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At the Labour party conference, cheerful in the hall but overshadowed by the war in Israel, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said that in government he would build 1.5 million homes and a host of ‘Labour new towns’. He wanted to spend £1.1 billion a year on higher overtime payments within NHS England to reduce waiting lists. A protestor poured glitter over him. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, also said Labour would ‘rebuild Britain’. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist,’ said Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Labour took Rutherglen and Hamilton West in a by-election that the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, called a ‘seismic night in Scotland’. Labour polled 17,845, to the Scottish National Party’s 8,399; the Conservative candidate lost his deposit. Labour doubled its Scottish seats to two. The swing to Labour was 20.4 per cent; the turnout was 37.2 per cent, against 66.5 per cent in the general election. Sir Keir said that the by-election campaigners ‘blew the doors off’, a mangled reference to a line from The Italian Job. Medway Council in Kent cancelled its Christmas lights to save money.

Metro Bank shares fell by 25 per cent in a day; it then said it had raised £325 million in new funding, as well as refinancing £600 million of debt. A man who went to Windsor Castle in 2021 with a crossbow to assassinate the Queen became the first person in Britain to be convicted of treason since 1981; Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, was sentenced to nine years in prison after treatment in a psychiatric hospital. One of Chail’s many exchanges with his chatbot girlfriend went: ‘I am an assassin.’ You are? ‘Yes.’ I’m impressed.

Rishi Sunak confirmed that the high-speed rail link HS2 would run to Euston station in London, but it became clear that the tunnel required from Old Oak Common would only be built through private investment. Flights from Luton were suspended when a multi-storey car park burnt down. The High Court declared it had no jurisdiction to hear a €145 million case brought by Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn against Juan Carlos, the ex-king of Spain, her former lover.

Abroad

Hundreds of gunmen from the Islamist political and armed group Hamas attacked southern Israel by surprise while thousands of rockets were launched from Gaza; on that day more than 1,200 were killed in Israel and more than 3,000 wounded. It took time for the scale of the attack to be clear. Of the dead in Israel, at least 260 were killed in an attack on a dance music festival in the Negev desert near the Gaza strip. At Kfar Aza, a kibbutz, dozens were murdered including infants. Shocking social media video came out of murders, bodies being mistreated by the terrorist attackers and women being taken captive; Israeli soldiers too were taken hostage, and many brought back to Gaza. The number of hostages exceeded 100. In retaliation, Israel struck Gaza from the air, killing about 370 in 24 hours and wounding 2,200; more were killed as the action continued.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, said: ‘We are at war.’ ‘Israel has a right to defend itself and its people – full stop,’ said President Joe Biden of America on television. ‘We congratulate the Palestinian fighters,’ said Iran. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, ordered a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza, cutting off supplies of electricity, food, water and fuel. Hamas threatened to kill hostages and broadcast the images if the Israeli army carried out airstrikes on the Gaza Strip without warning the residents targeted. By the time Israel had secured the border with Gaza, it had found 1,500 bodies of Gazan invaders. Oil prices rose.

More than 1,000 people were killed by a powerful earthquake in western Afghanistan. A Russian missile killed at least 52 people at a funeral in the village of Hroza, south-east of Kharkiv in Ukraine, which had a population of 300. A drone attack from opposition-held territory on a Syrian military academy in Homs killed 116 at a graduation ceremony attended by cadets’ families. The US administration announced new border wall construction in Texas, funded when Donald Trump was president. In regional elections in Germany, the conservative CDU and right-wing AfD made gains. Chinese vessels blocked Filipino boats from supplying an outpost in the Second Thomas Shoal, in the contested Spratly Islands. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, villagers ate an elephant that had escaped from a wildlife park. CSH