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Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, told police that they must investigate every theft and follow all reasonable leads to catch criminals; the Police Federation of England and Wales said forces were already ‘stretched beyond human limits’. Home Office figures showed that only 3.9 per cent of residential burglaries resulted in someone being charged, and for thefts from the person it was 0.9 per cent. Hartwig Fischer resigned as the director of the British Museum and Jonathan Williams stepped aside as his deputy when it became clear that information about 1,500 or so missing objects had been wrongly dismissed; police continued investigations. Two men were arrested on suspicion of arson in connection with the fire that gutted the Crooked House pub at Himley, Staffordshire, on 5 August. Six policemen were bitten at the Notting Hill Carnival.

The government set about (by an amendment to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill) changing the law that prohibits new housing if it raises the level of nutrients in waterways. The Ultra Low Emission Zone was extended to every London borough, meaning a £12.50 daily fee for the drivers of many cars – up to 700,000, some said. The number of people in Scotland to die from conditions caused by alcohol rose by another 2 per cent last year, to 1,276, the highest since 2008; Elena Whitham, the minister responsible, said: ‘If we didn’t have minimum unit pricing in place, I think that the deaths that we would be seeing today would have been higher.’

Nadine Dorries at last applied, with success, to oust Boris Johnson as Crown Steward and Bailiff of the three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham, thereby vacating her seat in the House of Commons after announcing that she would do so in June. She thought it a good occasion to publish an open letter to Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, accusing him of running ‘a zombie parliament’. ‘You flashed your gleaming smile in your Prada shoes and Savile Row suit from behind a camera,’ she wrote, ‘but you just weren’t listening.’ His catalogue of failures involved a good mix of metaphors: ‘The bonfire of EU legislation, swerved. The Windsor framework agreement, a dead duck, brought into existence by shady promises.’ James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, flew to China. Thousands of air travellers were delayed after a ‘technical issue’ on Bank Holiday Monday made National Air Traffic Services limit the number of planes landing.

Abroad

All the world wondered exactly how a private jet carrying three crew and seven passengers – including Yevgeny Prigozhin, the controller of the Wagner mercenary force and Dmitry Utkin, its co-founder – came to fall out of the sky over the Tver region between Moscow and St Petersburg. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said: ‘We are not involved in this situation, that’s for sure. I think everyone is aware of who is involved.’ President Vladimir Putin of Russia sent ‘most sincere condolences to the families’. Prigozhin, he said, ‘was a man with a difficult fate, and he made serious mistakes in life’, but had striven ‘for the common cause these past months’. According to the BBC, British defence sources said that Russia’s FSB domestic intelligence agency was most likely to have targeted the plane. Russian missiles struck Kyiv; Ukrainian drones destroyed two military aircraft at Pskov airport, 200 miles from St Petersburg.

China’s huge property developer Evergrande announced a loss for the first six months of the year of £3.6 billion; in its first day since March last year of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange, the company lost 79 per cent of its value. After Israel revealed talks with Libya hosted by the Italian foreign minister, the Prime Minister of Libya, Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, suspended his foreign minister Najla al-Mangoush as protestors demonstrated. Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, had a three-year sentence for corruption suspended, but remained in prison on other charges.

Spain’s top criminal court opened an investigation into whether Luis Rubiales, the president of the Spanish football federation, by kissing the player Jenni Hermoso on the lips after the World Cup victory committed sexual assault. He was suspended by Fifa but his mother locked herself inside the church of the Divina Pastora at Motril, on hunger strike till he is cleared. An Australian surgeon removed a living three-inch red worm from the brain of a woman who had foraged Botany Bay greens infested with parasite eggs left by python droppings. CSH