Home

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, rearranged the deck chairs. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was broken up, and Grant Shapps, the Business Secretary, was put in charge of a new department: Energy Security and Net Zero. Kemi Badenoch, the Trade Secretary, added business to her portfolio, as the new Secretary of State for Business and Trade. Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, became Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport had its ‘Digital’ lopped off and was put under Lucy Frazer. The new Conservative party chairman is Greg Hands, reckoned a safe pair. The King told Royal Mail not to sell stamps with his image on them until it had used up those left over from Queen Elizabeth’s reign.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visited Britain to address parliament. Liz Truss, once prime minister, told Spectator TV in an interview that neither she nor her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had been informed at the time of their disastrous mini-Budget of the ‘tinderbox’ of pension-fund Liability Driven Investments and their perverse effects. Ms Truss spent 4,000 words in the Sunday Telegraph arguing: ‘I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment.’ David Carrick, a Metropolitan police officer who for two decades committed rape and other crimes against women, was jailed for a minimum of 30 years, sentenced to 36 life terms. Nurses, ambulance workers and university staff went on strike again. The Welsh government launched a new LGBTQ+ Action Plan to introduce a gender self-identification system like the one in a bill passed by the Scottish parliament but blocked by the government of the UK.

BP reported record annual profits, more than doubling to £23 billion. After the Bank of England raised interest rates to 4 per cent, members of the House of Commons Treasury select committee criticised Britain’s four largest banks for failing to pass on higher rates to savers. LNER is extending its trial of selling single tickets only; a single will always be half the cost of a return. Shakespeare’s Globe in London warned anyone going to its new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to expect ‘misogyny and racism’.

Abroad

Turkey and Syria were struck by a double earthquake, one of 7.8 magnitude striking near Gaziantep, Turkey, 100 miles north of Aleppo in Syria, in the early hours while people were asleep and another, of 7.5 magnitude, at about 1.30 p.m. After two days the number of dead had reached more than 8,000 and was continuing to rise. Thousands more were injured and millions affected. Relief efforts were hampered by a fire started by the earthquake at the Turkish port of Iskenderun. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, pardoned ‘tens of thousands’ of prisoners, including many linked to anti-government protests, but not any accused of spying, murder or destruction of state property. Pakistan’s media regulator temporarily banned Wikipedia for failing to remove content deemed blasphemous. General Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan from 2001 to 2008, died in self-imposed exile aged 79. Paco Rabanne, the perfumier and fashion designer, died aged 88.

US vessels set about collecting the debris of a 200ft Chinese surveillance balloon off South Carolina. President Joe Biden ordered it to be shot down after it had been spotted 15 miles above Montana. Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, cancelled a visit to China, which eventually said it regretted the incursion. The New York Post reported that migrants in New York City were being given bus tickets to Plattsburgh, New York State, 20 miles from the Canadian border, from which many made for Quebec to claim asylum. Nyack Middle School in New York apologised for serving an ‘inexcusably insensitive’ lunch of fried chicken and watermelon on the first day of Black History Month.

Tens of thousands of Russians were reported to have been deployed to eastern Ukraine for a spring offensive. The Pope called for peace during his visit to South Sudan with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Justin Welby. Omar Menéndez was elected mayor of the city of Puerto López in Ecuador despite having been murdered by drug gangsters shortly before the polls opened. CSH