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Nadhim Zahawi, minister without portfolio and chairman of the Conservative party, was asked to explain how a penalty formed part of a £5 million tax payment he had made. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, asked Sir Laurie Magnus, his newly appointed ethics adviser, to examine whether Mr Zahawi had broken the code of conduct on ministerial behaviour. The appointment of Richard Sharp as chairman of the BBC was under review by William Shawcross, the Commissioner of Public Appointments, after it became known that in 2020, before his appointment, he had contacted Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, about an offer of a loan of £800,000 by Sam Blyth, an old friend of Mr Sharp’s, to Boris Johnson, then PM.

The government borrowed £27.4 billion last month, the highest sum for December since 1993. Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, an Afghan asylum seeker convicted this week of murdering a man in the street in Bournemouth, turned out to have entered Britain giving his age as 14 when he was 18, having been convicted of drug-dealing in Italy and having shot dead two people in Serbia. About 200 children, mostly Albanian teenage boys, remain missing from hotels housing asylum seekers, Robert Jenrick, the minister for immigration, told MPs; of 4,600 child asylum seekers who had arrived in the UK since 2021, 440 had gone missing and only half had returned. Isla Bryson, 31, a transgender woman, was found guilty in Glasgow of raping two women in 2016 and 2019, before she changed gender; she was sent to a women’s prison in Stirling. Ambulance staff went on strike again. A fireman was injured in a fire at the former Jenners department store in Edinburgh.

The House of Bishops of the Church of England is to present to the General Synod in February a proposal for prayers of blessing in church for civil marriages between couples of the same sex; the C of E is prohibited by law from marrying people of the same sex in church. A fortnight after it was hit by a ransomware attack, the Royal Mail was still advising people not to send parcels abroad. The High Court overturned the government’s refusal to allow a company called Aquind to build an electricity link between Hampshire and Normandy. The National Grid paid households to turn off appliances at peak times during the cold spell. The Office of Rail and Road ordered Avanti West Coast to put tickets on sale more than a few days in advance.

Abroad

Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, decided after some delay to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine, and allow other countries to do the same. Mateusz Morawiecki, the Prime Minister of Poland, had urged Germany to give it formal permission to export the German-made tanks to Ukraine. At a meeting of more than 50 allied countries on 20 January, Germany had come under pressure to co-operate. Boris Johnson paid a visit to Kyiv. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine sacked four deputy ministers and the regional governors of Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Sumy and Kherson. The British nationals Chris Parry and Andrew Bagshaw had been killed while ‘attempting humanitarian evacuation’ in east Ukraine, a statement by Parry’s family said. The Estonian ambassador in Russia was ordered to leave the country by 7 February; Estonia reciprocated by asking the Russian ambassador to leave by the same date. Turkey cancelled a visit from the Swedish defence minister after a Quran was burnt outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm; Sweden has applied to join Nato.

Eleven men and women were shot dead at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park near Los Angeles, California, on the eve of the Chinese new year and the killer, Huu Can Tran, aged 72, shot himself as police moved in. Two days later Chunli Zhao, 67, drove to a police station after seven Chinese-American farm workers were shot dead at Half Moon Bay, California. On a tour of Africa, Janet Yellen, the US Treasury Secretary, called China a barrier to the resolution of Zambia’s debt crisis. A Chinese battery company, Catl, won a bid to develop Bolivia’s lithium reserves. Microsoft confirmed a multi-billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, a machine designed to converse with human beings, write a student essay or compose music. Jacinda Ardern made her last appearance as prime minister of New Zealand after suddenly resigning; she was succeeded by Chris Hipkins. A 600 square-mile iceberg broke away from the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica into the Weddell Sea.