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Government ministers held short meetings with trade union representatives as strikes continued by ambulance drivers, teachers, bus drivers and driving test examiners. A bill was introduced to require some workers to provide a minimum level of service during strikes in the NHS, education, fire and rescue, border security, nuclear decommissioning and public transport. Evri, the courier formerly known as Hermes, said ‘Our service has not been as good as we would have liked’ as parcels were reported delayed or undelivered. James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, and Maros Sefcovic, a vice-president of the European Commission, held ‘cordial and constructive’ talks on Northern Ireland trade. Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen was suspended from the Commons for five days after breaching rules on paid lobbying, then lost the whip over comments about the Covid vaccine.

Even before its publication on 10 January, the Duke of Sussex’s memoir, Spare, provoked sharp intakes of breath when details were gleaned from a Spanish edition. He let it be known that he had killed 25 Taliban in Afghanistan. He explained how he first had sexual intercourse aged 17 in a field behind a pub. He admitted taking cocaine from the age of 17, cannabis at school and magic mushrooms, which made him feel that ‘only the truth existed’. He says that he and his brother begged their father not to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Queen. He says that during an argument at Nottingham Cottage, in the grounds of Kensington Palace, about Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, his brother ‘grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back.’

The government announced an ‘energy bills discount scheme’ for businesses from April, replacing the scheme that capped energy prices and had been expected to cost £18 billion over six months. Average petrol prices dropped below 150p a litre for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine. The average house price in the UK fell in December for the fourth month running, reducing the rise since December 2021 to 2 per cent. More than 650,000 deaths were registered in the United Kingdom last year, 9 per cent higher than in 2019 before Covid, although only about 38,000 deaths involved Covid in 2022, compared with more than 95,000 in 2020. A Cornish space mission failed when a rocket and satellites were lost over the Atlantic after a launch at Newquay from a converted Boeing 747.

Abroad

Russia was poised to capture the salt-mining town of Soledar in eastern Ukraine and thus to encircle Bakhmut. Two British men who had volunteered to help people evacuate from the front were reported missing on their way to Soledar. Russia claimed to have killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers in barracks in Kramatorsk, but Ukraine denied this. Britain was considering supplying a handful of Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine. Nikolai Patrushev, the Russian security council secretary, said that in Ukraine there was ‘a military confrontation between Russia and Nato, and above all the United States and Britain’.

In Henan, China’s third most populous province, 88 million people, nearly 90 per cent of the population, have now been infected with Covid, according to local health officials; more than two billion journeys in China are expected over the lunar new year this month. In Brasília thousands of protestors in Brazil football shirts and flags, angry at the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro, stormed Congress, the Presidential Palace and Supreme Court; 1,500 were arrested. Cardinal George Pell, who was acquitted of sexual abuse allegations when a conviction was quashed in 2020, died aged 81. King Constantine of Greece died aged 82.

The French government proposed raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030. Rain storms swept California, and residents of Montecito (where Oprah Winfrey and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have houses) were evacuated. The British-American online ‘influencer’ Andrew Tate lost a legal attempt to curtail his 30-day detention in Romania pending investigations into allegations of human trafficking and rape; he carried a copy of the Quran into court. The Democratic Republic of Congo withdrew from the 2023 Under-17 Africa Cup of Nations after 25 of its 40 players were found to be too old. CSH