ridiculously low French retirement age of 62 even further.

The socialists can teach her nothing about welfarism, or squandering public money. Perhaps partly because of the French people's love of the latter, she currently leads the polls, though her uncompromising line on ridding

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

France of illegal migrants and promoting Frenchness over multiculturalism also plays well, as does her scepticism about the supposed joys of the EU.

At the moment, the battle to come second is between M Mélenchon and Edouard Philippe, the prime minister from 2017 to 2020, when he jumped ship for the less contaminated post of mayor of Le Havre. Observing the finest traditions of French politics, M Philippe is being investigated for embezzlement and misuse of public funds. M Mélenchon's main hope is to get the youth vote out, which is why he and his myrmidons have been busily whipping up anarchy on the recent demonstrations, revelling in the vandalism and damage: and the wrecking has not been negligible, with 7,000 people arrested so far.

turn out and vote for M Mélenchon, leaving France with a final choice next May between him and Mme Le Pen. However stupid and complacent some French are, most realise the first-world standard of living they just about enjoy is contingent on the survival of something resembling capitalism: and capitalism is doomed if M Mélenchon enters the Élysée.

In his magnificent 2015 novel Soumission, Michel Houellebecq imagined a French presidential election between Mme Le Pen and an Islamist who promised to make France into an Islamic state. The “mainstream” socialist and conservative parties, eliminated from the contest, could not face Mme Le Pen and advised their supporters to vote for her rival, who won.

It says something about M Mélenchon and his crew that is unlikely to happen next year.

ROBERT TOMBS

Why I now fear Brexit could be lost

There is plenty of evidence to defend our decision to leave the EU. So why doesn't the Right make use of it?

There have always been issues in politics that reappear with zombie-like persistence. Once it was the nationalisation or de-nationalisation of the British steel industry, in those halcyon days when we still had one. The Labour Party was obsessed by it. Eventually it had its way and created a British Steel Corporation, that in 1980-81 spent £4bn to make steel worth only £3bn, which even then it failed to sell.

In earlier generations there were other zombie issues: church disestablishment, or whether parsons should wear surplices, or Marriage to Deceased Wife's Sister. Go back a few centuries and you had the unending question of whether the King was obliged to consult his barons.

Our generation has Brexit. Here is a question which in a rational world would long ago have been answered. Readers over the age of 30 may remember what the arguments were: Brexit would bring financial collapse, an emergency budget, huge tax increases, mass unemployment,

---

The Conservative Party, and even Reform, have allowed this to happen without a fight

bankrupt farmers, international pariah status – and so on.

None of this happened. The economy, despite the burdens loaded on to it by successive governments, is doing better than that of the EU, whose leaders do not deny its economic problems and whose political troubles are patent.

Despite the reluctance of many of those in power in Britain to put Brexit into practice, it has freed key industries, including agriculture and AI, to innovate. It has enabled Britain, however timidly, to set its own trade policies.

Our trading performance with the EU, despite repeated claims, is not significantly different from our trading performance with the rest of the world. As for pariah status, we have signed a significant defence pact with Australia and the US, and have played a leading part in aiding Ukraine, despite our own threadbare defences. And of course, we again have the power to make our own laws if we wish to.

Moreover, at a time of financial stringency, British taxpayers are saving many billions of pounds that would otherwise have gone to Brussels. Recent credible estimates - taking account of rising EU expenditure - are that as an EU member we would be liable for £25bn to £30bn a year, not to mention being liable for a share

of the EU's huge combined debts.

So what can the benefits possibly be for “aligning with” or even “rejoining” a stagnant and costly EU system? There is no coherent answer.

As with other zombie issues, coherent argument is not the key. All such issues always have two things in common. First, a body of the public that does not understand the technicalities (what exactly is the theological issue in parsons wearing surplices?) but nevertheless has a fixed opinion on the matter. Second, politicians eager to exploit their prejudices. So it is with rejoining the EU.

Members of the Labour Party are getting increasingly excited, with the encouragement of Andy Burnham, whose ambivalent hints are galvanising the Remainer faithful.

After tedious years of arguing and writing about this subject, I have concluded that the material pros and cons of EU membership are of little concern to eager Rejoiners. Nor are they greatly interested in Europe as a real place facing profound social and economic problems and alarming political dangers.

Does it even register with them that key parts of the EU may soon be controlled by their political enemies? Seemingly not.

The fact is we are not interested in Europe, of which we have only a superficial knowledge. The division in Britain is not about Europe: it is about us. It is about who should govern the country, and whose opinions should prevail – whether they are right or wrong. As Lewis Carroll put it: “The question is, which is to be the master – that’s all.”

How else can one explain the desperation of present Labour politicians to lose so much just to “get closer” to the EU? To pay to join an agricultural cartel that will cost us more than we can possibly gain from it? To join a carbon tariff scheme that will wreck more chunks of our surviving industry? To undermine our increasingly troubled democracy by treating a referendum with contempt?

No doubt these politicians would gain considerable satisfaction in telling each other that at last, after the humiliation of 2016, they have won, and rubbed the Brexiteers' collective nose in it. There are other motivations too. The most obvious is to have Brexit as a scapegoat. The Prime Minister can proclaim, with the air of having carefully studied the question, that Brexit has damaged the economy. The real damage done by Labour's own policies on tax, regulation and energy is thus pushed into the shadows.

In this conjuring trick, he is assisted by a procession of analyses from generously subsidised think-tanks and universities, ranging from the dubious

Remainer faithful: pro-EU supporters attending the Rejoin March in June to mark the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum

Robert Tombs is emeritus professor of history at the University of Cambridge

to the patently bogus. Their purpose is to massage the statistics and persuade the gullible that, if only we were in the EU, we would outpace not just the rest of Europe but America too. Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, is equally keen to distract attention from his institution's own lamentable recent record and is happy to join the chorus.

The Conservative Party, and even Reform, have allowed this to happen without a fight. David Cameron and George Osborne were the architects of the original Project Fear. Under Theresa May regret for Brexit was blatant and the attempt to surrender got within sight of succeeding.

Boris Johnson “got Brexit done” despite the obstruction of Parliament, but then lost a golden opportunity given by his pro-Brexit 2019 majority and allowed the mass immigration which, however illogically, discredited Brexit for some of its supporters.

Since then, the Right has not made a noticeable effort to defend Brexit. They should have refuted the scare stories, proclaimed the successes and denounced Rejoiner follies, not just once, but over and over again. There is plenty of material to make this case, but how many have used it?

By trying to avoid discussing Brexit they have given the Government a weapon against them, and a fig leaf to disguise its own mismanagement.

Moreover, Conservative half-heartedness convinces Brexit voters that they still cannot be trusted. Voters will forgive mistakes, but not betrayal.

For Labour, Brexit is not only a scapegoat for economic failures. Rejoining the EU – or just talking about it – is also bait to unite Labour and bring together a quarrelsome group of parties under the Burnham banner. Brexit demonstrates the tribalism of politics. The idea that politics is, or should be, all about dispassionate material calculation has never been true.

Politics is about feelings of belonging, identity, and trust – and conversely about alienation, anger and mistrust. Hence the desire of the nationalist parties to rejoin the EU – the only way for them to break up the United Kingdom. No matter to them that they have no inkling of whether EU membership would in reality be possible or what it might mean over the long term if they were allowed to join. And Burnham, whether through gormlessness or cynicism, dangles independence referendums at a time of

---

Andy Burnham and his supporters want to defeat this peasants' revolt for good

international danger, when defending the Union is a matter of security, not just of sentiment.

Tribalism is always with us: Whigs and Tories, Anglicans and Dissenters, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Sassenachs and Celts, Leavers and Remainers. The purpose, and the success, of parliamentary government was to tame tribalism. It forced tribes to come together to create coherent political alliances, coalitions of beliefs and interests that were capable of governing. Sometimes they even governed in the national interest.

All across the democratic world, political systems are under strain as angry divisions deepen and fester. Now, to crown it all, Burnham talks of institutionalising tribalism through proportional representation – a system which wherever it operates perpetuates chaos and obstructs the electorate's ability to choose or dismiss its government. Brexit was fundamentally about popular sovereignty versus the European and British establishment. Burnham and his supporters want to defeat this peasants' revolt for good.

That is why the issue keeps coming back, and why the next election will again be about “taking back control”, this time from a government concerned only with party advantage. But to win, the Brexit tribes must come together and fight.

FERGUS BUTLER-GALLIE

Take it from a priest, exorcisms are no joke

One

Republican

candidate

for Colorado

governor

has put his

ability to

banish

demonic

spirits on

the ballot.

Is it right

to call him

a crank?

I think the last time (more diabolically interested readers may be able to correct me) that exorcism played a role in the politics of a major power was during the Loudun possessions in 1634. Cardinal Richelieu rather cynically used the purported mass possession of a group of sexually charged nuns, and their subsequent exorcism by a handsome young priest, as a way to remove political enemies – including the priest – who opposed his desire to remove the town's wall.

Now, however, exorcism is back on the political agenda in the United States. Victor Marx, a Republican candidate for governor of Colorado, claims that one of his key qualifications for the role is that he is capable of performing exorcisms.

He claims to have exorcised many demons, including from a woman against whom his dog took umbrage by a swimming pool and numerous times over the telephone. Marx's other qualifications include running a Christian karate centre in Honolulu and calling in private air strikes on Islamic State.

It's easy to write off Mr Marx as a crank - as the voters of Colorado are expected to do. However, what makes him dangerous is arguably not that he takes demonic possession seriously but that he is so nonchalant in his identification of and response to it.

Mr Marx is a “non-denominational” pastor, which means he has no accreditation with, or training by, a recognised church. If he did, he would be nowhere near exorcisms, because ordered and apostolic churches take them immensely seriously indeed.

The Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie is a writer, priest and Vicar of Charlbury in Oxfordshire

In the Church of England, for instance, “deliverance ministry” is in the hands not of random clergy, but of a specific cleric given that role in each diocese. They are required to have specific training, skills and experience. What they do is very far from what the public – fed on horror flicks like The Exorcist – imagine to be an exorcism.

Many of them are psychiatrists as well as priests. In every case where deliverance (an exorcism) is considered, a medical or mental health professional is required to rule out underlying psychological or physical conditions before it can go ahead.

Most deliverance looks like gentle pastoral support and concentrated prayer, but then most of what is reported as requiring exorcism is said to feel like a sense of being “under attack” rather than the full-on vomiting and head spinning of Hollywood.

There will be those who see no difference between Mr Marx's imaginings and the exorcisms done by the CofE. However polite and professional they may be, the latter is as much obscurantist nonsense as the former. Yet, to treat the idea that there are things beyond the understanding and control of humanity in such dismissive fashion is as dangerous as Mr Marx's gung-ho, poolside exorcising approach.

Such a view does not take seriously the idea that there are things in this world which we cannot explain and that such things are not always forces for good (or benign). To acknowledge that fact in principle, and to try to address it when confronted with it in practice, isn't to see ghouls and goblins at every turn. Nor is it to minimise the potential for evil by the most damaging creature of all – which is man.

Rather, it is to be comfortable in the limits of our power and understanding. What deliverance ministry entails is not the mad drive by exorcisms of Mr Marx, nor the torturous power games of London, but an act which tries to seek help from that which is good and true when faced with something evil and beyond our control.

Exorcism, then, shouldn't really be a political hot potato as it has become in America. It is far too serious a matter for that. Ironically it is America's constitutional disdain for organised religion that has made such a mad crossover possible.

Fortunately, with no separation between church and state in England, the business of exorcism is unlikely to become a feature of the next round of voting for metro mayors, but will instead remain safely in the hands of the professionals.

The carnage

in their

homeland

means

Sudanese

people are

now the

second

biggest

national

group

crossing the

Channel

JAKE WALLIS SIMONS

Britain can't escape the fallout from the world's forgotten war

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

governed the country from 1899 until independence in 1956.

What is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world? According to YouGov's polling, 95 per cent of Britons were unable to answer that simple question, with 42 per cent erroneously citing Gaza and 23 per cent mistakenly selecting Ukraine.

At the last count, 70 per cent of the electorate was unaware that the most acute hunger crisis on Earth is in Sudan.

Since April 2023, more than 400,000 people have lost their lives as a result of conflict there – that's more than five times the deaths in Gaza – plus more than 10 million displaced, rampant malnutrition and 34 million desperate for aid.

In 2025, Joe Biden's administration declared it a genocide. Donald Trump's officials have since agreed.

From Britain's point of view, the problem is not simply a moral one. When you have the good fortune to live in a democracy, the problem tends to wash up on your shores, whether economically, militarily, geopolitically or physically. Sudanese people now account for the second biggest national group crossing the Channel. What happens in Sudan doesn't stay in Sudan.

The war itself is complex and does not resolve into an easy narrative. It is a proxy theatre involving a bewildering array of powers competing to enforce their own agendas, with the civilian population just an afterthought.

Although Britain is the “penholder” on Sudan at the UN Security Council, meaning the Foreign Office is expected to lead on the issue, Ed Miliband doesn’t seem to have much of a clue.

Sitting just above the Horn of Africa, Sudan sprawls over the ancient crossroads with the Arab world. Eight times the size of Britain, its economic development lies in the Nile valley, which bisects the country from south to north.

Its population of 53 million is young and comprises hundreds of ethnic and linguistic communities. The largest group is Sunni Arab, with strong Sufi traditions, concentrated in the north. Christians and followers of indigenous religions are found from the Nuba Mountains southwards. Britain

The first time many people heard of this in Britain was during the Darfur conflict in 2003, when rebel groups revolted against the regime of Omar al-Bashir, accusing him of oppressing non-Arabs. The dictator, who had strong ties to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, responded by unleashing the Janjaweed, a rabble of savage Arab militias that revelled in massacre, rape, ethnic cleansing and torching villages.

After three decades of despotism, Bashir was overthrown in 2019 and incarcerated. Under a transitional government, Sudan seemed on the brink of a democratic revolution. In 2020, desperate for economic relief, it even agreed to become a signatory to the Abraham Accords peace deal with Israel.

The following year, however, the civilian leadership was overthrown by a coalition led by the Brotherhood-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which were thirsty for power and worried about a reckoning for past atrocities. In 2023, the coalition descended into war with itself, as the descendants of the notorious Arab Janjaweed, now known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), took on the rump of the Brotherhood-linked state that had created it.

Thus emerged the fault line that has attracted such intense regional attention. The Islamist-leaning SAF is backed, of course, by Iran, which supplies it with Mohajer-6 drones and other materiel, and seeks strategic dominance.

It is joined by Saudi Arabia, which is motivated to protect Red Sea shipping and prevent the contagion of instability, particularly given the Houthi insurgency in its neighbour Yemen. Egypt, which wants to secure its southern border and Nile water interests, is a further ally.

To different extents, others include the malevolent powers of Turkey, Qatar and Pakistan. Russia, which covets the plentiful Sudanese gold reserves and a strategic foothold on the Red Sea, has been known to play both sides.

The RSF – formally accused of genocide by the UN and the United

States – has allegedly been backed by the United Arab Emirates (though Abu Dhabi denies this), which is deeply opposed to the Brotherhood, whether in the war-torn wastes of East Africa or on the radicalised university campuses of Britain.

To varying degrees, they are accompanied by Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya and Libyan factions, all of which are friendly towards the Emiratis. As outrage has piled upon outrage, Abu Dhabi has emphasised its plague-on-both-your-houses approach: it insists that neither of the two blood-soaked sides can form part of the future of Sudan.

Strangely enough, Andy Burnham, who has deep ties to the UAE from his time as Mayor of Manchester – Sheikh Mansour, of Abu Dhabi's ruling family, owns Manchester City football club and has significant local business interests – has been unable to tackle this conflict with the passion aroused for Gaza.

Yet atrocities are everywhere, and British taxpayers' money is never far away. This year, we are giving £146m, enough for 10 new primary schools, in aid to Sudan, not to mention the £194m we are donating to Pakistan, Turkey, Kenya and Ethiopia.

Then there's the lesson of failed states. What if Sudan becomes a jihadist playground, either through lawlessness, like in postwar Iraq or Libya, or after an Islamist victory? What if Sudanese terrorists infiltrate Britain in small boats (as may have happened already)? What if shipping in the Red Sea becomes further disrupted? What if the Iranians gain a port across the water from the Saudis and up the coast from the Houthis? Arms trafficking? Smuggling networks? Mercenaries?

Britain cannot intervene in every conflict. But neither can we keep firehosing the region with money we don't have while clinging to the comforting fantasy that the blowback will never reach Dover. While Mr Miliband sanctions Israel and bickers over the downgrading of the Jerusalem consulate, Sudan, the great forgotten war, is about to bite us hard.

Something is rotten in the state of Germany. And Putin is celebrating

Allegations against a former spy chief come after a long history of intelligence failings, reports Anne McElvoy

The poison of betrayal is by no means as rare as we like to think of it. It's not a

I nice part of our existence but it's an entirely predictable one." I had good reason in recent days to remember this cynical observation on human nature and espionage as an extraordinary scandal rocked Germany and its allies.

My spy-philosopher was Markus Wolf, who had spent four decades at the helm of East Germany's feared foreign intelligence services, earning himself the nickname "the man without a face".

It was the early 1990s and we were working many long days and evenings at his dacha, near an elite government colony outside East Berlin. My assignment, as a journalist who had covered East Germany, was from US publisher Random House – to get his memoirs on track and ask him tough questions.

Over his ritual afternoon coffee and cigarette, Markus continued on his theme of betrayal. There was, he said “a class of treason that is particularly intensely felt and you do not forget – and that is a traitor inside one’s own secret service”.

“Someone you know well, who gives information to another one. This sort of betrayal is poison for every intelligence service – and the vaccines we have against it often have limited effects.”

His words reverberated this week after the bombshell revelation that August Hanning, the head of Germany intelligence from 1998 to 2005 had been arrested on a string of espionage and treason charges. I found myself imagining what Markus, who died aged 83 in 2006, would have made of it all, at a time of extraordinary vulnerability in Nato and threats inside Germany and the UK from Russian, Chinese and Iranian hostile operations. The bigger the revelation, the more poker-faced the veteran spy-runner tended to be. "Well, that's a hammer" was

often his droll German phrase when discussing some truly extraordinary incident adding secrets and espionage.

Hanning's arrest has come as a sledge hammer to the BND, Germany's counterpart to MI6. He is accused of paying his former chief of staff, Manfred Dankesreiter, for 12 years from 2010 to furnish him with over 2000 classified documents.

Hanning, now aged 80, allegedly intended to use the information to prepare briefing documents for Azerbaijan. Some of the information is believed to have covered Iran's nuclear programme.

Hanning also reportedly had repeated contact with a senior Chinese military officer, Wang Jianzheng.

He has denied treason and investigations continue. But no one is seriously denying that this is a vastly damaging moment for the BND. It stands accused of an extraordinary lapse in failing to see that one of its own former heads was a dangerous liability, and ignoring a host of warning signs about his conduct.

It adds yet another reason for suspicion on top of the history of leaks, moles and accidents that has dogged German intelligence since reunification, at a time when European security demands alliances.

The present BND boss, Martin Jäger, who has pushed for the modernisation of a notoriously clunky and bureaucratic service, issued a statement this week on the rising threat from Russia and the importance of trust between intelligence services.

MI6 among other partner services is carefully assessing any potential leakage of information which could identify agents or help enemy countries find weak spots in Western defences.

The aim is not to “dramatise”, as one British official puts it. But there’s more than enough drama and despair already.

---

DEEPER UK TIES

The timing of this scandal could hardly be worse. The UK and Germany are deepening their security ties under the new Kensington Treaty.

It ranges across partnerships in defence, cyber-intelligence and even prospective participation of Berlin in an international fighter-jet project with Britain, alongside Japan and Italy.

Andy Burnham earnestly told embattled Chancellor Freidrich Merz in a tightly controlled appearance outside the German parliament this week that he wanted closer cooperation. A figure with expertise in monitoring German spy services messaged drily, “Well let’s just hope not too close in the circumstances...”

REUTERS/LISI NIESNER; ANDREAS RENTZ/GETTY—

MI6 is reviewing what information was shared with the BND in the period of Hanning's alleged crimes to assess any potential damage to its “equities”. This is spy-speak for sources, human assets and proprietary data.

Other British sources in the spying game have more sympathy with the Germans' embarrassment as they join Burnham in pursuing closer ties, especially in the digital war against Russia.

"It is just very unfortunate," says one. "When German intelligence colleagues are changing their culture and training and the resources are being put in to improve the quality of the services. It's a process which will take a long time."

Collaboration has been developing. German spy chiefs have had contact in the past couple of years with UK foreign and military intelligence as they have sought expanded budgets and changed onerous laws to be ‘German intelligence have had a problem with trust among allies, partly because of their structures’

John Foreman, ex-UK military attaché

Clockwise from main, August Hanning in 2007; chancellor Friedrich Merz welcoming Andy Burnham to Berlin; the MI6 HQ in London; former chancellor Olaf Scholz; Manfred Dankesreiter; the BND's Berlin HQ; police at Hanning's home in Nordwalde

---

Four of Germany's biggest spy scandals

1990

Klaus Kuron

The senior West German counter-intelligence official was exposed as a Stasi spy after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

---

1990

Gabriele Gast

Gabriele Gast, like Kuron, was exposed as a double-agent during the process of German reunification. She was found guilty of espionage and treason and sentenced to six years and nine months in prison.

2023

Carsten Linke

This rising star of the BND and a volunteer football coach in Germany was charged with treason for allegedly passing material to Russia. His trial is ongoing.

---

2026

August Hanning

The 80-year-old,

who led the BND

from 1998 until 2005,

was arrested at his

home on suspicion

of espionage and

treason for allegedly

selling classified

information to a

foreign power.

able to counter external threats. The aim on the British side may be not to “over dramatise”, but the judicial process in Germany will be thorough and threatens to tie up today’s BND officials in providing evidence and risk assessments on the past.

Meanwhile Jäger's crucial reform agenda may suffer. Crises that damage its reputation and trust just keep happening at a frequency that allies cannot overlook.

Tomasz Siemoniak, a former coordinator of the Polish intelligence service, told the Die Welt newspaper in Germany that it “will strengthen growing concern among allies about the BND and consequently could limit exchanges of information”.

“It is a subject which will feature in spy training for years to come.”

---

PRIVATE AMBITIONS

At the very least, Hanning appears to have had scant respect for the basic rules of a secret service when he allegedly saw opportunities to feed his security consultancies with valuable information.

The bigger question for the BND, if these allegations turn out to be true, is how this activity could have gone undetected for so long. Worse, according to reporting by Die

Welt, the infamously bureaucratic service indulged a bizarre side-hustle for a

indulged a bizarre side-hustle for a serving official which facilitated alleged treason when Dankesreiter was allegedly allowed to freelance for Hanning.

Markus Wolf used to boast that many of the counter-espionage failings he profited from in West Germany stemmed from the fact that the security services were run “like a post office”, obsessed by pernickety processes to the detriment of their mission. It would not have taken the counter-espionage genius of George Smiley to figure out that this was highly risky. Hanning's tendency to maintain ties with Kremlin favourites, former Soviet intelligence officers and Chinese military figures was known.

His alleged scheme only came to light when his home was searched in connection with his suspected involvement in another affair in which he allegedly advised an heiress in a bleak domestic custody case.

Separately, he is accused of receiving funds from Christina Block, a German restaurateur, to connect her to Israeli intelligence services as she allegedly sought advice on how to “kidnap” her own children to secure their return from her estranged husband. She denies wrongdoing and her trial is ongoing. Hanning denies involvement in the Block case.

The former BND boss, who faced financial difficulties when he lost a portion of his pension in a Baltic banking scandal, is claimed to have become more cavalier in entangling his business and secret lives. He had been a man of the elite German state machinery – a Spitzenbeamte – with a CV stretching back to West Germany's representation in East Berlin in the late days of communism.

Leaving the BND in 2005, he moved to another high-profile job working for the late Wolfgang Schäuble. A flinty politician who was wheelchair-bound after an attempt on his life in the 1990s, Schäuble acted as a powerful counterweight to Angela Merkel in her Cabinet.

Someone who served with Hanning in a diplomatic capacity recalls him as “bureaucratic and boring”.

Others saw a more thrusting character with relentless ambitions. One person who knew him in a personal capacity says: "Don't be fooled by his dour appearance – the white shirt and the stiff-backed look expression wasn't really like he was at all. He was umtriebig – a go getter – a man with a finger in a lot of pies."

On retirement Hanning launched his free-wheeling career in private practice. He spoke at lucrative security events in the US, such as a 2017 national lawyers' convention event at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC. He also created a web of consultancies and built "a wide circle with networks from Britain to the Middle East to China".

A former colleague Bernd Schmidbauer, an intelligence services coordinator under Helmut Kohl, told Die Welt that Hanning was “an excellent colleague and had many great achievements to his name for the security of the Federal Republic”.

Notably, he is credited with supplying intelligence which countered the US account of Iraq retaining active weapons of mass destruction, in contrast to the UK. German espionage, despite its faults, has a strong record in the Middle East. Hanning was an Iraq sceptic and refused to back down on his service's analysis even as the US sought to pressure allies into supporting military action against Sadam Hussein.

Schmidbauer added: “This case is a tragedy not only for Germany’s intelligence services but also one for a former top German official himself.”

---

BLIND TO RUSSIA

I was alongside a senior UK intelligence figure when another story of a mole inside the BND caused outbreaks of perspiration in 2023. This time a top official, still only identified as Carsten L, had allegedly shared secret intelligence with Russia about the war in Ukraine and the monitoring of the mercenary Wagner group in return for money.

The UK reaction then was a tad more empathetic still. After all, all spy services have their leaks, defectors and disasters and Russia is a formidable adversary targeting the weak, manipulable or greedy.

"There is no worse moment than discovering that someone you have trusted has broken that trust and done immense damage," said a security contact on that occasion.

Yet, again, there was acknowledgement of Germany's particular problem with traitors in the face of a resurgent Russia. Successive chancellors indulged a “wandel durch handel”, or “change through trade” posture, which relegated security concerns ahead of cheaper oil and gas from Russia and the opportunity for German manufacturers to export to China.

As the threat rose, this posture was defended with naivete and avoidance that frustrated allies.

John Foreman, a former UK military attaché in Moscow, notes that German intelligence “has had a specific problem with trust among allies, partly because of their structures and restrictions”.

That bureaucracy “has roots in the country’s history and the desire to have tight control of what the agencies can do”, he adds, “but it is also cultural and a blind spot also because there has been a history of far too much institutional optimism about Russia”.

He cites Germany being caught out in 2022 because its secret services did not believe warnings by the US and the UK that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was imminent.

That left the then-BND chief Bruno Kahl caught out on a fact-finding visit to Kyiv, just as Moscow launched its assaults across the country. Kahl had to be rescued by an emergency special operation.

In Hanning's case, Foreman believes that his Azerbaijan links will require deep investigation. The country has an on-off relationship with Putin's Russia from its

days in the Soviet Union. It is also “a powerful and oil-rich state which is very sharp and aware of its strategic position in the region and keen to acquire more knowledge about Western intentions”.

---

DOUBLE AGENTS

German spies unaware of what was going on under their noses was one of Markus Wolf's favourite subjects back in the early 1990s. His stories still haunt the BND.

My work with him turned into a three-year project. There were days and long evenings of intense conversations and rifling through thousands of files. Sometimes it was cordial, often it was tense as we tussled over fact checks and evasions, while his wife Andrea tried to soothe the mood with hearty dinners and evenings in front of the TV.

We watched a James Bond movie together, and Dangerous Liaisons, which concluded with Wolf's review: "I told you they would all die in the end."

Tales of covert activities and the mixture of human opportunism, absurdly unintended consequences and tragic outcomes spilled out onto my cassette tapes. One theme which feels strikingly relevant today emerged: how vulnerable West Germany's secret services, foreign and domestic, have been to penetration by hostile states, both before and after the end of the Cold War.

It was under Markus's watch, for instance, that Günter Guillaume, whom he had hired and trained as an East German sleeper agent, was able to build a career in the Social Democratic Party and join Chancellor Willy Brandt's inner circle as an aide.

That became the country's most consequential spy scandal when Brandt resigned in 1974. He had been slow to heed warnings about Guillaume, who had such intimate access to his office that he was nicknamed “the coat stand”, as he was always in the corner.

In retirement Markus conceded the operation partly backfired, as the East had been benefiting from Brandt's policies.

Another who left her mark on a long list of BND double dealers was Gabriele Gast, another “nemesis” of the service.

For two decades from 1970 to 1990 she supplied East Berlin with reports on Eastern European security and risk assessments which were passed to the KGB. Wolf described her the most highly placed woman in the BND. Her perceptive reports landed directly on the desk of then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl. “What neither he nor her superiors knew was that they also landed on mine,” Markus recalled.

The Stasi had been particularly lucky with Gast. Her doctoral supervisor was an eminent professor of Eastern European studies with links to the BND. When she completed her thesis in 1973, she was offered a coveted job as an analyst in the service's Pullach institute, near Munich.

As Gast rose in her role she became enormously valuable, providing intelligence on Nato deployments, the BND's own intelligence gathering and the Gaddafi regime in Libya. Exposed after the collapse of the GDR, Gast was arrested in 1990 and convicted in 1991, receiving a sentence of six years and nine months in the confines of the 19th-century Stadelheim prison in Munich.

Gast had been drawn into espionage by romance but money is more often a motivation – and many people drawn into dubious activities either have money problems, as Hanning has had, or convinced themselves they needed more of it.

In the early 1980s Markus's Stasi also recruited Klaus Kuron of West Germany's domestic intelligence service, who passed crucial information about counter-espionage and agent identities.

Kuron felt that others were promoted above him and that his working-class background was held against him. He also simply liked getting a second salary and stipends, paid by East Germany. Ultimately convicted of “aggravated treason”, Kuron was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment.

But allegedly the case with Hanning, it was curious happenstance rather than effective counter-espionage that delivered him to authorities.

---

PLEASURE FOR PUTIN

Even now it appears the lessons of the chequered history of German spying and of Markus Wolf have not been fully absorbed by the state. Yet the Cold War is back with a vengeance, and as Blaise Metroweli MI6 chief said on taking office last year, “the front is now everywhere”.

The risks of the West's services being under-prepared for penetration or letting enemies see vulnerabilities so clearly as they can do in the Hanning affair are immense.

As more emerges of the damage he was allegedly able to do, possibly fired by a belief that he was still owed access to secrets he should have left behind in retirement, the BND and its allies will count the cost carefully.

But one place where the story will be received with undiluted joy is in the Kremlin. There, a KGB officer who was stationed in Germany and has risen to power on the back of domestic repression and the wings of war, poses the biggest threat to European peace in our lifetime. Vladimir Putin is watching.

Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and a member of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network

The Sunday Interview

The evening of Sunday, November 20 2022 was meant to be

“unforgettable” for Bob Chapek. The then-Disney chief executive had helped convince Elton John to broadcast his final tour show in North America, at the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers, on the entertainment giant’s streaming service. Chapek and his wife, Cindy, were excited to see a “legend” whom he had “idolised for years” live one last time. Being there, at the site of John’s career-defining 1975 performances, would have felt “like stepping into a dream”.

It would also have been a reward, of sorts: a reminder of how fun his job was supposed to be. In his almost three years as chief executive, Chapek had steered Disney through some of the most difficult times in its history: the coronavirus pandemic that shut cinemas and closed its theme parks, the height of the culture wars and what is now called “Woke 1.0”, a damaging dispute with the Republican governor of Florida. For better or worse (usually worse), Disney under his stewardship was rarely out of the headlines.

Chapek never made it to Dodger Stadium. Instead of seeing John's swansong, he was, in his words, "pushed off the Disney stage". While Cindy was still getting ready, he took a call from Susan Arnold, the then Disney chairman, who told him that he was being sacked, to be replaced by his immediate predecessor, Bob Iger. The evening was "unforgettable", just not in the way Chapek had hoped.

Now, after almost four years out of the spotlight, Chapek has returned with a score-settling memoir that leaves the reader in no doubt whom he blames for his downfall: Iger. There are 121 mentions of Iger's surname in Behind the Castle Walls, with many more references to him as "Bob". Chapek alleges that his predecessor – who was chief executive from 2005 until 2020 – embarked on a "relentless, three-year campaign" to undermine his hand-picked successor and return as the company's saviour. Chapek also claims, conspiratorially, that Iger had been given a heads-up about how bad Covid would be and used him as a "sacrificial lamb" before he could reclaim his old job (of which more later).

Chapek found himself in an unusual position after he was promoted in February 2020. On the one hand, he was just the seventh chief executive in the company's history, one of the most powerful men in world entertainment and custodian of the legacy built by Walt Disney after he had made a name for himself – and made the company hundreds of millions in profit – in the more commercial parts of the organisation. On the other hand, the charismatic Iger hung around as executive chairman with responsibility for Disney's creative output until the end of 2021. This resulted in what the Hollywood trade press gleefully referred to as “the Battle of the Bobs”. It was this odd-couple dynamic that, Chapek says, did for him in the end.

The Bobs could not be more different from one another. Iger is the consummate Hollywood operator with matinée-idol good looks who counts the likes of Harrison Ford and Robert Downey Jr as personal friends and enjoys a reputation as one of the best “talent wranglers” in the business. Chapek is less clubbable, a marketing man who pulled himself up from humble roots to the top of the entertainment world through sheer determination.

Disappointed as he was to miss out on the Elton John concert, the fact that he was ousted bothers Chapek most. "The unfairness of the firing at all is the big issue," Chapek, 66, tells me now. "It was just the fact that they did it and the real reason why they did it that, to me, was the cruel and unfair part of it. The rest of it's window dressing. I mean, did it [cause] maximum pain? Yeah... It almost felt like it was vindictive. 'How can we make this as painful as possible?" (The \$20m/£16m exit package he received may have softened the blow, especially coming after earning the best part of \$50m in the previous two years.)

Chapek is talking to me from a hotel room in New York, where he has just seen the premiere of Midnight, an off-Broadway musical he helped to develop. Despite having left the corporate world behind, he still wears a dark suit and open-necked shirt, though his grey beard looks just a little longer than when he was one of the most powerful men in world entertainment. We spend much of our time together discussing the most difficult part of his professional life, his one real failure, and he is polite to a fault – even if he tends to alternate between pitying himself and passing the buck.

Bob Chapek

He explains what went wrong during his tenure like this: Iger left his successor powerless to make the decisions he would have liked, he claims, especially when it came to films released when the culture wars were fought most fiercely. So when I ask whether he wishes he had excised the controversial same-sex kiss in Lightyear, Pixar's Toy Story spin-off, he replies with: "It wasn't really my call." The film was so badly received that it was reported to have lost in excess of \$100m.

Chapek was also a public champion of the controversial Snow White remake, starring Rachel Zegler, while it was in development (it was eventually released last year, well after he left), even though he insists he privately “knew it had the potential to have challenges”. The production was marred by the use of dodgy CGI dwarves, its revisionist, feminist script, the need for extensive re-shoots and the forthright public pro-Palestinian statements from Zegler. It was panned by critics and bombed at the box office, losing Disney almost \$170m. Go woke, go broke, as they say. "He green-lit those films that became so controversial," Chapek says of Iger. Yet it is Chapek who seems to have caught the reputational flak. That rankles.

He describes the experience of writing his memoir as “more painful than cathartic”; Iger, who declined to comment on Chapek’s claims when contacted by The Telegraph, will have been the source of much pain. The start of the book includes Chapek’s memory of their first joint TV interview after he succeeded Iger. Watching it back now is excruciating: they wear the same outfit (“It was like a scene out of that movie Twins, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito,” Chapek writes) and the body language between the two is so chilly that a viewer could be forgiven for thinking that it was filmed in Antarctica, not California.

Woke Snow White wasn't my fault

From then on, Iger's “malicious” campaign – as Chapek saw it – was to make unhelpful comments in interviews and on social media, retaining creative control over the studio for the best part of two years as

Disney's former chief executive opens up about his claims that predecessor (and successor) Bob Iger ran a ‘relentless campaign’ to undermine him. By Liam Kelly

well as allegedly pouring poison in the ears of Disney board members and other Hollywood types.

One of the most extraordinary claims Chapek makes in his book is that the supremely well-connected Iger left Disney abruptly because he had been tipped off by friends in high places about the severity of Covid and had no wish to be the boss who closed the theme parks or laid off tens of thousands of staff.

He offers no evidence for this, but cites “several high-ranking people both in government and private business”. Does Chapek really think that his predecessor as Disney boss was secretly warned about how bad Covid would be?

“Well, it’s been told to me from various sources. I obviously can’t get inside his head and say what the real motivation was,” he says. “I would have been highly sceptical had I not been told by so many people. And that doesn’t mean that that makes it true. Only he can answer that question. He’s denied it in the past, but I think if you look at the record, it is a little bit curious what happened, how fast it happened, and when it happened. But maybe that's just a coincidence."

Perhaps what the Indiana-born Chapek calls his “Midwest affability” meant he was not entirely suited to that cut-throat world. His earliest jobs featured him scarring his hands from scraping the grease off restaurant equipment with a razor blade, falling through a ceiling as a roofer and cleaning maggot-infested rotted corn at a maize plant. After graduating with a master’s in business administration from Michigan State University, he got a job at the J Walter Thompson advertising agency selling Kraft sliced cheese. Later came stints at Heinz, where he sold cat food aimed at fat felines, and a shoemaker before, in 1993, he joined Disney as marketing director for its nascent home video division.

On his first day, a “6ft 6in male staff member” walked into his office, closed the door and dropped his trousers to the floor. He never explained why. “It was for shock value. I’m sure he saw me as the new guy from packaged goods, [who] had not spent one day in entertainment, was from Indiana,” says Chapek. They worked together for a

number of years afterwards. "By the way, [he was] really good at his craft."

Chapek was, too. He developed the market of direct-to-video sequels - a genre that is not critically adored but was incredibly lucrative - and increased profitability at Disney's theme parks by increasing prices and relentlessly focusing on improving visitor experiences.

His years as chief executive were fraught. One particularly damaging flashpoint came in the summer of 2021, when actress Scarlett Johansson sued Disney, alleging breach of contract when it chose to release Black Widow in cinemas and on its streaming service simultaneously (because many multiplexes were still closed) as Johansson's pay was linked to the box office performance.

Disney put out a statement saying that she had a “callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic”. Chapek insists that Iger, as chairman and the man overseeing the creative side of the business, approved the statement, but that he bore the brunt of the backlash from the “Hollywood crowd” instead.

was that he never had much of a relationship with “the talent”, and the Johansson episode showed it. He insists that Iger was the person who really ought to be blamed. “If there ever was a situation where I tried to weigh in, I was reminded of the agreement, the nature of who was going to do what, and not to make the relationship situation even more difficult by in any way intruding on his ability to control the creative product,” he says. “And so the few times I tried, I got slapped back and told: ‘Stay away.’ Do I wish I had more influence over that? Yes. Did I take full responsibility for it, even though those decisions weren’t made by me? Yes. Do I regret the situation? Entirely.”

Unlike many Hollywood memoirs, Chapek's is notably short on stardust, which at the very least backs up his claims of being frozen out of creative decision-making. Does he have many celebrity friends?

“Me? Not necessarily. I have many celebrity relationships. But to me, I'm as comfortable, and more comfortable, spending my free time with people I find a connection with, regardless of their walk of life,” he says. “Are there household names that I know and communicate with? Yes, absolutely. Is that a driver for me, though? Absolutely not. I judge people on their character and how much fun it is to hang out with them, as opposed to what they can do for me, or the fact that I can name-drop who I had dinner with last night.” When I invite him to do a little light name-dropping, just for fun, he merely says he is “going to stay away from that”.

Not long after the Black Widow case was settled – with Johansson paid as much as \$40m (£32m), according to some reports – Chapek found himself in a Florida quagmire. The state, which is home to the Walt Disney World resort in a company-governed county, was riven by debates over legislation that would limit discussion about gender and sexual identity with the youngest children in state schools. Its liberal opponents nicknamed it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and put pressure on Chapek and Disney to take a stand.

Chapek's instinct was to maintain Disney's apolitical public stance while

---

‘When you walk through a theme park, you’re not thinking, “Well, I wonder if Cinderella’s Left or Right”’

trying to “soften” the bill in private. Iger, who by this point had retired as chairman, posted on social media his personal criticism of the legislation. The effect on Chapek was twofold: it made it more difficult for Disney to influence Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, while also not making him look gay-friendly to the liberals in Hollywood.

As Ed Sheeran has recently learnt, not picking a side in a fraught debate is not enough for the activist class. Chapek was forced into an about-turn and Disney put out a statement making clear its opposition to the bill; enraged, DeSantis revoked the company's governance rights over the land on which its resort sits. "I have my own opinion on the matter, but when you're the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, it's not your job to give your opinion," Chapek says today.

Most people aren't especially bothered about the political views of entertainment conglomerates, I offer. "You walk through a theme park, you're not thinking, 'Well, I wonder if Cinderella's Left or Right,'" he replies. "It's the place to escape that."

Hot on the heels of the Don't Say Gay debacle came Lightyear. As is by now probably obvious, Chapek pins the blame for that on his predecessor/ successor. "I inherited a group of films that had a marked increase in... let's just call generically representation, broad representation," he says. "I, again, wasn't responsible for the development of those films and what was put into the script, but I inherited managing it."

The irony is that Iger, the archetypical Hollywood liberal, who has been a big Democrat donor and talked up as a potential presidential contender, returned to Disney and promptly said, in effect, that it had been too woke under Chapek. Does that bother him? "Yes, of course," he says, getting uncharacteristically animated. "That's why I wrote the book!"

Chapek hasn't seen Iger for four years, but does not think he will enter the race for the White House. When asked whether he would vote for Iger if he did, he offers a: "No comment." It does not take much reading between the lines to know what he really thinks.

In his book, Chapek says that he did “nothing” wrong during his tenure as chief executive. It is not a universally shared view, as the critics over his handling of talent and the culture wars would attest. Now Chapek slightly walks back his claim of infallibility. “I guess it should have been qualified; [I didn’t do] anything that deserved the action that was taken against me.”

Since his defenestration, Chapek has not visited a Disney theme park, though his children and grandchildren have been. Might he go back at some point?

"At some point?" I can't answer. Forever is a very long time. Right now I'm not in the frame of mind to try to buy into the facade of what Disney is – and beautiful facade, lovely facade – to its guests given what has transpired with me," he says, a little sadly. "It's hard to go sit on [the] 'It's a Small World' attraction and know the reality of what happens in the Team Disney building."

'Behind the Castle Walls: My Thirty Years at the Happiest Place on Earth' by Bob Chapek with Don Yaeger is published by Gallery Books at £20

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Business & Money

Carney warns Burnham over Thames Water expropriation

Canada seeks appropriate compensation as Prime Minister pledges to undo Thatcher's legacy

By Ben Marlow

MARK CARNEY has intervened over the potential nationalisation of Thames Water with a warning that it could damage foreign investment in Britain.

Canadian officials are growing increasingly concerned that any decision by Andy Burnham to place Thames Water under state control could result in heavy losses for overseas investors.

Ottawa is thought to have cautioned that any expropriation of privately owned assets without accompanying compensation could jeopardise further investment in the UK economy. Canada's so-called Maple Eight pension funds and its banks have poured tens of billions into airports, ports, the energy sectors, key utilities and property.

The dramatic intervention underscores mounting anxiety about the Prime Minister's hostility towards the private sector. Mr Burnham has promised to “end neo-liberalism” and undo Margaret Thatcher's legacy of privatisation and deregulation.

Yet, private property rights are a fundamental pillar of the UK's legal and economic system, and one of the key protections that make Britain a top destination for overseas capital.

Ottawa was lobbying primarily on behalf of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the country's national bank champion. It is not known whether the Canadian officials were acting on the instructions of RBC senior figures or independently.

The discussions are understood to have occurred in recent weeks. Mr Carney met the Prime Minister on a visit to Liverpool last month where the pair watched Everton football club, who they both support. RBC is a senior creditor to Thames Water, and is among a consortium of more than 100 financial institutions that has proposed a £16bn rescue package in which around a third of the supplier's borrowings would be written off in return for ownership.

However, many of the creditors fear being wiped out if ministers follow through with a threat to seize control of the company instead. Industry sources insist RBC's concerns are shared by many of the other lenders to Thames.

Both Ofwat and ministers have refused to give the proposal their blessing. Instead, Mr Burnham has made repeated yet vague threats to exert greater “public control” over the failing water industry. It is these remarks that prompted Canadian officials to intervene. “We are still trying to understand what ‘public control’ is, and what the Government wants to do with Thames. None of us know the answer,” a creditor told The Telegraph.

“They are not looking for abnormal treatment. They just want fair value, whether that’s through nationalisation or a financial restructuring, and for their security to be respected,” another said.

The uncertainty threatens to derail discussions about another round of rescue funding for Thames Water. Having already lent the company £3bn to keep it afloat for the past 18 months, creditors have been asked to provide another £2.4bn of liquidity.

Earlier this month, Dave McKay, RBC's chief executive, warned the Labour Government about the risks of creating a more hostile environment for foreign and private capital. In an interview with The Sunday Times, he said: "When the UK flirts with nationalising Thames Water, with putting on a bank tax, with putting a capital tax on the wealthy or housing, it sends a signal you want to harvest your economy, not grow it."

RBC and a spokesman for the creditors declined to comment. The Canadian High Commission did not comment.

ADAM GRAY/REUTERS

Marvel to behold Participants dressed as Spider-Man gather for an unsuccessful attempt at the Guinness World Records for the largest gathering of people wearing the superhero's costume, at the opening day of New York Comic Con in Manhattan.

Prime Minister waters down the ‘made in Britain’ defence drive

By Matt Oliver

ANDY BURNHAM is poised to water down Labour's definition of a “British” defence company amid a debate over whether American contractors should qualify.

Earlier this year, ministers pledged to “back British” when buying military equipment as part of efforts to boost domestic economic growth and jobs.

But industry sources said they now expected a “sensible” definition of a British company to encompass American and European-owned businesses that have facilities and staff in the UK.

The concession underlines the challenge of restricting contract awards to domestic companies, with multinational groups responsible for providing Britain with vital military capabilities.

A Whitehall source disputed that the definition was being watered down, insisting that including foreign-owned companies was “consistent” with the Government’s original proposal.

Work on the policy is ongoing and nothing had been finalised, they added.

But industry sources said Ministry of Defence officials now seemed to have settled on a broad definition after “tying themselves in knots” for months.

They added that MoD officials had invited companies in for “workshops” to discuss the issue last month. One source said: “Nobody knows what it means. If you restricted it to companies that are truly British, the list would be very small indeed."

The source added: “They now seem to have settled on a more sensible definition.”

Another source familiar with the talks welcomed the workshops and said it was “positive that the MoD are engaging on this”.

Speaking at the Labour Party conference last month, Luke Pollard, the defence minister, also suggested officials were leaning towards a broader definition of “British”.

Mr Pollard said: “A British company is one that has a site in the UK, employs people in the UK, boosts UK skills and

---

'If you restricted it to companies that are truly British, the list would be very small indeed'

pays taxes here. We are open to US [and other foreign] companies that do that."

The defence investment plan, published over the summer, pledged a greater focus on “sovereign” capabilities manufactured in the UK.

It comes after the pandemic and the Ukraine war exposed the vulnerability of international supply chains to geopolitical crises. The Trump administration's tense relationship with Europe has also prompted a rethink of whether America's allies have become too dependent on US technology.

A key test of the “back British” drive is expected soon when the Government announces which company has won a multibillion-pound contract to build a new generation of Skynet 6 military satellites.

European giant Airbus, which has built previous Skynet satellites at its Stevenage facility, is vying against American rival Lockheed Martin, which is pledging to build a new UK facility if its bid is successful.

Both companies argue their domestic subsidiaries are British companies employing thousands of people, providing work to local companies through their supply chains. On Friday, an MoD spokesman said: "We want the UK to be the best place in the world to start and grow a defence business.

"As set out in the defence investment plan, we will bring forward a package of ‘backing British’ measures to ensure that defence spending is driving value back into local communities, while remaining consistent with our international obligations.

"This will include defining a British business, buying strategically to support UK capability and resilience, and supporting firms to invest, grow and sustain critical skills and capacity."

Nscale erased references to Bytedance deal

By Matthew Field

A BRITISH AI champion removed references to its relationship with the Chinese technology giant Bytedance from official filings ahead of a planned \$35bn (£26bn) public listing on Wall Street.

Nscale, which counts Sir Nick Clegg as a board member, initially included details of a deal with Bytedance in a confidential document disclosed to US regulators earlier this year.

However, in official filings published last month, Nscale removed mentions of Bytedance, one of its biggest customers, which has long faced scrutiny from US politicians. Nscale, which is backed by Nvidia, has been racing towards a New York float expected to value it at \$35bn. Founded just over two years ago by former coal miner Josh Payne, the business has emerged as a major player in the race to power AI by building data centres around the world. In addition to Sir Nick, the former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg is also a director.

A deal between Nscale and Bytedance had long been rumoured, but not acknowledged by the company. Bytedance, which is based in China, previously controlled TikTok. It was forced to sell its majority stake in the business in January on national security grounds.

Nscale's final 192-page prospectus, published in September, makes no mention of Bytedance. However, earlier draft filings confidentially submitted to regulators and only published in recent weeks confirm the extent of its links to the Beijing-based tech giant.

A filing in February states: “For the year ended Dec 31, 2025, our largest customer was Bytedance.”

Nscale declined to comment. Bytedance was contacted for comment.

Banks brace for £2bn loss over CityFibre

By James Warrington

BANKS are bracing for losses of up to £2bn on their investment in CityFibre as part of a major restructuring of the debt-laden broadband firm.

The BT challenger is expected to ask lenders, which include NatWest, Lloyds and Société Générale, to accept write-downs on debts of close to £4bn.

The refinancing is expected to involve the banks converting some of their debt into equity in the company as well as taking a haircut on existing loans. There are fears the total impact could be as much as £2bn. Insiders said exact figures had not yet been finalised and some lenders were expected to take a larger write-down than others.

It is understood that the Treasury's National Wealth Fund, which has pumped about £300m of taxpayer money into CityFibre, will not be affected by the refinancing.

Bosses are seeking the concessions after shareholders including Goldman Sachs and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala pledged to inject a further £900m in equity funding.

Karen Egan at Enders Analysis said:

“Equity shareholders will be asking for some pain on the debt side of the equation in return for the £900m of equity injection, even if that pain isn't in the form of an official write-down of the debt stack.”

CityFibre, which is the largest of the so-called alt-nets building full-fibre networks to rival BT, is scrambling to cut its £3.8bn debt pile as it grapples with soaring interest costs.

A spokesman said: “Our performance demonstrates [the] strength of CityFibre’s business and we are well-positioned to meet any challenges ahead.”

Approved for issue in the UK by HSBC Global Asset Management (UK) Limited, who are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Copyright © HSBC Global Asset Management (UK) Limited 2026. All rights reserved. Content ID: D048594; Date of Approval: 28.05.2026

Matthew Lynn

Britain's beer makers need help, before it is too late

---

The country's most emblematic industry is suffering from successive governments' criminal neglect

MARSTON'S started brewing beer in Burton upon Trent in 1834, and rolled out barrels from its current site in 1898. Brewing has been synonymous with Burton for generations. It has survived a couple of world wars, a great depression, as well as huge changes in the way the nation drinks.

It has not been able to survive Andy Burnham's Labour government, however. It was announced this week that Carlsberg Britvic, which now owns the Burton plant, will close it with the loss of 300 or more jobs.

Of course, companies change where they make stuff all the time. And yet, there is also a bigger point here. Brewing, perhaps the most emblematic British industry, is facing a deep crisis – and if the Government is not willing to help it will disappear completely.

The Marston's brewery will finally close in the middle of next year, and production of at least some of the brands will be transferred to other plants. But it looks inevitable that Burton upon Trent will no longer be part of its plans. According to the company, sales of traditional ales are in steep decline and it needs to stay focused on the parts of its business that are still able to grow.

Well, perhaps. There is, however, no escaping the fact that traditional brewing is now in big trouble. Last week we learnt that Molson Coors, another giant global drinks manufacturer, had decided to close Sharp's Brewery, which makes Doom Bar, in north Cornwall.

In May, Redemption Brewing in north London went into administration. According to the brewer tracker, produced by the Society of Independent Brewers, “brewery closure rates increased dramatically during 2025 compared to previous years, with a 37pc spike compared to the previous year”.

Britain might be traditionally a nation of beer drinkers. But it seems increasingly likely that it will be brewed abroad, or else concentrated in one the few mega-breweries operated by one of the multinational giants. Proud traditions of local production, often dating back hundreds of years, are starting to die out.

There are lots of reasons for that, and many of them are perfectly understandable. Ales are a lot less popular than they used to be, especially with younger drinkers, even those interested in any

form of alcohol.

‘Traditions of local production, often dating back

The historic Yorkshire brewer Timothy Taylor rebranded last month in an effort to appeal to a hipster market, but it is hard to see gimmicks like that making any real difference. The summer heatwave means the wheat harvest has been dreadful and that has pushed up costs.

hundreds of

years, are

dying out'

Even the huge popularity of weight-loss drugs may well have made a difference, with appetites changing. After all, three or four pints of ale have never been the diet option. All of those have made the market tougher for the traditional brewers.

And yet, let's not kid ourselves. The decline of brewing is also a self-inflicted crisis. Just like every other manufacturing company struggling to stay open in Britain, the industry has been hit by electricity costs that are twice those of France and four times the United States.

It is not as power intensive as some sectors, such as building materials or petrochemicals, but it is still a challenge that is not faced in other countries. At the same time, employment taxes have been pushed up sharply and ridiculously restrictive planning rules mean it is virtually impossible to reconfigure plants to make them more efficient. It is a daunting list of obstacles, all of them imposed by governments.

At the same time, demand has been crushed. The pubs have been hit by soaring business rates and the same employment taxes that cripple every other company. They have been closing at the rate of 14 a week. Many of the traditional breweries sold the bulk of their beers through the pubs, some of them owned directly, or more often by getting their tap on the bar.

As they close down, demand for domestically brewed beer goes down as well. When people buy in the supermarket instead they are far more likely to choose something mass produced in Germany or Spain than brewed within a few miles from wherever they live. Put the two together and it has proved a toxic mix. The rate at which breweries are now closing is accelerating.

It is not as if the Government does not have the ability to help. It could freeze duty for beer brewed in the UK, and perhaps even reduce it. The levy on a pint in the pub in Britain is now 10 times the amount charged in Germany, Europe's other great beer-drinking nation. It could reverse the rise in employer's National Insurance contributions now that it is clear to everyone how much damage it did to jobs.

Perhaps most of all it could include brewers in the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme that offers some relief from soaring energy prices. That might only be a sticking plaster. It would be far better to permanently reduce power prices by scrapping costly net zero levies and allowing the development of our own resources. But at least in the short-term it would help.

Instead, nothing is happening. Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister, and John Healey, his Chancellor, are happy enough to film TikToks swapping pork scratchings at their local pub. They don't seem to care that the pub may not be around much longer and, even if by some miracle it survives, it may not be selling anything brewed in Britain.

The whole of British manufacturing industry has suffered terribly from the criminal neglect of successive governments. But brewing is the one we may miss most of all – and before long the industry may barely exist.

Business comment

Burnham is bizarrely oblivious to the Continent's descent into chaos

JEREMY

WARNER

With France again in flames, the timing of Andy Burnham's 'more Europe' positioning could scarcely look worse for Britain

---

The Prime Minister is making friendlier relations with Brussels central to Labour's growth strategy

AT THE time of Britain's referendum on membership of the European Union, campaigners for Leave used to talk of being “tethered to a corpse”, by which they meant that Europe was economically dead, and would drag the UK down with it if we stayed.

Despite the faintly distasteful imagery, it was an immensely powerful message which undoubtedly helped tip the balance in favour of Leave.

Europe had only quite recently emerged from the near-death experience of the eurozone debt crisis.

It survived the maelstrom only because of a massive intervention in bond markets by the European Central Bank. Few of the fault lines at the heart of monetary union which caused this crisis have since been fixed. In the years that followed, the overriding story was one of economic stagnation and growing political disharmony.

War in the Middle East, prompting veritable armies of migrants to mass at Europe's borders, seemed to confirm that this was no longer a club that Britain should be a part of.

It scarcely needs saying that in the event, leaving it has not much improved the UK's position. If there was ever a Brexit dividend to reap, it has yet to make itself felt.

Growth in GDP per head has actually slightly lagged the eurozone since 2016, we've largely continued to mirror the EU in trade and regulatory policy, and Britain has singularly failed to control its borders as promised.

But none of this really amounts to a compelling case for going back in, or even just getting closer to Europe by rejoining its single market and/or customs union.

That hasn't stopped Andy Burnham, Britain's new Prime Minister, making friendlier relations with Europe central to Labour's growth strategy as a precursor to going back in. In doing so, he seems bizarrely oblivious to political and economic reality.

Observing current events across the Channel is to witness the unfolding early stages of a second eurozone debt crisis, only potentially much worse than the first because this time it has Europe's second largest economy, France, at its centre. The corpse is back, and though Britain too seems to be in a state of advanced rigor mortis, the EU looks even less appealing now than it did in 2016.

This doesn't mean the euro is about to collapse, taking the European Union with it. Though much desired by convinced Eurosceptics, Russia, and possibly even the White House, the prospect of “Eurogeddon” is not something anyone of sound mind should welcome; the fallout would be immense, enveloping the UK alongside our Continental neighbours.

Lehman Brothers to the power of 20 may even understate the likely economic consequences. As for the wider and longer-term geopolitical implications, they scarcely bear thinking about. Make no mistake. If bond vigilantes succeed in dislodging France, they'll be coming for Britain next. In or out of Europe, it will be impossible to escape the hurricane.

Alarmist analysis is of course the name of the game when it comes to the unstable nature of Europe's monetary union. The single currency's imminent demise has been confidently predicted ever since it came into being 27 years ago, but it hasn't happened yet.

Somehow or other, it always finds a way of disappointing those who would see it destroyed. Last time, all it took to save matters was for Mario Draghi, then president of the European Central Bank, to cast aside German scruples, and finally start acting like the head of a proper, sovereign central bank.

Sitting alongside Mervyn King, then governor of the Bank of England, at a Global Investment Conference in London, Draghi simply said: “Within our mandate, the ECB is prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro”.

And with that, the crisis subsided; the ECB didn't have to buy a single government bond to turn the tide,

'You wouldn't want any part of the economic quagmire that is today's France'

though it later acquired vast quantities of them. Words were enough. Sadly, it may be rather more difficult this time around. All of which undermines the case being made by Burnham for rushing back into the EU's orbit.

As a rough rule of thumb, Britain will only vote for Europe when it can look across the Channel and see that things are better over there than they are here. This was obviously the case in the mid-1970s, when Britain joined what was then the common market, but it was no longer true by 2016.

The situation today is even worse. Grim though Britain's predicament is, it is plainly not as bad as that of France, or even Germany, whose problems are very different but is also struggling to adapt to the challenges of the modern world. In any case, the timing of Burnham's "more Europe" positioning could scarcely look worse. The optics are terrible. With France again in flames, it looks too much like trying to scramble aboard a sinking ship.

As it is, you wouldn't want any part of the economic quagmire that is today's France. President Macron had some of the right ideas for reform, but he always lacked the political

bandwidth to carry them through in durable form. Of the two child-like front runners for next year's presidential election, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, both promise to reverse what were in the first place less than ambitious plans to add a mere two years to the retirement age. The latter says he'll also cancel large parts of the national debt.

Small wonder that investors are running for the hills. And you thought that Britain's triple lock was unsustainable. Just try the burgeoning size of France's pensions promise.

Further monetisation of the national debt by the ECB cannot be relied on this time around, even with France's own woman in charge, Christine Lagarde. No doubt the ECB will act on a temporary and time-limited basis if things get completely out of hand, but there is already strong resistance to any such intervention from Berlin, where the Chancellor Friedrich Merz is under intense political pressure to play hardball from the Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (Afd).

All looks set for the mother of all Franco-German stand-offs. Message to Burnham; keep well away.

The battle of ideas looming over the UK economy

UK public sector debt

Talk Right, govern Left?

SOURCE: HM TREASURY, OBR

LIAM

HALLIGAN

---

An increasingly Left-wing Labour looks likely to be challenged by increasingly Thatcherite Tories

THERE is a “battle of ideas” looming in British politics, Kemi Badenoch observed last Wednesday.

While rattling out policy pledges during the closing speech of her party's annual conference in Birmingham, the Tory leader released a 95-page essay laying out her guiding principles.

Declaring herself a “classic old-school Conservative”, Badenoch made clear she “believes in a state that does the important things and does them well”. Andy Burnham’s Labour party, she argued, meanwhile “believes in more and more and more and more government”.

Since coming to office in July 2024, Labour has indeed, in two budgets, raised taxation by some £70bn a year – equivalent to no less than 10 pence on the basic rate of income tax.

The party has also hugely increased borrowing. When Labour took power, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicted the UK government would, by 2029, have taken on an additional £323bn of borrowing. Labour has since hiked government spending and expanded the state so much the OBR's borrowing forecast over same five-year period until 2029 is now £583bn – an astonishing 80pc increase, adding almost three-fifths of a trillion pounds to our national debt.

This unusually sharp rise in projected borrowing and related interest payments, along with inflation being persistently above all other G7

nations, explains why UK government borrowing costs have been higher than other large, industrialised economies for almost two years now.

As the cost of borrowing rises – the 30-year yield crept above 6pc last week, hitting a 28-year high – so do interest costs, which themselves are now being paid largely from additional state borrowing. Yet still, the Labour MPs, unions and activists who removed Sir Keir Starmer and put Burnham in No10 want more.

That's why plenty of the senior politicians I met in Birmingham, plus countless business leaders, now openly warn that, unless the UK changes course, we're heading for a 1976-style fiscal meltdown - when an insolvent Britain was forced to go "cap in hand" to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout.

Back then, the UK government was spending a massive 46pc of GDP. That same figure is on track to hit 42pc by the end of this decade.

But with Britain having run up an annual surplus just once this century, our national debt has ballooned. And, over the last 25 years, much of that growth in indebtedness has happened under the Tories. The national debt was just over 60pc of GDP in 2010, when David Cameron took office. After 14 years of Tory rule, it was 95pc.

That's why Badenoch accuses her party of "talking Right, but governing Left" ahead of 2024.

Since becoming Prime Minister in July, Burnham has defended Labour's record during the 1970s – ignoring the IMF bailout – while pushing not just for higher taxes, but more state control and a return of utilities and other infrastructure to public ownership.

“Nostalgia is not a plan for our country,” retorted Badenoch last week. “Andy Burnham is promising a better yesterday what I am promising is a better tomorrow.”

In the red

eliminate inheritance tax on family homes and slash employer National Insurance for workers under 25, while confirming an earlier pledge to scrap stamp duty. Her party says it has found £70bn in annual spending cuts. Other policies include leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and accelerating illegal migrant deportations while backing a third Heathrow runway.

Having taken over in October 2024, as the fifth Tory leader in seven years, Badenoch was initially wary of

'Be in no doubt, UK politics is about to get more stark and vivid'

provoking more moderate Conservative MPs, lest they trigger yet another leadership contest. More recently – and especially last week in Birmingham – she was less cautious, revealing her true Thatcherite colours.

In her essay entitled The Right Way – a deliberate echo of an essay penned by Margaret Thatcher herself in 1976, entitled The Right Approach – Badenoch argued the last Conservative government failed because it didn’t know what it stood for.

“Wealth must be created before it is distributed”, says Badenoch in The Right Way. As such, she argues: “The next Conservative government will have one central principle: business, not government, creates growth.”

Growth will be achieved through tax reductions, cutting red tape and reducing the size of the civil service back to pre-pandemic levels. “What is really missing from politics and government today,” she says, “is people prepared to say no”.

Many will chide Badenoch, not only those on the Left, but plenty of former Tories who now back Reform. While her personal poll ratings are strong, her party languishes in third place, behind both Reform and Labour.

She is surely right, though, that as the centrist governments of Blair then Cameron disappear in the rear-view mirror of history, a battle of ideas is looming, like that which took place during the late-1970s and early 1980s. An increasingly Left-wing Labour party faces increasingly Thatcherite Tories – a picture made more complex these days, with the addition of the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Reform.

But be in no doubt, UK politics is about to get more stark, vivid – and much more consequential.

So it's heartening that the Tories finally get, that for businesses and the economy to grow, in Badenoch's words: "The government, more often than not, needs to get out of the way."

-GEOFF PUGH FOR THE TELEGRAPH-

‘We can’t keep up with your electric vehicle targets’

Renault has shone with EV sales. But its UK boss tells Matt Oliver that official net zero mandates are far too steep

THE carmaker behind one of Britain's most popular electric vehicles (EVs) has urged ministers to scale back “delusional” net zero targets amid fears they risk backfiring.

Adam Wood, the boss of Renault UK, insisted the French automotive giant supported the green transition and pointed to booming sales of the Renault 5 electric hatchback as proof consumers would buy affordable cars.

However, he warned that the trajectory of the Government's zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate was so steep that it was becoming “unsustainable” and could force manufacturers to scale back investment in EV technologies.

Speaking at the company's office in Rickmansworth, Herts, Mr Wood told The Telegraph: "For us, the debate is not the destination – we are absolutely convinced the destination is 100pc electric. The debate is about the speed at which we get there.

“But we shouldn’t be complacent or delusional that we have something today that is absolutely aligned with the ZEV mandate because we don’t.”

Mr Wood said consumer demand had “not kept pace with the ZEV mandate” and was being propped up by “unsustainable levels” of discounting by manufacturers.

He added: "The trajectory needs to be sustainable for the industry at a time when, let's not forget, manufacturers are having to invest more than ever

in the next generation of technology to make that transition happen.

“Anything that puts in jeopardy that investment – and the certainty that the

Eco push sparks row EVs by numbers

33pc

The target for EV production this year

26pc Current EV market share

80pc The legal target for 2030

Renault 5's cost

automotive industry needs more than ever – is unhelpful.”

£21k

Twingo's cost

Ministers are reviewing the ZEV mandate following intense lobbying by carmakers, who say they are struggling to keep up.

This year's headline requirement is for 33pc of cars sold to be electric.

Renault's call to relax the rules will sound alarm bells in Whitehall because the company is one of the few that has stayed ahead of the targets.

Mr Wood said the French manufacturer's sales are "approaching 50pc" thanks to the success of the revamped Renault 5. That compares with an overall market share of 26pc for electric cars so far this year.

At the same time, Renault has seen a “seismic” jump in EV sales since the outbreak of the US-Iran war, which has sent petrol and diesel prices soaring.

However, the ZEV mandate target will rise to 38pc of vehicle output in 2027, 52pc in 2028, 66pc in 2029 and 80pc in 2030. Mr Wood said even Renault was worried about meeting it in later years.

He pointed to worries about the cost and extensiveness of public charging networks, adding: "You've got to have an eye on the future because 50pc today is not 80pc in 2030.

"We've started to demonstrate that when you create a virtuous circle of affordability - accessible vehicles, improving charging infrastructure and a cost of ownership equation which works for people - then you can convert more people to go electric.

“But that doesn’t mean that with a market at 26pc today, we’re on course sustainably to be at 80pc by 2030.”

The targets for electric light commercial vans (LCVs) were particularly challenging, he said.

The LCV market today is hovering around 10pc for EVs but we're talking about 70pc by 2030."

by 2030.

Mr Wood argued that the Renault 5 had been successful because it “brought electric cars into a more affordable space”

while also “bringing a smile to people’s faces”.

Unlike many other EVs, it is a small car rather than an SUV, putting it up against the likes of Chinese

Adam Wood with the new Twingo (left) and Renault 5. Inset, the latter car's petrol-powered 1973 predecessor

competitors such as the BYD Dolphin. "I think the industry, perhaps in pursuit of electrification, has sometimes been guilty of potentially trying to sell a category of vehicles to customers," Mr Wood said.

“What we’ve come back to is the core of what motivates people to buy. It’s not simply a rational choice, it’s one that’s also emotional.”

The four-door hatchback, which sells for as little as £21,495 after a government grant, was the UK's most popular EV in April and July this year.

Since its launch in January 2025, almost 20,000 have been sold in the UK, including 10,000 so far this year.

It has helped Renault to grow sales in 2026 while rivals including Ford, Volkswagen and Fiat have flagged.

Renault this year will also launch the smaller Twingo electric city car in the UK. It is expected to cost as little as £16,000 after a government grant.

It could compete even with the cheapest cars made by China's BYD and Jaecoo, which have been relentlessly eating into the market shares of Western manufacturers.

“It will be extremely competitive,” Mr Wood said. “The car is really agile and it’s also extremely fun.”

The Twingo was developed in just two years – at “China speed” – because of work by the company’s “advanced China development centre” in Shanghai, where a prototype was built.

The vehicle was built on top of a French core design and will be manufactured in Slovenia. The Renault

5 is made in France. Car development normally takes five years, with Mr Wood arguing that the Twingo was an example of Western carmakers learning from their Chinese rivals.

"With Twingo, what we've shown is the humility to acknowledge that China is part of the epicentre of global car development, particularly in electric vehicles," he said.

“That’s what enabled us to break records. We’ve developed a car in two years from concept to reality and brought it to market. Crucially, though, that’s on a platform that was developed in Europe by Renault engineers. We’re demonstrating that it is absolutely possible to be competitive [with China]. The Renault 5 is testament to that.”

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Why America will be bullish about the Budget

Wall Street could be the biggest winner from John Healey's statement, at the expense of UK banks. By Tom Saunders

AT A meeting with bank bosses last week, John Healey was coy about whether he was preparing to hit them with higher taxes.

The Chancellor said the UK was facing a “challenging fiscal picture” but stopped short of saying what that meant for lenders.

Banks have been lobbying for weeks against either a higher bank levy or a windfall tax, which they say would send the wrong signal about growth at a time when the UK needs it most.

Many in the City fear it is a losing battle. Labour's union backers and many within the party see increasing the bank surcharge, an additional tax on profits, as a relatively pain-free way to raise much-needed funds for the Treasury. In a sign of resignation among investors, shares in Lloyds and NatWest have both fallen more than 7pc over the last month, while Barclays is down almost 12pc.

But conspicuously absent from Healey's Downing Street meeting on Tuesday were the chief executives of any of the US banks active in the UK, or the bosses of any of the so-called “shadow banks” that have eaten into much of the high street lender’s businesses. There is increasing concern in the City that only British banks will face higher taxes in the forthcoming Budget, with non-bank lenders and the UK operations of international banks exempted.

The supposed rationale for honing in on Britain's high street lenders is that they have not done enough to support small businesses.

Meanwhile, targeting overseas banks could backfire: international companies could easily ship staff or future investment overseas.

Yet targeting only domestic banks risks inadvertently boosting the US banks operating in Britain. “Shadow banks” – non-bank lenders such as private credit funds, many of them US-based – could also benefit. It risks the UK becoming more dependent on Wall Street money to fuel growth, leaving us less self-sufficient and creating leverage for the US.

Pushing more activity into the “shadow banking” sector would also be worrying at a time when regulators are increasingly concerned about the risks posed by this lightly-regulated corner of the market.

US banks have made inroads into the UK in recent years. JP Morgan has invested over £1bn into its Chase, its retail bank, in the UK and has around 3m customers here. It had £30bn in assets at the end of 2025, more than Monzo, and Chase is now a sponsor of the England men's football team.

Wall Street's Citi, meanwhile, employs about 14,000 people in the UK, offering investment banking and wealth management services among others, while Wells Fargo has been expanding in the UK property lending market over the last decade and a half.

Attracting US investment is a good thing but the bosses of both JP Morgan and Citi have warned they will curb activity here if taxes go against them,

There is concern in the City that only British banks will face higher taxes in John Healey's Budget

signalling the risks of relying too heavily on overseas banks. Higher taxes on British lenders also risk ceding further ground to a growing crop of US shadow banks. These are non-bank financial companies that offer lending and other bank-like services without facing the same strict rules and government safety nets that traditional commercial banks have.

Last year, at a hearing in the Lords on the growth of private markets, Michael Roberts, the chief executive of HSBC Bank, said that private firms were increasingly lending directly to corporates at a price point his bank struggled to compete with.

Shadow banks can offer more competitive loans because they don't face the same rules about how much regulatory capital they have to hold. This is the cushion of loss-absorbing funds that banks must hold so they can absorb bad debts without collapsing or needing a taxpayer bail-out.

For every £100 lent out directly by HSBC, the bank has to tie up about £15 of capital, Mr Roberts told peers, while a private credit fund lending to the same business holds just £3.

In some areas, private credit has already out-muscled banks. In the middle-market – meaning loans of around £500m or less – private credit financed 68pc of private equity-backed companies in 2023, compared to 30pc in 2016, according to the Loan Market Association. The industry is also active at the top end of the market. In June last year, Apollo provided a £4.5bn debt facility to EDF to support its projects in the UK.

According to a recent House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee report, private credit loan issuance grew by 285pc in the UK between August 2022 and April 2024 alone. Active players include Apollo, Blackstone and KKR, all based in New York, and Ares and Oaktree, both headquartered in Los Angeles.

Benjamin Toms, an analyst at RBC, said that capital requirements have made it harder for UK banks to lend to small businesses. As a result, shadow banks and specialised lenders have

moved in. A report by the British Business Bank earlier this year found that over two thirds of SME lending in 2025 came from either challenger and specialist banks, or non-bank lenders.

Mainstream banks had been creeping back into the market recently but any extra tax could slow this down.

There have now been 10 quarters of consecutive, year-on-year growth in lending to small businesses by UK banks. According to UK Finance, gross lending to SMEs by the main high street lenders reached £5.35bn in the three months to June. However, SME lending by British banks is still lower compared to pre-Covid levels. In real terms, lending in the first half of 2026 was a third below the 2019 average.

A rise in the bank surcharge will only make the disparity in capital costs between banks and shadow banks wider, by making it even more expensive for banks to hold the capital.

This could be damaging for growth. While shadow banks have moved into the SME lending sector over the past several years, sky-high interest rates mean there is no guarantee they could fill any new gap left by banks if they retreat because of higher taxes.

‘I’m not in favour of things that lack principle. It’s easy to say charge my friends over here. I think that’s wrong’

While traditional banks use deposits from the public to make loans, shadow banks borrow money from institutional investors or financial markets instead. This makes them more sensitive to changes in interest rates. Regulators are also concerned about the rapid growth of the lightly regulated shadow banking sector.

Pushing more small businesses into the arms of shadow banks and supercharging the growth of US lenders operating here would be the likely unintended consequences of a Healey tax raid on Britain's banks.

But, perhaps surprisingly, even those who stand to benefit don't think it's a good idea. “I'm not in favour of things that lack principle,” Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, told Bloomberg last week when asked about the possibility of a tax just targeting UK banks. “It's easy to say charge my friends over here. I think that's wrong.”

A Sainsbury's and Morrisons merger cannot be discounted

Supermarket bosses want to make their groups bigger, but will customers benefit? By Jonathan Prynn

IT WAS a three-month flirtation that fizzled out. Move on, nothing to see here. But while the tentative merger talks between Britain's second and sixth-biggest supermarket chains, Sainsbury's and Morrisons, may have run their course by February, the dust raised by the unwanted public outing of the talks last week has far from settled.

Retail analysts believe the disclosure of the abortive discussions between Simon Roberts, Sainsbury's chief executive, and Sir Terry Leahy, Morrisons' chairman and the former boss of Tesco, has fired a starting gun on a new and potentially turbulent period of consolidation.

All over the Square Mile investment bankers are now running the rule over every possible permutation of takeover and merger in a vast £200bn grocery industry that has seen remarkably little consolidation over the past 20 years. Indeed, not since “Mozzers” swooped on Safeway in a £3bn takeover in 2004 has one major UK supermarket chain swallowed another. That may soon change.

Hyman, partner at RAH Advisory, put it: "Nothing is certain, but I think now it is more likely to be when, rather than, if." The underlying drivers for the urge to merge are not hard to identify. Wafer-thin margins of 3pc to 4pc – at best – at a time of rising costs, cut-throat competition, and political pressure to keep a lid on prices mean it is a constant battle to deliver the returns investors crave. Greater scale gives supermarkets greater buying power, allowing them to squeeze even better deals out of suppliers.

At the same time, the market has evolved from the big four to the big six with the arrival and ascent of the German discounters Aldi and Lidl, making the regulatory hurdles to any merger rather less formidable. Indeed, new realities of the grocery landscape are being formally recognised by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in a proposal to reclassify the pair as “large grocery retailers” rather than “limited assortment discounters” as they were before.

The change may sound technical, and it has yet to be formally adopted, but it has implications when the next merger or takeover proposal comes bowling along. The assumption that any combination of the biggest players will be stymied by the regulators – as happened with Sainsbury's and Asda ill fated engagement in 2019 – no longer applies. Deals could go through with

Simon Roberts, second left, the Sainsbury's chief executive, has fired a starting gun on a potentially turbulent period of consolidation

far fewer supermarket sites having to be sold and far less risk of reduced competition harming consumers.

‘Nothing is certain, but I think now it is more likely to be when, rather than, if’

Putting the orange-livered grocer together with Morrisons would have created Britain's second biggest supermarket chain with 23.6pc of the market, just behind Tesco's 27.8pc.

So when will the M&A dam burst? "I'm not Mystic Meg but stories like this act as a catalyst," says Clive Black, the vice-chairman and head of consumer research at the investment bank Shore Capital Markets.

“It’s not a given that Sainsbury’s and Morrisons will merge but it puts the whole sector in play.”

Tesco is probably barred from a takeover of a major rival because of its dominant share. Under Ken Murphy's leadership it appears to have gone down a different route with its current interest in acquiring Majestic Wine.

Meanwhile, the German twins are unlikely to want to acquire a full-service supermarket chain, according to Hyman. It would add complication to business models built around stripping out costs.

The options for purely UK consolidation within the big six are therefore limited. But Asda – which, like Morrisons, is a private equity-owned, debt-laden laggard – is probably going to have to find a dance partner at some point. Some combination of Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons now looks inevitable.

Another longer-term scenario, raised by a leading industry figure this week, is a pan-European wave of consolidation creating champions hefty enough to take on US and Chinese giants who will ultimately look to muscle in on their patch.

“Alone we will be equal to one US state or one province in China," the industry source says. "But together, we may have chance. Alone, there is no chance. So yes to consolidation. Sometimes it is desirable."

Black is more sceptical, pointing out that many of the world's biggest grocery retailers spent much of the first two decades of the 21st century unwinding global empires laboriously assembled by previous chief executives. He points out that Tesco once operated in territories as far flung as America, Japan, China, India, Thailand and Malaysia.

Now only the central European outposts in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary remain outside the British Isles, and even they look destined to be cast off soon.

More plausible, believes Black, is a raid from Amazon. The US tech giant has a balance sheet big enough to take on even Tesco, but has so far failed – by its own standards – in its own efforts to crack the UK grocery sector.

Amazon closed its 19 grocery stores last September after its till-free format failed to catch on with shoppers. The tech giant still has grocery operations here, though, in the form of Whole Foods, the US organic food chain it bought for \$13.7bn (£10.13bn) in 2017.

Black believes there is scope for one or two more big mergers in the UK, probably involving Sainsbury's, Morrisons or Asda, before a new phase that nobody has yet seriously considered. He thinks that if a new oligopoly is created through a spasm of consolidation, the next opportunity to create value for shareholders could be deconstruction and break-up. He points to the food manufacturing sector, where, for example Unilever has demerged its Magnum ice cream business.

In the end, Sainsbury's and Morrisons nuzzling came to nothing. But the conversation, now in the open, has lit a spark that could trigger more corporate upheaval in the UK's hyper-competitive supermarket scene than we have seen for a generation. It is a prospect that the fee-hungry advisers and funders of the City will relish.

How Merlin's 'boring' brands lost their magic touch

The Legoland owner is banking on new rides as theme parks lose their appeal in the smartphone era. By Tom Haynes

FOR many children, a trip to Sea Life London can sound like the highlight of a holiday. Yet recent visitors have complained it is “a little tired”, “boring, empty, and overpriced”, and “fine, not remarkable”.

The reviews, posted on Tripadvisor this year, are subjective. But they offer a glimpse of the broader challenges facing theme park and entertainment juggernaut Merlin Entertainments.

Sea Life is one of London-based Merlin's biggest global brands, alongside Legoland resorts, Madame Tussauds and Peppa Pig World of Play.

The company also owns the London Dungeons, Alton Towers and Thorpe Park and the London Eye.

Over two decades, the British company has become the world's second-biggest operator of visitor attractions, behind only Disney.

But a poorly timed, debt-fuelled deal to go private on the eve of the pandemic has derailed its finances and left executives scrambling to stave off a debt squeeze. At the same time, Merlin must contend with a wave of newer attractions, from escape rooms to virtual reality, vying for people's attention.

A decade ago, Merlin's success attracted the attention of private equity giant Blackstone, which in 2019 took the company private alongside Kirkbi, the investment firm of the family behind Lego, and Canadian pension giant CPPIB.

The consortium paid £4.7bn to take Merlin off the stock market – a valuation equivalent to 12 times its annual earnings. Merlin's new owners promised “significant, long-term investment” to secure the future of its attractions and drive further growth. In 2018, the year before it went private, Merlin made a pre-tax profit of £285m on revenues of £1.68bn. Some 67 million people visited its attractions.

But the deal came at the wrong time. Merlin's net debt rose from £1.1bn in 2018 to £4.7bn by the end of 2020, just as Covid-19 was forcing places such as Legoland to close. As interest rates have soared since the pandemic, the company's net financing costs have risen nearly tenfold, from £38m in 2018 to £368m last year.

As the cost of living crisis has squeezed disposable income worldwide, Merlin has been forced to write down its brand value by hundreds of millions of pounds.

Last year it made a pre-tax loss of £426m. Visitors to one of its attractions numbered 60.5 million, down almost 10pc since the company went private. Some challenges were beyond the company's control: the pandemic, soaring interest rates and a cost of living crisis.

But Helen Rodriguez, an ana CreditSights, says the company hasn't helped itself. Executives have spent years spreading money across a sprawling collection of attractions instead of focusing on the best performers.

“Instead of pursuing a very focused investment strategy towards their more successful concepts, they’ve gone wide and broad, and they’ve acquired and invested in a lot of different things over the last 15 to 20 years,” Rodriguez says. “The investment strategy hasn’t been terribly effective.”

Some of the more puzzling projects include a £20m Bear Grylls adventure park in Birmingham, closed in 2024, and a Peter Rabbit-themed attraction in Blackpool. A

The Legoland resort in Windsor is among London-based Merlin's biggest global brands; a dragon model at the attraction, inset

lack of focus has followed turnover in chief

executives in recent years. Merlin's long-time boss Sir Nick Varney left in 2022 after 23 years in charge. Scott O'Neil, an American sports

executive who ran the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, replaced him, but he left two years later to run LIV Golf, the breakaway Saudi league.

Fiona Eastwood, a former executive at the BBC's

commercial arm,

parachuted in last year

and launched a turnaround plan.

Since then, Merlin has narrowed its focus. The company handed back

Blackpool Tower, which it managed for 15 years, to the council in June, along with the Peter Rabbit attraction.

Meanwhile, Merlin has spent £70m on new indoor roller coasters at Legoland parks in Florida and California, and new attractions based on the popular children's shows Bluey and Paw Patrol have come to its British parks. The new rides aim to capture the attention of a new generation of children as Merlin tries to revive theme parks that have been losing appeal in the smartphone era.

This pressure is showing elsewhere in the company.

Last year, Merlin wrote down Madame Tussauds by £262m. A further £48m was written off against other attractions in 2024.

But the company's most pressing challenge is financial. Merlin had more than £600m of debt due in 2027, a deadline looming over the entire business. It needed to push out repayment “in order to give them a couple of years to continue to try and turn around the business”, Rodriguez

'They've gone wide and broad. The investment strategy hasn't been terribly effective'

says. The sale of Merlin's Lego Discovery Centres to the Lego Group for just over £200m in February eased pressure, but selling assets has traditionally proved difficult.

“They tried to sell Sea Life, but there were no attractive offers,” Rodriguez says. Instead, the company has effectively been mortgaging its attractions. Merlin recently agreed a £657m loan to help refinance around £630m of debt due next year, securing the lending against attractions including the London Eye, the London Dungeon and Shrek’s Adventure London.

The next few years will show whether the refinancing has given Merlin enough time to rebuild the appeal of its attractions – or whether it has simply delayed the next reckoning with its debts.

A Merlin spokesman said: “We are making good progress in our transformation, investing in our strongest destinations, bringing iconic brands to life and welcoming more guests as a result.”

The \$80bn debt trap facing Hollywood's mega studio deal

David Ellison's ‘downright ugly’ coup of Warner must tackle worrying numbers, reports James Warrington

“IT WAS not easy to get here,” David Ellison told employees after closing Paramount’s \$110bn (£82bn) mega-merger with Warner Bros last week. “At times, it was downright ugly.”

Even Ellison's most ardent critics will acknowledge that he has pulled off a coup. In a few short years, the 43-year-old has built a media empire in the face of fierce political opposition and emerged as Hollywood's newest mogul.

Yet troubles at his newly merged company – now rebranded as Skydance – are only just beginning. Despite the backing of his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, and three Gulf states, David Ellison's deal was funded primarily through eye-watering sums of debt.

“While David Ellison laid out his company’s priorities, focusing on storytelling, trust, technology and market leadership, he omitted the elephant in the room, which is the necessary cost-cutting that has to happen to deal with the company’s deep debt and satisfy investors,” says Mike Proulx, an analyst at Forrester.

Skydance has a net debt of roughly \$80bn, or around seven times its

profits. That is almost three times higher than the 2.5x level normally associated with the industry, according to Enders Analysis.

The question for Ellison is: how does he plan to escape this debt trap?

Skydance brings together two of Hollywood's biggest studios and their extensive back catalogues of film and TV shows, ranging from the Harry Potter franchise to Game of Thrones and SpongeBob SquarePants, as well as the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services and the CNN and CBS news networks.

It is an enviable array of intellectual

---

‘Content is a spend, but you can also see it as an investment because it’s going to drive growth’

property that gives Skydance the scale to rival both Disney and Netflix.

Yet analysts and rating agencies are raising eyebrows at the financial gymnastics required to combine the two behemoths. Both already carried significant debt from their own formative mergers.

Paramount raised \$52bn of debt in just a week as it scrambled to close the deal, which is the largest leveraged buyout in history.

Skydance has an enviable array of TV and films, such as the Harry Potter franchise

The timing could hardly have been worse, coming amid a wider bond sell-off that has driven up borrowing costs across the market. Skydance's finances will be further constrained by legal obligations requiring it to release at least 30 films in cinemas in the US each year and increase US production spend by \$1.5bn over five years.

“We have a business plan,” Ynon Kreiz said this week. He is the non-nonsense former boss of toymaker Mattel who has been named co-chief executive of Skydance. “There’s a complete financial envelope to how we’re going to run the business, and content is a spend, but you can also see it as an investment because it’s also going to drive growth.”

Skydance executives are keen to emphasise the potential for cash generation from a company with revenues of around \$70bn. They are aiming to quickly cut the borrowing pile, bringing leverage down to below three times profits by 2029.

Around four million UK homes now have access to a Paramount+ subscription, making it the fourth most popular streaming service, though it remains well behind Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney.

HBO Max, which only launched in the UK in March, was not included in the latest industry figures, but is hoping to scoop up more subscribers ahead of the launch of its new Harry Potter series on Christmas Day.

Ultimately, the debt-fuelled takeover will rely heavily on cost-cutting. Ellison has already said he is eyeing savings of \$6bn and industry observers describe new boss Kreiz, who previously ran production giant Endemol, as “unsentimental”.

Analysts say office property will be a key target for savings, but there are also fears for the 4,000 Warner Bros employees in the UK.

Investors may be reassured by the significant equity backing, including the \$24bn pumped in by the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

Sir Tony Blair has been appointed as an adviser to the Skydance board, raising the prospect that he will serve as a proxy for these Gulf shareholders given his think tank carries out a significant amount of work in the region. Ultimately, though, it is the Ellison family that has staked its reputation – and vast amounts of money – on a mammoth deal to reshape Tinseltown. It will be on them to prove the numbers stack up and the deal can work.

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The parish where worshippers face £160 fines for going to Mass

Council raises £360,000 from one traffic camera in a year as churchgoers are caught by restrictions. By Erik Olsson

For nearly 20 years, Jacqueline Venus had been tending to her father's grave in St Mary Magdalen church in Richmond, south-west London. The 62-year-old, who is blind, can only access the church by car, usually driven there by her friends and brother.

But for nearly two years, Ms Venus has been close to being forced to stop visiting the cemetery, located on a small cul-de-sac on North Worple Way.

'It's quite immoral. It comes across like a cash-making scheme. It's a honey trap'

Since September 2024, Richmond Upon Thames council has banned drivers from travelling westbound on the road seven days a week between 7am and 7pm.

In the latest financial year alone, the council issued more than 4,000 fines to cars on North Worple Way, pulling in about £360,000 from just one camera, according to council figures shared with The Telegraph.

Father Adrian McKenna-Whyte, parish priest of St Mary Magdalen, says the restrictions had caused “real and ongoing distress” for the Roman Catholic community. He said attendance at some services was down by as much as a third, with elderly and less mobile parishioners fearful of getting fined.

"Some have simply stopped coming, choosing parishes where parking isn't restricted," he says. "The only clear effect of extending these restrictions into the weekend is to limit the number of people able to attend Mass here."

Drivers who are caught on the camera can expect a £160 fine, which is reduced to £80 if paid within 14 days. Venus, whose brother was fined twice when driving her to the cemetery, called Richmond council and asked them how she was supposed to visit the church as a blue-badge holder.

She says the council switchboard and the traffic enforcement firm dismissed her request for an exemption and suggested she park outside the enforcement zone and walk.

"It's ridiculous," she says. "There's got to be a way around it so people can go to church. I can see why they put it there, the rat-run. But there should be some exemption for going to the church.

“Isn’t part of our human rights that we have the right to visit our parents’ grave without getting a parking penalty or driving penalty?”

The camera, which is by the street's bus station, is positioned before two parallel signs explaining the restrictions. The traffic reduction zone was introduced to stop drivers cutting through the two-way street to avoid congestion on Mortlake High Street. Residents said the rat-running worsened after Hammersmith Bridge shut in 2019 and more traffic was funnelled towards Mortlake.

However, McKenna-Whyte said he is “troubled” about the “many cases” of mourners and funeral directors who have received fines as a result.

Jasmin Solomon was fined on the day of her grandmother's funeral as she followed the hearse – which was also fined – to the church during the procession.

Solomon says receiving the fine out of the blue a month after the funeral was upsetting. "It reminded me of that

4,000

Fines issued

Cars caught

offending in

North Worple

Way during the

past financial year

£36k

Amount raised

Sum brought in

from one camera,

according to

council figures

Father Adrian McKenna-Whyte

Parish priest at St Mary Magdalen in Richmond

'At the very least, restrictions should be lifted on Sundays'

day, and there was a picture of nan's hearse [on the notice],” she says.

The council raised the overdue fine to £280, despite Solomon emailing them evidence from the funeral directors that she was a part of the procession.

"It's disgusting, with the knowledge that they had," she says. "It's quite immoral. It comes across like a cash-making scheme. It's a honey trap."

Solomon's mother, Lynda Bazely, had also been fined a couple of weeks earlier when she drove to meet McKenna-Whyte to discuss the funeral.

The 60-year-old, from nearby Barnes, appealed the fine to no avail, despite having the priest write a letter explaining the circumstances. “I just thought, that’s complete robbery,” she says.

The church, which is known for having the tomb of Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton, was never consulted on the restrictions and only found out about them when they were introduced.

McKenna-Whyte has written to the council seven times and has raised the issue with Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat MP, but has never received an explanation for why the restrictions run 12 hours a day, seven days a week. "At the very least, restrictions should be lifted on Sundays, but ideally, over the whole weekend," he says.

He also says the restrictions regularly caused congestion and bottlenecks along the council's proposed alternative route to the church via Vineyard Path and Alder Road.

In a letter to the council, he wrote: "The narrowness of this road is impassable for hearses so that funerals directors have told me that they have had to appeal against tickets as well."

Residents, who can apply for an exemption, welcomed the restrictions during the consultation in 2023.

Natalie Lamb, who lives on one of the road's side streets, broadly supports the restrictions, noting that traffic on the street used to be a “nightmare”.

But she acknowledges that the restrictions have caused “chaos” for taxis and delivery drivers and were “a pain” for people unfamiliar with the area.

"If you do not know the area you could get stung really badly," Lamb says. "We have friends of ours who have driven in and been stung."

The blue road signs, which are placed several metres ahead of the camera, are too “subtle” and come as a “surprise” to many drivers, with one resident adding: “It should be more in your face.”

A Richmond council spokesman said: "The North Worple Way traffic reduction scheme was introduced with the support of nearby residents to make the area safer and prevent it being used as a shortcut by drivers looking to avoid congestion on Mortlake High Street. The feedback from those residents has been positive.

“St Mary Magdalen Church remains completely accessible without the need for a permit or to cross a camera control point. The church has been advised of this route and we will continue to work with them to ensure those attending are aware.”

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Fame & Fortune: Levi Roots

‘Mandela inspired my Reggae Reggae sauce’

The entrepreneur experienced a lightbulb moment after meeting the former president and went on to create a £30m empire. By Dan Moore

Levi Roots, the culinary entrepreneur, was born Keith Valentine Graham in Clarendon, Jamaica, and moved to the UK aged 11.

A former reggae singer, he was nominated for the best reggae act at the Mobo awards in 1998. But he is best known for his Reggae Reggae Sauce, a condiment concocted on the kitchen table in his flat in Brixton, London, in 2005.

Two years later, Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh of Dragons' Den invested £50,000 for a 40pc stake in his venture. Since then, he has expanded his range of sauces and food, and branched out into books, TV shows and restaurants. He is estimated to be worth more than £30m.

A father of eight, the 68-year-old lives in south London with his partner, Martina, and their son, Christopher.

---

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB?

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB:

My first proper job upon leaving school was as an apprentice engineer on £13 a week, which was a lot of money in 1974. I'd go straight home and give it all to my mother, Doreen.

---

HOW DID YOU GET THE JOB?

HOW DID YOU GET THE JOB.

My brother, Trevor, was an engineer at Selby Engineering in Brixton, and he got me in as an apprentice. I was so lucky to get a proper job, but I didn't last long because music was in my blood.

---

WHAT DID YOU DO?

I went on the road, initially as a sound assistant with a band and then up front on stage, singing and DJing. I made money on tours, enough not to be scrounging off my parents, and I could afford to buy the clothes and shoes I wanted to look good on stage.

---

WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT MONEY AS A CHILD?

WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT

MONEY AS A CHILD?

It took me a long time to figure out that

it's not about spending, but retaining

the cash. It wasn't until I learnt to keep

it that I realised the value of money.

---

IS IT TRUE YOU SANG FOR NELSON MANDELA?

I was at mum's house, asking for a few quid. This was in the 1990s, and she said: "Look, forget the money, you need inspiration. Go see the man; he's down the road." I asked who, and she said Mandela, who was visiting Brixton with [the then] Prince Charles. Well, you've got to do what your mother says, so I joined the thousands congregating around the Recreation Centre.

It was Mandela's birthday and

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they were looking for someone to sing before him.

A security guard called Derek saw me, ushered me through, and I was able to present Mandela with a birthday cake and sing “Happy Birthday” to him, like Marilyn Monroe to JFK.

---

WHERE DID YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL DRIVE COME FROM?

It was after shaking Mandela's hand and speaking to him. I thought, this man had been in prison for 23 years and look what he has achieved. I had a light bulb moment, went to Notting Hill Carnival and launched the sauce.

ON DRAGONS' DEN?

I noticed that all kinds of people were also flocking to my "Rastaurant" stall. So, I went anywhere and sold at local markets every weekend, and got spotted by a producer.

---

DID YOU LEAP AT THE CHANCE TO BE ON THE SHOW?

No! I'd never heard of it, I thought it was like I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! and they'd be asking me to eat kangaroo testicles. I went home and told the kids and they strongly advised me not to do it – and certainly not sing that bloody Reggae Reggae song. But I did.

HOW MUCH OF YOUR SUCCESS

WAS THE SAUCE, AND HOW MUCH

OF IT WAS YOUR PITCH?

The Dragons were about to have a field

day with me for presenting the worst

pitch ever. But when I started singing

and reached the verse, “so nice with

your fried chicken, make burgers finger

licking”, I took a side look and saw Rich-

ard Farleigh tapping along, and I knew

I had them.

And of course there was the angel, the greatest man I've known, Peter Jones, six foot seven and wearing stripy socks. He knew this wasn't about Reggae Reggae Sauce, it was going to be about Levi Roots.

---

Levi Roots attributes a lot of credit to Dragons' Den star Peter Jones for the success of his brand

HOW DID YOU CELEBRATE YOUR SUCCESS?

I went down to Ozwald Boateng in Savile Row to buy a suit and some shoes. They cost £3,000, but mum paid for them because it was important to keep the £50,000 from the Dragons.

This goes back to learning how to use the money as opposed to spending it. The order from Justin King [the former chief executive] at Sainsbury's for 250,000 bottles of Reggae Reggae Sauce was achieved through an outsourced company, pardon the pun. The outsourcer got their money, we got ours, and I always had money in the bank, which gave me leverage.

WHAT WAS YOUR BEST

BUSINESS DECISION?

I suppose it was following Peter Jones's

advice not to focus on the products, but

to concentrate on Levi Roots. Peter was

in it for the long run. He still has his

shares in the company.

AND YOUR WORST DECISION?

Thinking the brand could cover everything. We spent a lot of time and money on a range of sandwiches. I took my eye off the ball as the brand was about Caribbean products, and sandwiches are not Caribbean.

ARE YOU A SAVER OR A SPENDER? A bit of both, as I have a young family, and it's important to think about the future. I want them to continue living the quality of life they have now when I'm gone. Equally, we have a lovely house, we go on nice holidays, and Christopher, who is 13, is in a private school. So, I make sure I spend on my family.

WHERE DO YOU LIVE?

We have a nice house in Selsdon on the outskirts of Croydon. We have roe deer and badgers visiting our garden, which is better than the drunks and naked ladies who'd fall into our tiny front garden in Brixton after dark.

WHAT'S NEXT FOR YOU? The Levi Roots movie will start filming next year. I can't name the Hollywood actor who's playing me, although I've been out to Jamaica with him, and he's stayed here at our house.

Levi is a leading business speaker represented by the London Keynote Speakers Agency. For more information on Levi and his range of products, visit LeviRoots.com

The dream of an inheritance tax-free Britain is dead

Comment

Michael Mosbacher

Kemi Badenoch's speech last Wednesday was lauded for its crowd-pleasing pledges on inheritance tax – yet it will also guarantee that death duties will remain with us for many years to come.

This might seem a strange conclusion when the Tory leader declared that the next Conservative government will exempt family homes from the tax if they are passed to children and grandchildren, and that no death duties on other assets would be due for a couple with an estate of £1m or less. Mrs Badenoch also made clear that her long-term aim, when the Treasury's finances allowed for it, would be to scrap the tax altogether.

So what is there to gripe about? Well, the heralded £1m inheritance tax threshold is, of course, no such thing. It is a £500,000 threshold – married couples and civil partners can pass on their unused allowance to their surviving spouse, bringing us up to £1m. This was dreamt up by then Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling in 2007 to counter George Osborne's own £1m IHT gambit at that year's Tory conference.

The policy is an oddity in that the UK tax system, unlike that of many countries, does not give tax advantages to the married. At least, not at any point where it might promote the institution. Marriage is only incentivised at the point of death. The heirs of the divorced and never married are discriminated against by the Darling IHT regime.

A £500,000 inheritance tax threshold today is, in real terms, still lower than where it stood in 2007. The nil-rate band then was £300,000, just over £525,000 in today's money. Yet it has been stuck at £325,000 since 2009. In this regard, Mrs Badenoch's move is welcome but hardly revolutionary. She is simply keeping up with inflation.

Now, exempting one's family home from IHT, much in the same way that one's principal home is exempt from capital gains tax, will be extremely welcome to millions. It will certainly alleviate anxiety about inheritance tax. But it too comes with problems and unfairnesses. Just exempting homes will serve as a powerful disincentive to people downsizing, when it might otherwise be sensible. Indeed, some might be encouraged to upsize in their later years to reduce their heirs' tax bill. The measure will serve to further ossify the UK property market.

There may, of course, be tax reliefs to avoid this levy on moving to a more appropriate home – but such measures will further complicate the UK's extraordinarily complex tax code, something Mrs Badenoch has pledged to simplify. It goes to illustrate how complexity is often the product of the best of sensible intentions.

▲ Scrapping taxes on the wealthy would be politically difficult for Kemi Badenoch

The measure would also entrench a further unfairness into our tax system. Why should this exemption only apply to people with children? As fertility rates continue to fall, more and more of us will die childless. Is it really just and fair that the estates of those who have not had children by choice or misfortune are taxed more highly?

Making the IHT threshold £1m (or, in truth, £500,000) is also likely to make it sticky. Nice round numbers have an attraction, which are all too easily stuck with despite the vicissitudes of inflation. But now we come to the biggest problem with Mrs Badenoch's proposed IHT regime. Despite her promise, do we really believe that a future government will ever deem the public finances to be in such fine settle that this particular tax can be ditched?

If the next government fully implements Mrs Badenoch's promises – the Cameron governments did no such thing in regard to Osborne's 2007 pledge, but then they did have the excuse of the financial crisis – those left paying IHT will be the rich, or at least the significantly affluent.

The economic arguments for scrapping this tax that would only be paid by the wealthy would be powerful

\- if combined with other tax changes, much of the wealth that has flown out of Britain over the past few years would probably flood back. And new wealth would also come in besides. The billionaire exodus would in all likelihood be more than reversed. Britain would once more be a country open for business.

But it is not economics that has the trump card when it comes to tax policy. Scrapping taxes on the wealthy is politically difficult – especially so for a Conservative government. The likely reasons for Mrs Badenoch not announcing plans to fully scrap IHT are not the ones she vaunted about economic prudence and balancing the budget. No, they are the fear of being pilloried for handing tax cuts to billionaires. This is certainly the attack line Labour and the Left more generally would have inevitably rolled out. Those arguments would be all the louder once many fewer estates paid IHT.

And that is why death taxes are sadly more securely in place now than they were before Mrs Badenoch's speech.

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What to watch

TIME

BBC One, 9pm

The return of Jimmy McGovern's Bafta-winning anthology about the penal system

Jimmy McGovern's Bafta-winning anthology about the penal system returns with another gripping three-part drama, this one set in a young offender institution (YOI), and with a new cast.

The exception is the always excellent Siobhan Finneran, who reprises her role from the first two series as prison chaplain Marie-Louise O'Dell, who has transferred to the YOI after experiencing a crisis of faith.

BBC Young Musician 2026 BBC Four, 7.30pm Petroc Trelawny presents further highlights of the auditions. The participants play a range of instruments including marimba, bassoon, piano, French horn and cello, with a repertoire featuring Mozart, Liszt and Elgar.

The Great Celebrity Pottery Throw Down

Channel 4, 7.45pm

Liza Tarbuck hosts the final, in which the four remaining celebrities – Fatiha El-Ghorri, Layton Williams, Denise Van Outen and Richard Herring – have to complete two challenges. Judges Rich Miller and Keith Brymer

There she meets senior officer Bobby Bailey (David Tennant in full unsmiling mode), who does things by the book and has an unhappy home life that eventually impinges on his work.

Among the troubled prisoners are two teenagers, Peter (Ollie McNulty) and James (Louis McCartney), who are struggling through the terrifying first weeks of their incarceration for violent crimes, and the

11 V1, 9pm

This five-part psychological thriller about obsession, hidden desire and betrayal was adapted from Elizabeth Day's novel by Sarah

vulnerable Christopher (Chukwubuikem Molokwu). When tragedy strikes, O'Dell clashes with Bailey and his colleague Freddie Jennings (Daniel Ryan), who know more about events leading up to it than they are prepared to share.

As the main characters' stories play out, we see overlapping themes emerge while asking if telling the truth really does unburden the soul.

Jones decide who receives the ceramic trophy.

Veronica Lee

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now is a thrilling adaptation

Solemani (who also appears in the starry cast). Ben (Tom Cullen), a charismatic Tory politician, asks his lifelong friend Martin (Luke Evans), a journalist, to scupper a party leadership bid by Jarvis (Sam Troughton). The narrative jumps between the trio's time together at

boarding school and the present day, when a violent incident occurs at Ben's lavish birthday party at his country mansion.

A welcome return as Jools Holland introduces another eclectic mix of performers, including former Housemartins frontman Paul Heaton, singer-songwriter Skye Newman, teenage rapper DC3, experimental indie band Mary in the Junkyard and alt-folk singer Dermot Henry. Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr talks about his new album, The Age of Everything.

---

Lesley Manville

Remembers – Top Girls

BBC Four, 10pm

The actress talks about

being part of both the

original theatre cast of Caryl

Churchill's groundbreaking

play in 1981 and Max

Jools Holland introduces an eclectic mix of performers

Stafford-Clark's BBC adaptation a decade later, which follows at 10.15pm.

FILM

Don't Look Now (1973)

BBC Two, 10.45pm

Nicolas Roeg's thrilling adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's 1971 short story follows a couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, both mesmerising) as they travel to Venice following the death of their daughter. Once in Italy, they meet a pair of sisters who claim to possess a sixth sense – before the couple start experiencing sightings themselves. A horror milestone exploring the psychology of grief.

---

Main channels

---

BBC One

6.00 am News (S) 7.35 Match of the Day (R) (S) 9.00 Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (S) 10.00 Politics England (S) 10.30 Sunday Morning Live (S) 11.30 Money for Nothing (R) (S)

12.00 Bargain Hunt (AD) (R) (S)

12.45 pm Points of View (S)

1.00 News; Weather (S)

1.15 Songs of Praise (S)

1.15 Songs of Praise (S)

2.00 FILM: Shrek the Third (2007)

Animated sequel with the voice of Mike Myers (AD) (S)

3.25 Kingdom (AD) (R) (S)

4.15 Homes Under the Hammer (AD) (R) (S)

5.30 Regional News; Weather; Weather (S)

5.40 Countryfile (S)

6.40 The Reluctant Vampire (AD) (S)

The Reluctant Vampire

7.10 Strictly Come Dancing: The Results Emma, Josh and Johannes wave goodbye to another couple (AD) (S)

8.00 Antiques Roadshow Fiona Bruce presents the show from Dartington Estate in Devon (S)

9.00 Time New series. A tragedy strikes in a young offenders' institution (AD) (S)

10.00 BBC News at Ten (S)

10.25 Regional News; Weather (S)

10.30 Match of the Day Including Liverpool v Manchester City (S)

11.35 FILM: The Nice Guys (2016) Crime comedy starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling 12.25am The Graham Norton Show 2.20 - 6.00am News

---

BBC Two

6.40 am Countryfile (R) (S) 7.35 News (S)

9.00 Landward (R) (S) 9.30 The Best of Weatherman Walking (R) (S)

10.00 Saturday Kitchen Best Bites (S) 11.30 Eva Longoria: Searching for France (AD) (R) (S)

12.10 pm Nigel and Adam's Farm Kitchen (R) (S)

1.10 FILM: The Ipcress File (1965) Spy thriller starring Michael Caine (AD) (S)

2.55 FILM: Funeral in Berlin (1966) Cold War thriller starring Michael Caine (S)

6.20 Celebrity Antiques Road Trip (R) (S)

Eva Longoria: Searching for France

7.20 Eva Longoria: Searching for France The actress explores the history, food and culture of Bordeaux (AD) (S)

8.00 Pilgrimage: The Road Through North Wales The travellers' last leg begins outside Eryri national park. Last in the series (AD) (R) (S)

9.00 Wilderness with Simon Reeve

Simon treks and canoes through

Canada's Yukon Territory (S)

10.00 Later... with Jools Holland New series. With Paul Heaton, Skye Newman, DC3, Mary in the Junkyard and Dermot Henry (S)

10.45 FILM: Don't Look Now (1973)

Supernatural thriller with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie (AD) (S)

12.35 am Sign Zone: Not Going Out 1.05

Sign Zone: Question Time 2.05 Sign

Zone: Saving Lives at Sea 3.05 -

6.20am This Is BBC Two

---

ITVI

6.00 am The Voice UK (AD) (R) (S) 7.00 James Martin's Saturday Morning (R) (S) 9.25 News (S) 9.30 Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh (S) 11.30 EFL Live. Southampton v Portsmouth (kick-off 12.00pm) (S)

2.25 pm Cooking with the Stars (AD) (R) (S)

2.50 Celebrity Lingo (R) (S)

3.20 FILM: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Action sequel starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (AD) (S)

5.40 The Chase (R) (S)

6.30 News (S)

6.45 ITV News London; Weather (S)

The Box

7.00 The Box The three finalists battle it out to be crowned the winner. Last in the series (AD) (S)

8.00 Emmerdale Kim is worried about Joe (AD) (S)

8.30 Coronation Street Kit refuses to act as a character witness for Sarah (AD) (S)

9.00 The Party New series. Political drama starring Luke Evans (AD) (S)

10.00 News; Weather (S)

10.20 DNA Journey Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan learn about their family histories (AD) (R) (S)

11.40 The Party 12.45am Shop on TV 3.00 Motorsport UK 3.50 Unwind with ITV 5.05 - 6.00am Prue Leith's Cotswold Kitchen

Advertising Standards Authority

asa.org.uk

We regulate ads across all media, including online.

Because every little helps.

Telegraph · ROYAL APOINTMENT with Hannah Furness

Radio choice

Currently: AI on the Farm

Radio 4, 1.30pm

R4's ongoing Farming Tomorrow season, looking at how UK British farming might change in coming

---

RADIO 1 FM 97.6-99.8MHz

6.00am Radio 1's Weekend Early Breakfast 7.00 Radio 1 Weekend Breakfast 10.30 Newsbeat 10.32 Radio 1's Group Chat with Vicky and Charley 1.00pm Radio 100s with Sam and Danni 2.00 Radio 110s 3.00 Radio 120s with Sam and Danni 4.00 The Official Chart: First Look on Radio 1 with Lauren 7.00 Radio 1's Life Hacks with Oré and Shanequa 9.00 Radio 1's Chillest Show 11.00 BBC Introducing on Radio 11.00am 1Xtra's R&B Show with Chuckie 2.30 1Xtra's R&B Slow Jamz Mix with Chuckie 3.00 Radio 1's Chill Mix 3.30 Radio 1's Chill Mix 4.00 - 6.58am Radio 1 Early Breakfast with Mylo and Rosie

---

RADIO 2 FM 88-90.2MHZ

6.00am Good Morning Sunday 9.00 Love Songs with Michael Ball 11.00 Paddy McGuinness 1.00pm Elaine Paige on Sunday 3.00 Sounds of the 70s with Shaun Keaveny 5.00 Pick of the Pops 6.00 Pick of the Pops 7.00 Tony Blackburn's Golden Hour 8.00 The Paul Gambaccini Collection 10.00 Radio 2 Unwinds with Angela Griffin 11.00 Radio 2 Unwinds with Angela Griffin 12.00 Connor Phillips 3.00am Alternative Sounds of the 90s with Dermot O'Leary 4.00 - 6.30am Owain Wyn Evans

---

RADIO 3 FM 90.2-92.4MHZ

6.30am Breakfast 9.00 Sunday Morning 12.00 Private Passions 1.30pm Music Map 3.00 Music Matters: Outside In 4.00 Jazz Record Requests. With Alyn Shipton 5.00 The Early Music Show 6.00 Choral Evensong 7.00 Sunday Feature 7.45 Words and Music 9.00 Brass Banding with Hannah Peel. Hannah meets history-making adjudicator Annie

decades, takes in everything from a week of future-focused dialogue on The Archers (7pm), to a week of lunchtime Farming Today specials (Mon-Fri, 1.45pm) exploring everything from

Crookston 10.00 Night Tracks. A soundtrack for late-night listening 11.30 Unclassified 12.30 - 6.30am Through the Night

---

RADIO 4 FM 92.4-94.6MHZ; LW 198KHZ

6.00am News Headlines 6.05 Beyond Belief 6.35 On Your Farm 6.57 Weather 7.00 News 7.00 Sunday Papers 7.10 Sunday 7.54 Radio 4 Appeal 7.57 Weather 8.00 News 8.00 Sunday Papers 8.10 Sunday Worship 8.48 Witness History 8.58 Tweet of the Day 9.00 Broadcasting House 10.00 Desert Island Discs 11.00 The Archers 12.15pm Profile 12.30 Unspeakable 12.57 Weather 1.00 The World This Weekend. Global news with Jonny Dymond 1.30 AI on the Farm 2.00 Gardeners' Question Time. From the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2.45 Opening Lines. Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Why Didn't They Ask Evans? 3.00 Drama: Why Didn't They Ask Evans? Dramatisation of the novel by Agatha Christie 4.00 Take Four Books. Marlon James talks about his Booker-shortlisted novel The Disappearers 4.30 Brain of Britain. General knowledge quiz 5.00 Witness History 5.10 The Verb. Poems by Owen Sheers, Jason Allen Paisant, Helen Mort and David Morley 5.54 Shipping Forecast 5.57 Weather 6.00 Six O'Clock News 6.15 Pick of the Week. Highlights of the past seven days 7.00 The Archers. Alistair finds himself in trouble 7.15 Grandchildren of the '56 Revolution. Young Hungarians living in the shadow of the 1956 uprising 7.45 Thief at the British Museum. Ittai recruits an ally to go on a secret mission inside the museum 8.00 Feedback 8.30 Last Word 9.00 Money Box 9.25 Radio 4 Appeal 9.30 From Our Own Correspondent 9.59 Weather 10.00 The Westminster Hour 11.00 In Our Time 11.45 Short Works 12.00 News and Weather 12.15am The Artificial Human 12.45 Bells on Sunday 12.48

climate resilience to land use and succession. There are special editions of The Briefing Room (Thu, 4pm) and The Food Programme (Fri, 11am), too, plus this cutting-edge report by

Shipping Forecast 1.00 As World Service 5.00 News Summary 5.04 Last Word 5.32 Weather 5.34 Shipping Forecast 5.43 Prayer for the Day 5.45 - 6.00am Farming Today

---

RADIO 5 LIVE MW 693 & 909KHZ

6.00am The Martin Lewis Podcast 7.00 Sunday Breakfast 10.00 Colin Murray 12.00 5 Live Sport 2.00pm Premier League Football 4.00 5 Live Sport 4.30 Premier League Football 6.45 606 8.30 5 Live Formula 1. A look ahead to the US Grand Prix 9.00 Stephen Nolan. The day's main news stories, topical debate and interviews 12.00 Tennis' Darkest Hour 12.30am Tennis' Darkest Hour 1.00 Dotun Adebayo 5.00 - 6.00am Wake Up to Money

---

CLASSIC FM FM 99.9-101.9MHZ

6.30am Classic FM Breakfast with Sam Pittis 9.00 The Classic FM Hall of Fame Hour with Tim Lihoreau 10.00 Tim Lihoreau 12.00 John Brunning 3.00pm Stephen Mangan 6.00 Curtain Call with Richard Armitage 7.00 Relaxing Evenings with Zeb Soanes. Zeb hosts an evening of the most relaxing music 10.00 Calm Classics 1.00am Bill Overton 4.00 - 6.30am Early Breakfast

WORLD SERVICE

DIGITAL ONLY

6.00am Weekend 9.00 News 9.06 From Our Own Correspondent 9.30 The Food Chain 10.00 News 10.06 People Fixing the World 10.30 The Fifth Floor 11.00 The Newsroom 11.30 Amazing Sport Stories 11.50 More or Less 12.00 News 12.06pm BBC OS Conversations 1.00 Newshour 2.00 News 2.06 The Climate Question 2.30 Happy News 3.00 News 3.06 Sportsworld 7.00 The Newsroom 7.30

Charlotte Smith on the potential for AI to transform the farming landscape and help agricultural businesses become more productive and profitable.

Gerard O'Donovan

Good Bad Billionaire 8.00 News 8.06

Unexpected Elements 9.00 Newshour 10.00 News 10.06 The Climate Question 10.30 Assignment 11.00 The Newsroom 11.30 The Fifth Floor 12.00 News 12.06am From Our Own Correspondent 12.30 BBC Inside Science 1.00 The Newsroom 1.30 Discovery 2.00 The Newsroom 2.30 CrowdScience 3.00 News 3.06 People Fixing the World 3.30 The Fifth Floor 4.00 The Newsroom 4.30 The Conversation 5.00 - 8.00am Newsday

---

RADIO 4 EXTRA DIGITAL ONLY

6.00am Desert Island Discs Revisited

6.45 Pursued by Bears 7.00 Poetry

Extra 7.30 Alive, Alive Oh and Other

Things That Matter Omnibus 8.40

Inheritance Tracks 8.50 Tristram

Shandy Omnibus - Part Two 10.00

Whack-0! 10.30 The Clitheroe Kid

11.00 Desert Island Discs Revisited

11.45 Pursued by Bears 12.00 Poetry

Extra 12.30pm Alive, Alive Oh and

Other Things That Matter Omnibus

1.40 Inheritance Tracks 1.50 Tristram

Shandy Omnibus - Part Two 3.00

Whack-0! 3.30 The Clitheroe Kid 4.00

SteelHeads 4.30 Over Sea, Under

Stone 5.00 Desert Island Discs

Revisited 5.45 Pursued by Bears 6.00

Poetry Extra 6.30 Alive, Alive Oh and

Other Things That Matter Omnibus

7.40 Inheritance Tracks 7.50 Tristram

Shandy Omnibus - Part Two 9.00

Whack-0! 9.30 The Clitheroe Kid

10.00 Date Night 10.30 Alexei Sayle's

Strangers on a Train 11.00 Party

11.30 Electric Ink 12.00 SteelHeads

12.30am Over Sea, Under Stone 1.00

Desert Island Discs Revisited 1.45

Pursued by Bears 2.00 Poetry Extra

2.30 Alive, Alive Oh and Other Things

That Matter Omnibus 3.40

Inheritance Tracks 3.50 Tristram

Shandy Omnibus - Part Two 5.00

Whack-0! 5.30 - 6.00am The

Clitheroe Kid

Dance: Dangerous Games (S)

6.45 Classic Albums (S)

---

Channel 4

6.10 am Cheers (R) (S) 6.40 Cheers (R) (S) 7.05 Cheers (R) (S) 7.35 Cheers (R) (S) 8.00 Everybody Loves Raymond (AD) (R) (S) 8.30 Everybody Loves Raymond (AD) (R) (S) 9.00 Frasier (AD) (R) (S) 9.30 Frasier (AD) (R) (S) 10.00 Sunday Brunch (S)

1.00 pm The Simpsons (AD) (R) (S)

1.25 The Simpsons (AD) (R) (S)

1.55 The Dog House (AD) (R) (S)

2.55 George Clarke's Amazing Spaces (AD) (R) (S)

3.55 Worst House on the Street (AD) (R) (S)

5.00 Channel 4 News (S)

5.30 Formula 1: Singapore Grand Prix Highlights (S)

Apocalypse

7.45 The Great Celebrity Pottery Throw Down The four finalists create a dessert trifle set. Last in the series (AD) (S)

9.00 Apocalypse A new survivor arrives at the West camp seeking shelter (AD) (S)

10.15 Gogglebox Thoughts on The Celebrity Traitors and Strictly Come Dancing (AD) (R) (S)

11.15 Geordie Coppers 12.15am 999: On the Front Line 1.10 Ramsay's Hotel Hell 2.00 Ramsay's Hotel Hell 2.50 FILM: Shadowbox (2025) Premiere. Drama starring Tillotama Shome. In Bengali and Hindi 4.20 George Clarke's Amazing Spaces 5.00 The Simpsons 5.25 The Simpsons 5.50 - 6.30am Countdown

---

Channel 5

6.00 am Milkshake! 9.00 Entertainment News on 5 (S) 9.05 The Cruise: Fun-Loving Brits at Sea (AD) (R) (S) 10.05 The Cruise: Fun-Loving Brits at Sea (AD) (R) (S) 11.05 Holidaying with Jane McDonald & Friends (R) (S)

12.00 Warship: Life in the Royal Navy (AD) (R) (S)

1.00 pm Warship: Life in the Royal Navy (AD) (R) (S)

2.00 Live: NFL on 5 Jacksonville Jaguars v Philadelphia Eagles (kick-off 2.30pm) (S)

5.30 The Wonderful World of Chocolate (R) (S)

6.00 Million Pound Motorhomes (R) (S)

6.55 5 News Weekend (S)

Live: NFL on 5

7.00 The Grosvenor: London's Grand Hotel A look at the luxury hotel in Mayfair (S)

8.00 22 Kids & Counting Chloe Radford and her partner Jake welcome their second child (S)

9.00 Live: NFL on 5 Seattle Seahawks v San Francisco 49ers (kick-off 9.25pm) (S)

12.30 am Cops 12.55 Motorway Cops: Catching America's Speeders 1.55 Entertainment News on 5 2.00 Must Have Ideas 4.00 The Cruise: Fun-Loving Brits at Sea 4.45 Spain with Michael Portillo 5.30 Entertainment News on 5 5.35 Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom 5.45 - 6.00am Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom

---

Sky Arts

6.00 am Sir Simon Rattle: The Joy of Conducting (S) 7.10 Dance On! (S) 8.20 Tales of the Unexpected (AD) (S) 8.50 Tales of the Unexpected (AD) (S) 9.20 Tales of the Unexpected (AD) (S) 9.50 Tales of the Unexpected (AD) (S) 10.20 Tales of the Unexpected (AD) (S) 10.45 The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (S) 11.45 Portrait Artist of the Year 2026 (AD) (S)

12.45 pm Andrea Bocelli - Sacred Arias (S)

2.20 Laurel and Hardy: Their Lives and Magic (AD) (S)

4.00 Dean Martin: A Legend in Concert (S)

Legacy in the Dust: The Four Aces Story

7.45 Bob Marley: Uprising! Live The singer's performance at Dortmund's Westfalenhalle in 1980 (S)

10.15 Legacy in the Dust: The Four Aces Story A look at the rise and fall of Hackney venue the Four Aces Club (S)

12.30 am Grand Ole Opry: Opry Live 1.30

FILM: Luther: Never Too Much (2024)

The life of soul singer Luther Vandross

3.30 Women Who Rock 4.45 -

6.00am Classic Albums

---

U&Drama

---

FV 20 FS 158 SKY 143 VIRGIN 116

6.00 am Teleshopping 7.20 The Bill (S)

8.10 The Bill (S) 9.10 The Bill (S)

10.10 The Bill (S) 11.10 The Bill (S)

12.10 pm Nora Roberts' Blue Smoke (S)

2.10 Catherine Cookson's The Girl (S)

5.25 Tess of the D'Urbervilles (S)

6.40 Tess of the D'Urbervilles (S)

Sister Boniface Mysteries

FV Freeview FS Freesat (AD) Audio description (R) Repeat (S) Subtitles (SL) In-vision signing

8.00 Sister Boniface Mysteries A killer scarecrow wreaks havoc at the annual Scarecrow Festival (AD) (S)

9.00 Silent Witness The team investigates the assassination of the government's Health Secretary (AD) (S)

11.20 New Tricks 12.40am Nora Roberts' Blue Smoke 2.45 2point4 Children 3.15 Copper 4.00 - 6.00am Teleshopping

---

Talking Pictures TV

6.00 am FILM: A Matter of Murder (1949, b/w) Crime drama starring Maureen Riscoe (S) 7.10 Edinburgh Royal Mile Travelogue 1946 7.30 The Lucy Show (S) 8.00 Sherlock Holmes (S) 8.30 FILM: Hangman's Wharf (1950, b/w) Crime drama starring John Witty (S) 9.40 Bruce Lee: Enter the Dragon (S) 10.45 Tell Me Another (S) 11.15 FILM: Ghost Town Law (1942, b/w) Western starring Buck Jones (S)

12.30 pm Batman (S)

1.00 FILM: Cheaper By the Dozen (1950) Family comedy based on a true story starring Clifton Webb (S)

2.45 That's My Boy (S)

3.20 Look at Life

3.30 For the Love of Ada (S)

4.00 The Man from UNCLE (S)

5.00 The Footage Detectives

6.00 Enemy at the Door (S)

The Footage Detectives

7.00 FILM: The Green Man (1956, b/w)

Black comedy starring Alastair Sim (S)

8.35 Dial 999 A gang of career criminals carry out a payroll robbery in Fleet Street (S)

9.05 Fox Drama following the lives of a London gangster and his family (S)

10.05 The Best of The Adventurers Highlights from the Seventies "Adventures of" series

11.45 The Heritage Chart Show 12.50am

FILM: Man in the Attic (1953, b/w)

Thriller starring Jack Palance 2.30

FILM: Beat the Devil (1953, b/w)

Comedy starring Humphrey Bogart 4.15 Star Performance: The Collar 4.45 Carnival in MUnich 5.00 The Adventures of Robin Hood 5.30 - 6.00am Supercar

---

Film4

FV 14 FS 300 SKY 855 VIRGIN 428

11.00 am FILM: Secret Headquarters (2022) Comedy adventure starring Owen Wilson (S)

1.05 pm FILM: Hidden Figures (2016) Fact-based drama starring Taraji P Henson (AD) (S)

3.35 FILM: The War Lord (1965) Medieval drama starring Charlton Heston (S)

Next Goal Wins

6.00 FILM: Next Goal Wins (2023) A Dutch coach takes on the challenge of transforming American Samoa's soccer team from serial underdogs into winners. Comedy starring Michael Fassbender (S)

8.00 FILM: Gran Turismo (2023)

A teenager beats thousands of other gamers in a competition to become a racing car driver in real life. Fact-based drama starring David Harbour and Orlando Bloom (AD) (S)

10.40 FILM: T2 Trainspotting (2017) Mark Renton returns to his roots hoping to make peace with the friends he betrayed 20 years previously. Danny Boyle's drama sequel with Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle (S)

1.00 - 3.05am FILM: Passing (2021, b/w)

Historical drama starring Tessa

Thompson and Ruth Negga

With the Sussexes, it's never easy

Unrivalled royal insight delivered to your inbox

---

More channels

FV 9 FS 173 SKY 116 VIRGIN 108

7.00 pm A Stitch in Time

7.30 BBC Young Musician 2026

9.00 Talking Shakespeare

10.00 Lesley Manville Remembers – Top Girls

10.15 Top Girls

---

BBC Four

12.05 am Caryl Churchill: Omnibus

1.15 Shakespeare in Italy with Francesco da Mosto

2.15 A Stitch in Time

2.45 - 3.45am Talking Shakespeare

---

ITV3

11.30 am Downton Abbey

12.35 pm Downton Abbey

1.35 Downton Abbey

2.40 Downton Abbey

4.10 Downton Abbey

6.05 Blue Murder Motel

7.05 Blue Murder Motel

8.05 Midsomer Murders

10.05 Midsomer Murders

12.00 Wycliffe

1.05 am The Blame

2.05 George and Mildred

2.30 - 6.00am Teleshopping

FV 26 FS 117 SKY 120 VIRGIN 118

10.30 am Live British Touring Car Championship. Coverage from Brands Hatch

6.20 pm The Motorbike Show

7.20 Sharpe

9.30 FILM: RoboCop 2 (1990) Sci-fi thriller sequel starring Peter Weller

11.50 Lioness

12.40 am Auf Wiedersehen, Pet

1.40 Two and a Half Men

2.10 Two and a Half Men

2.30 Unwind with ITV

3.00 - 6.00am Teleshopping

---

ITV4

Every Wednesday. Sign up now

---

FV 18 FS 124 SKY 136 VIRGIN 147

Noon A Place in the Sun

1.00 pm A Place in the Sun

2.00 A Place in the Sun

3.00 A Place in the Sun

3.50 Come Dine with Me

4.20 Come Dine with Me

4.50 Come Dine with Me

5.20 Come Dine with Me

5.55 Come Dine with Me

6.25 Four in a Bed

6.55 Four in a Bed

9.00 999: On the Front Line

10.00 24 Hours in A&E

11.05 24 Hours in A&E

12.05 am Emergency Helicopter Medics

1.10 999: On the Front Line

2.15 24 Hours in A&E

3.20 - 3.45am A Place in the Sun

---

More4

FV Freeview FS Freesat (AD) Audio description (R) Repeat (S) Subtitles (SL) In-vision signing

---

U&Gold

---

SKY 110 VIRGIN 124

11.40 am Only Fools and Horses

1.05 pm Only Fools and Horses

2.55 Only Fools and Horses

4.15 Only Fools and Horses

5.50 Only Fools and Horses

7.10 Only Fools and Horses

8.30 Only Fools and Horses

9.50 Gavin & Stacey

10.25 Gavin & Stacey

11.00 Only Fools and Horses

12.35 am Only Fools and Horses

1.55 Only Fools and Horses

3.10 - 4.00am The Story of Only Fools and Horses

FV 27 PS 195 SKY 155 VIRGIN 129

Noon Man and Beast with Martin Clunes

1.00 pm Man and Beast with Martin Clunes

2.00 Caribbean with Simon Reeve

3.00 Incredible Journeys with Simon Reeve

4.00 Canal Boat Diaries

5.00 Canal Boat Diaries

8.00 Dream Car Fixers

9.00 Bangers & Cash

10.00 Bangers & Cash: Restoring Classics

11.00 Bangers & Cash

12.00 Bangers & Cash

1.00 am Bangers & Cash

2.00 Great Continental Railway Journeys

3.00 - 6.10am Teleshopping

---

U&Yesterday

---

Sky Atlantic

11.20 am Homicide: Life on the Street

12.25 pm Homicide: Life on the Street

1.30 Homicide: Life on the Street

2.30 House of the Dragon

3.30 House of the Dragon

4.45 Fargo

5.50 Fargo

6.55 Fargo

8.00 Fargo

9.00 Fargo

10.05 War

11.05 The Terror

12.10 am The Terror

1.15 Deadwood

2.10 Deadwood

3.10 - 4.10am Deadwood

Variations

---

ITV2

BBC One: 10.00 - 10.30am Sunday Politics Northern Ireland

BBC Two: 10.45pm Inis na nlontas

11.35 - 12.05am Sunday Politics Northern Ireland

UTV: No variations

---

Northern Ireland

---

Scotland

BBC One: 10.00 - 10.30am The Sunday Show 11.35pm Sportscene: Premiership Highlights 12.20am FILM: The Nice Guys (2016) 2.15 - 6.00am BBC News

11.10am Red Bull Soapbox Race

1.10pm Wagging Rights 2.10

Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

3.30 Would I Lie to You? 5.25 Explore

6.30 Guy Martin: The World's Fastest Van? 8.00 Wagging Rights. The celebrities take on Ball Sports, teaching their dogs to put balls in a basket 9.00 Have I Got a Bit More News for You. With Maisie Adam and Lewis Goodall 10.00 QI 10.40 Mock the Week 12.00 Live at the Apollo 1.00am QI XL 2.00 Will & Ralf Should Know Better 3.00-4.00am Dave Gorman: Modern Life Is Goodish

---

U&Dave

BBC Scotland: 7.00pm Reporting

Scotland: News at Seven 7.15

Sportscene: Premiership Highlights 8.00

Pilgrimage: The Road to the Scottish Isles 9.00 Highland Cops 10.00 Still Game 10.30 Scot Squad 11.00 Breaking the News 11.30 The Sunday Show midnight Close

11.35am The Voice UK 12.50pm Celebrity Catchphrase 1.50 FILM: The Croods (2013) Animated comedy with the voice of Nicolas Cage 3.45 FILM: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) Harry Potter prequel starring Eddie Redmayne 6.20 FILM: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) Fantasy adventure starring Eddie Redmayne 9.00 Big Brother. A group of contestants live under 24-hour surveillance, hoping to win a cash prize 10.00 Big Brother: The Group Chat 11.05 Family Guy 12.05am American Dad! 1.05 Plebs 1.35 G'wed 2.10 Piglets 2.35 Unwind with ITV 3.00-6.00am Teleshopping

---

Discovery

---

Challenge

Noon Cash Trapped 1.00pm Tenable 2.00 Bridge of Lies 3.00 The Chase 5.00 The Chase Celebrity Special 7.00 The Chase 9.00 The Chase Celebrity Special. With Dani Harmer, Eddie Hall, Chemmy Alcott and Alex Horne 10.00 The Chase 11.00 Bullseye 2.00-4.00am The Chase

---

Quest

Noon The Yorkshire Auction House 1.00pm The Repair Shop 2.00 The Repair Shop 3.00 The Repair Shop 5.00 The Yorkshire Auction House 6.00 The Derbyshire Auction House 7.00 Secret Life of the Auction House. Queen Victoria's belongings go under the hammer 8.00 The Repair Shop 10.00 The Repair Shop. The team give a beloved clarinet its tune back 11.00 The Repair Shop 1.00am Richard Hammond's Workshop 3.00-4.00am Wheeler Dealers: Dream Car

Noon Building Off the Grid 3.00pm

Alaska: Homestead Rescue 9.00

Barnwood Builders. Mark Bowe returns to some of his favourite completed builds 10.00 In the Eye of the Storm

11.00 Kindig Customs 2.00am

Wheeler Dealers World Tour 3.00-5.00am Alaska: Homestead Rescue

---

PBS America

11.50am Nazi's Diplomats: Dancing with the Devil 1.00pm Thirties in Colour: Countdown to War 4.00 Nazi's Diplomats: Dancing with the Devil 5.15 WWII in Colour: Road to Victory 10.50 Nazi's Diplomats: Dancing with the Devil 12.00 Women of World War II: More Untold Stories 1.15am Weathered: Earth's Extremes 2.00-6.00am Teleshopping

---

Sky History

11.30am Pawn Stars 12.30pm The Lost Women Spies 7.00 Britain's Murder Map with Vicky McClure and Jonny Owen 9.00 Heist: Robbing the Bank of England 11.00 Mafia: Behind the Bloodshed 12.00 What on Earth? 1.50-4.25am Pawn Stars

---

Sky Documentaries

11.30am Seen & Heard: The History of Black Television 1.20pm Wilder 3.00 I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not 5.00 FILM: JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (2021) Documentary examining the assassination of US president John F Kennedy 7.15 FILM: When We Were Kings (1996) Oscar-winning documentary, by Leon Gast 9.00 I'm Carl Lewis! 11.00 Nike's Big Bet 12.40am Stasi FC 2.30-4.45am Mr Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown

---

Sky One

11.45am The Simpsons 12.15pm

FILM: Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) Stop-motion animated adventure with the voice of George Clooney 2.00 Superstore 4.30 Formula 1 5.30 Ted's Notebook 6.00 Agatha Raisin 8.00 Rob & Romesh vs Team GB: Winter Special. The duo head to the World Curling Championships in Fredericton, Canada 9.00 FILM: London Has Fallen (2016) Action thriller starring Gerard Butler 11.00 Saturday Night Live 12.30am Romesh: Can't Knock the Hustle 2.00-4.00am The Force: North-East

---

Great! Mystery

11.10am Hailey Dean Mysteries 1.00pm Murder, She Wrote 9.00 FILM: Ruby Herring Mysteries: Her Last Breath (2019) Thriller starring Taylor Cole 9.56 Good News on GREAT!. An uplifting round-up of good news stories 10.01 FILM: Ruby Herring Mysteries: Her Last Breath (2019) Thriller starring Taylor Cole 10.50 FILM: Ruby Herring Mysteries: Prediction Murder (2020) Crime mystery starring Taylor Cole 11.46 Good News on GREAT! 11.51 FILM: Ruby Herring Mysteries: Prediction Murder (2020) Crime mystery starring Taylor Cole 12.45am FILM: A Housekeeper's Revenge (2016) 1.41

Good News on GREAT! 1.46 FILM: A Housekeeper's Revenge (2016) 2.25 FILM: Killer Ending (2018) 3.50-4.00am Good News on GREAT! Extra

---

Sky Cinema Premiere

11.15am Mother's Pride (2026) 1.00pm Hitpig! (2024) Animated comedy, voiced by Jason Sudeikis 2.35 The Fix (2026) Thriller starring Zachary Levi and Liam Neeson 4.50 Better Man (2024) Robbie Williams biopic starring Jonno Davies 7.15 Mother's Pride (2026) Comedy starring Martin Clunes and James Buckley 9.00 Mexicali (2026) Action thriller starring Bren Foster 11.00 One Last Shot (2026) Action thriller starring Scott Adkins 12.45am Cold Storage (2026) 2.25-4.30am Barron's Cove (2026)

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Sky Sports Main Event

11.00am Live EFL 1.00pm Live Super Sunday. Crystal Palace v Nottingham Forest (kick-off 2.00pm) 4.00 Live Super Sunday, Liverpool v Manchester City (kick-off 4.30pm) 7.30 Live NFL. Green Bay Packers v Chicago Bears (kick-off 6.00pm) 9.15 Live NFL. Seattle Seahawks v San Francisco 49ers (kick-off 9.25pm). Coverage of the week five match from Lumen Field 12.30am NBC's FNIA 1.10-4.45am Live NFL. Atlanta Falcons v Baltimore

Ravens (kick-off 1.20am). Coverage of the week five match from Mercedes-Benz Stadium

Sky Sports Premier League

Noon Super Sunday Matchday 1.00pm Live Super Sunday. Hull City v Everton (kick-off 2.00pm) 4.00 Live Super Sunday. Liverpool v Manchester City (kick-off 4.30pm) 8.00 Lost Grounds 8.30 Antiguoko K.E.: The Club That Conquered The Premier League 9.15 SNF 9.45 PL Greatest Games 10.00 Premier League Highlights 1.00am SNF 1.30 Premier League Highlights 3.00-4.00am PL Greatest Games

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TNT Sports 1

11.15am Live: Serie A. Como v AS Roma (kick-off 11.30am) 1.30pm Sign Up - Into Football 2.15 Original Documentary 2.30 Live: The Gallagher PREM. Exeter Chiefs v Newcastle Red Bulls (kick-off 3.00pm) 5.30 The Gallagher PREM 7.15 Groundbreaking 7.30 Live: Serie A. Cagliari v Juventus (kick-off 7.45pm) 9.45 Groundbreaking 10.00 Uefa Champions League Magazine 10.30 Uefa Champions League - Classics 11.00 The Gallagher PREM 12.00 The Breakdown 12.30am MLB Highlights 1.00-4.30am Live MLB

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BBC News

Noon BBC News 1.30pm The Travel Show 2.00 BBC News 2.30 Tech Now 3.00 BBC News 4.30 Global Eye 5.00 BBC News 8.30 Newscast 9.00 BBC News 11.30 AI Decoded 12.00 BBC News 12.30am Global Eye 1.00 BBC News 1.30 Premier League 2.00 Newsday 2.30 Business Today 2.45 BBC Sport 3.00 Newsday 3.30 Business Today 3.45-4.00am BBC Sport

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GB News

11.00am Sunday with Michael Portillo

1.00pm The Weekend 3.00 Nana

Akua 6.00 The Camilla Tominey Show

7.00 Free Speech Nation 9.00 Alex

Armstrong Tonight 11.00 Alex

Armstrong Tonight Late Edition 12.00

The Late Show Live 3.00-5.00am

Alex Armstrong Tonight

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Sky News

Noon Sky News 1.30pm Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips 2.00 Sky News: Today 4.30 Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips 5.00 Sky News 7.30 Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips 8.00 Sky News 8.30 UK Tonight Highlights 9.00 Sky News 9.30 The World with Yalda Hakim 10.00 The Wrap with Gillian Joseph 12.00-6.00am Sky News

STV: 3.50 - 5.05am Unwind with STV

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Wales

BBC One: 10.00 - 10.30am Politics

Wales 11.30 - 12.00 Back in the Day

BBC Two: No variations

ITV1 Wales: No variations

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ITVI Regions

No variations

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S4C

6.00am Cyw 9.00 Yr Ynys 10.00 Athrawon 11.00 3 Lle 11.30 Y Sin 12.00 Y Sin 12.30pm Hanner Marathon Caerdydd 2026 1.30 Taclo'r Ty 2.00 Taith Bywyd 3.00 Y Wal 3.55 Ffermio 4.25 Clwb Rygbi URC 6.10 Pobol y Cwm Omnibws 7.15 Newyddion S4C a'r Tywydd 7.30 Dechrau Canu Dechrau Canmol 8.00 Yr Actor a'r Eicon 9.00 Cleddau 10.00 Am Le i Fyw 11.00 - 11.35pm Cymry ar Gynfas

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Forecast

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General situation

Clouds spreading from the southwest across the United Kingdom today, with sunny spells mainly north of Wales. Showery spells in southern England with patchy valley mist in central Scotland.

London, Cent S

England, Channel Is,

SW England, E

England, SE England,

E Anglia, Midlands:

Sunny spells in the

morning before

showery spells spread

north today. Max 57-62F

(14-17C). A light to gentle

southerly wind. Rainy

periods west tonight.

Min 46-59F (8-15C).

NW England, Lake

Dist, IoM, Cent N

England, NE England:

Increasing cloud today.

Max 42-60F (6-16C). A

light and variable wind.

Clear spells tonight.

Min 37-52F (3-11C).

Wales:

Showery spells south today. Max 44-61F (7-16C). A gentle and variable wind. Rainy spells tonight. Min

42-57F (6-14C).

◆ N Ireland:

Increasing cloud today.

Max 49-58F (9-14C). A gentle SE wind. Rainy spells tonight. Min 44-55F (7-13C).

◆ SW Scotland, NW Scotland, Glasgow, Cent Highlands, Argyll, W Isles, SE Scotland, NE Scotland, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Moray Firth, Orkney, Shetland:

Sunny spells and dry for most today. Max 38-56F (3-13C). A light to moderate S wind.

Showery spells tonight. Min 32-52F (0-11C).

British readings Last night's report for 24 hours to 4pm - \*estimated readings | Sun hrs | Rain in | Max/Min °C | Daytime weather | Isles of Scilly | 3.4" | 0.06 | 17" 8" | showers | Jersey | 2.9" | 0.09 | 17" 13" | showers | Keswick | 1.3" | 0.58 | 15" 8" | rain | Kew Gardens | 5.8" | 0.03 | 20" 9" | p/cloudy | King's Lynn | 1.9" | 0.12 | 20" 9" | rain | Leeds | 2.9" | 0.57 | 16" 9" | rain | Leek | 1.9" | 0.59 | 15" 8" | rain | Leominster | 2.2" | 0.05 | 17" 9" | showers | Lincoln | 3.2" | 0.10 | 16" 9" | showers | Liverpool | 1.3" | 0.47 | 15" 9" | rain | London | 2.7" | 0.03 | 19" 9" | showers | Manchester | 2.7" | 0.47 | 15" 9" | rain | Middlesbrough | 3.1" | 0.04 | 16" 9" | showers | Newcastle | 6.1" | 0.00 | 15" 8" | p/cloudy | Newquay | 3.4" | 0.00 | 16" 13" | cloudy | Nottingham | 2.0" | 0.44 | 17" 9" | rain | Orkney | 0.0" | 1.07 | 12" 8" | rain | Oxford | 2.9" | 0.06 | 18" 8" | showers | Perth | 3.1" | 0.17 | 14" 7" | rain | Peterborough | 6.6" | 0.00 | 18" 8" | p/cloudy | Plymouth | 4.6" | 0.00 | 17" 12" | p/cloudy | Portsmouth* | 3.1" | 0.08" 19" 8" | showers | Prestwick | 0.9" | 0.14 | 13" 10" | rain | Sun hrs | Rain in | Max/Min °C | Daytime weather | Aberdeen | 8.8* | 0.00 | 14* | 8* | p/cloudy | Aberystwyth | 1.3* | 0.22 | 16* | 11* | rain | Antrim | 3.0* | 0.22 | 13* | 9* | rain | Aviemore | 1.0* | 0.83 | 11* | 6* | rain | Barnstaple | 2.5* | 0.07 | 18* | 11* | showers | Barrow-in-Furns. | 3.0* | 0.22 | 15* | 11* | rain | Basingstoke | 7.4* | 0.00 | 18* | 8* | p/cloudy | Bedford | 5.6* | 0.06 | 19* | 8* | p/cloudy | Belfast | 5.8* | 0.02 | 14* | 10* | p/cloudy | Berwick | 4.1* | 0.07 | 13* | 8* | showers | Birmingham | 6.5* | 0.00 | 18* | 10* | p/cloudy | Bodmin | 2.4* | 0.00 | 15* | 12* | cloudy | Bournemouth | 4.0* | 0.00 | 19* | 9* | p/cloudy | Braintree | 3.8* | 0.05 | 19* | 9* | showers | Brecon | 5.3* | 0.00 | 16* | 9* | p/cloudy | Bridlington | 2.2* | 0.05 | 16* | 9* | showers | Brighton | 3.1* | 0.05 | 18* | 9* | showers | Bristol | 3.2* | 0.04 | 18* | 9* | showers | Camborne | 3.8* | 0.00 | 16* | 12* | cloudy | Cardiff | 7.6* | 0.00 | 17* | 11* | p/cloudy | Carlisle | 1.2* | 0.21 | 14* | 8* | rain | Catterick | 3.3* | 0.14 | 17* | 8* | rain | Cheltenham | 5.1* | 0.03 | 18* | 9* | p/cloudy | Sun hrs | Rain in | Max/Min °C | Daytime weather | Chester | 1.6* | 0.44 | 14* | 10* | rain | Coventry | 2.2* | 0.03 | 18* | 9* | showers | Doncaster | 4.1* | 0.08 | 16* | 9* | showers | Dover | 2.8* | 0.09 | 19* | 11* | showers | Dundee | 2.3* | 0.15 | 14* | 7* | rain | Eastbourne | 5.5* | 0.02 | 19* | 10* | p/doudy | Edinburgh | 5.0* | 0.00 | 14* | 8* | p/doudy | Epsom | 3.7* | 0.10 | 18* | 9* | showers | Falmouth | 2.1* | 0.00 | 16* | 12* | doudy | Farnborough | 2.5* | 0.09 | 19* | 8* | showers | Fort William | 0.2* | 1.76 | 13* | 8* | rain | Glasgow | 2.7* | 0.28 | 13* | 8* | rain | Great Malvern | 3.4* | 0.05 | 18* | 9* | showers | Grimsby | 3.1* | 0.15 | 16* | 9* | showers | Guernsey | 0.9* | 0.45 | 16* | 13* | rain | Hereford | 2.7* | 0.07 | 17* | 9* | showers | High Wycombe | 5.8* | 0.02 | 18* | 8* | p/doudy | Holyhead | 2.1* | 0.16 | 14* | 11* | rain | Huddersfield | 2.6* | 0.36 | 14* | 8* | rain | Ipswich | 2.0* | 0.23 | 20* | 8* | rain | Isle of Man | 5.0* | 0.00 | 14* | 11* | p/doudy | Isle of Skye | 0.9* | 0.92 | 12* | 9* | rain | Isle of Wight | 2.8* | 0.04 | 18* | 8* | showers | Atlantic front

Facts & figures | Temperature (C) | Last week | Last month | Last year | London | 15.0 | 17.1 | 14.6 | Manchester | 12.4 | 14.4 | 12.3 | Edinburgh | 10.9 | 13.0 | 10.5 | Belfast | 10.4 | 13.2 | 10.9 | Noon today: Dry for most by midweek in central Europe as high pressure builds over France and the Iberian Peninsula. | Rainfall (ins) | Last week | Last month | Last year | London | 0.72 | 2.07 | 18.35 | Manchester | 1.94 | 4.28 | 38.69 | Edinburgh | 0.16 | 2.69 | 21.05 | Belfast | 0.73 | 2.23 | 23.40 | Sun & moon (Greenwich) | Sunshine (hrs) | Last week | Last month | Last year | London | 29.8 | 195.0 | 1933.2 | Manchester | 28.8 | 143.4 | 1625.1 | Edinburgh | 40.2 | 148.6 | 1478.3 | Belfast | 26.1 | 120.1 | 1338.8 | Last week's extremes

Lighting up | Sun rises | 0719 | Sun sets | 1817 | Moon rises | 0823 | Moon sets | 1803 | First quarter | Oct 18 | High water Source: © Crown copyright. All rights reserved | Aberdeen | 1816 to 0736 | Belfast | 1836 to 0748 | Birmingham | 1822 to 0728 | London | 1817 to 0720 | Manchester | 1822 to 0730 | Penzance | 1839 to 0739 | Sun hrs | Rain in | Max/Min °C | Daytime weather | Ramsgate | 2.8" | 0.07 | 19" | 11" | showers | Rhyl | 1.8" | 0.52 | 14" | 11" | rain | Rugby | 5.8" | 0.03 | 18" | 9" | p/cloudy | Salisbury | 3.6" | 0.07 | 18" | 8" | showers | Scunthorpe | 3.0" | 0.22 | 17" | 7" | rain | Sheffield | 2.3 | 0.08 | 16 | 9 | showers | Shetland | 3.9" | 0.00 | 12" | 8" | cloudy | Shrewsbury | 3.2" | 0.00 | 17" | 9" | cloudy | Skegness | 5.0" | 0.03 | 17" | 9" | p/cloudy | Southampton | 3.1" | 0.24 | 18" | 6" | rain | Southend-on-Sea | 5.7" | 0.00 | 19" | 9" | p/cloudy | Stockport | 1.9" | 0.52 | 16" | 9" | rain | Stornoway | 2.2" | 0.50 | 13" | 8" | rain | Swansea | 2.0" | 0.04 | 17" | 11" | showers | Swindon | 3.0" | 0.02 | 17" | 8" | cloudy | Thirsk | 1.3" | 0.02 | 17" | 10" | cloudy | Tiree | 1.7" | 0.14 | 13" | 9" | rain | Weymouth | 2.4" | 0.04 | 17" | 9" | showers | Whitehaven | 1.7" | 0.47 | 13" | 10" | rain | Windermere | 0.0" | 1.14 | 14" | 9" | rain | Worcester | 2.9" | 0.04 | 18" | 9" | showers | Yeovil | 0.5" | 0.21 | 19" | 11" | rain | York | 3.4" | 0.09 | 17" | 9" | showers | High water Source: © Crown copyright, AI r | Aberdeen | 0108 | 4.5m | 1335 | 4.3m | Belfast | 1122 | 3.4m | 2333 | 3.6m | Cardiff | 0711 | 12.5m | 1928 | 12.6m | Dover | 1120 | 6.9m | 2340 | 6.7m | ---

Sea forecast | Falmouth | 0519 | 5.2m | 1734 | 5.3m | Harwich | -- | -- | 1150 | 4.1m | Holyhead | 1025 | 5.6m | 2239 | 5.8m | Hull | 0611 | 7.8m | 1840 | 7.5m | S North Sea: A gentle to moderate west-northwesterly wind today. Seas will be moderate. Visibility will be good.

Dover Strait, English Channel: A light to moderate west-northwesterly wind today. Seas will be rough on the east and the west. Visibility will be good.

St. George's Channel: A moderate to strong southerly wind today. Seas will be very rough. Visibility will be good.

Irish Sea: A gentle to moderate southwesterly wind today. Seas will be very rough. Visibility will be good. | UK | Europe | Warmest | Cavendish, Tues 24.3C (75.7F) | Catania (Italy), Fri 35.0C (95.0F) | Coldest | Braemar, Wed -3.2C (26.2F) | Muonio (Finland), Fri -9.9C (14.2F) | Wettest | Kinlochewe, Mon 1.65in. | Cabo Penas (Spain), Sun 3.05in. | Liverpool | 1116 | 9.4m | 2329 | 9.6m | London | 0153 | 7.1m | 1406 | 7.1m | Portsmouth | 1137 | 4.8m | 2345 | 4.7m | Southampton | 0057 | 4.4m | 1116 | 4.6m | World readings

9 Abbreviated quote in genuine performance (7)

10 Model leader in perfect Spanish kingdom (7)

Prize Crossword 3,390 telegraph.co.uk/puzzles

12 Snake destroyed diarist's plant (10)

1 Permanently ahead of pace too (3,4,7)

11 Tiny bit, first half of 7 Down, say? (4)

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