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The Conservatives argued about tax and HS2 at their conference in the former Manchester Central railway station. At the end, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, announced cancellation of the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2. He promised £36 billion for a ‘Network North’ and for transport outside London (where there would be a ‘Euston development zone’). He proposed raising the legal age for smoking by one year every year. He declared his values as ‘service, family, work’ and said: ‘A man is a man and a woman is a woman.’ He wore a bracelet saying ‘Dada’. In her own speech, Akshata Murty, his wife, said ‘aspiration’ summed him up. Lightning struck a food waste recycling tank at Cassington, Oxfordshire, causing a huge explosion.

Junior doctors and consultants belonging to the BMA union went on strike for three days at the same time. Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, announced a ban on trans women on women’s wards. Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, said mobile phones should be banned from classrooms. Sir Nicholas Coleridge will become Provost of Eton in 2024. Dame Sharon White announced her resignation, from February 2025, as chair of John Lewis. From January, a typical household is expected to pay £1,996 annually for energy – less than the annual rate of £2,074 in the third quarter of 2023, but up from the £1,923 in the fourth; the forecast was by the usually reliable Cornwall Insight. A standard ticket for Glastonbury next year will cost £360.

The RMT union called off a Tube strike, but Aslef brought out train drivers nationally. A new system for moving goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland came into operation; ‘Not for EU’ labelling appeared on some food. Supplying plastic cutlery became illegal in England. A cheap malaria vaccine developed at the University of Oxford was recommended for use by the World Health Organisation. Sir Michael Gambon, the actor, died aged 82. Someone planted a sapling near the felled sycamore by Hadrian’s Wall, but the National Trust dug it up again.

Abroad

More than 100,000 people had fled the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, almost all the Armenians living there, since Azerbaijan attacked it on 19 September. Allies of Ukraine were running out of ammunition to give it, Britain and Nato warned. The pro-Moscow Smer party led by Robert Fico, a former prime minister, won Slovakia’s parliamentary elections; it had promised an end to military support for Ukraine. The British company BAE Systems won a £3.95 billion contract to build a new generation of Australian submarines under the Aukus security pact. Demand for oil would continue to grow this year, according to the cartel of 23 oil-exporting countries called Opec+. Turkey carried out air strikes on Kurdish targets in northern Iraq, after a bomb was set off in Ankara by allies of the banned PKK Kurdish rebel group. The main opposition leader in the Seychelles, Patrick Herminie, was charged with witchcraft but released on bail.

The United States government avoided a federal shutdown after Congress passed a short-term funding bill; but it excluded provision for $6 billion in aid for Ukraine. Kevin McCarthy was voted out as the House Speaker, 216-210. Senator Dianne Feinstein died aged 90; the Governor of California said he would appoint a black woman as interim replacement until an election could be held for the remainder of the senator’s term. Donald Trump, the former American president, appeared in the Supreme Court of New York for a civil trial, accused of inflating prices of his properties to secure better loans and insurance deals. A former gang member Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis, 60, was indicted with the murder in 1996 of the rapper Tupac Shakur, then aged 25. All models of Onewheel electric skateboards were recalled after America’s Consumer Product Safety Commission highlighted four reported deaths involving the machines between 2019 and 2021.

The UN sent a police mission led by Kenya to Haiti to counter gangs. The Pope said it might be all right for a priest to bless a same-sex couple, as long as this did ‘not convey a mistaken concept of marriage’. His reply, in a series of answers to dubia by a group of old-fashioned cardinals, came on the eve of a synod in Rome examining how the Catholic Church could become more ‘synodal’. At least 13 people died in a fire at the Fonda Milagros nightclub in the Spanish city of Murcia. Some people complained that the new iPhone 15 became too hot to touch, especially when playing the video game Asphalt 9.        CSH