Post-PM posts
David Cameron will not be the first former prime minister to serve as foreign secretary (which remarkably is only his second ministerial post).
– Sir Alec Douglas-Home served as Edward Heath’s foreign secretary between 1970 and 1974. The difference in his case is that he had renounced a peerage when he became prime minister, and sat in the Commons. Arthur Balfour, too, followed a spell as prime minister with that of foreign secretary, in which post he served between 1916 and 1919 under Lloyd George.
– Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain all served as Lord President of the Council after leaving No. 10. Baldwin managed to follow his spell as Lord President of the Council with a third term as prime minister – a feat which Cameron may or may not have ambitions to emulate.
– The last foreign secretary to serve from the Lords was Lord Carrington, appointed by Mrs Thatcher in 1979. He resigned after the Falklands invasion in 1982.
Numbers game
The organisers of the pro-Palestine march on Armistice Day claimed 800,000 had taken part; the police estimated 300,000. Some estimates for previous marches:
Nuclear disarmament, 22 October 1983 200,000 (police) 400,000 (organisers)
Countryside March, 21 September 2002 400,000 (police) 400,000 (organisers)
Stop the (Iraq) War, 15 February 2003 750,000 (police) 2m (organisers)
Anti-austerity, 26 March 2011 250,000 (police) 400,000 (organisers)
People’s vote, 23 March 2019 312,000-400,000 (Manchester Metropolitan University) 1m (organisers)
Testing on animals
How many animals are used for scientific/medical research?
– There were 2.76m procedures last year, a 10% fall on 2021 and the lowest since 2002. Some 96% of experiments were described as ‘non-recovery’, sub-threshold, mild or moderate; 4% were ‘severe’. The number of individual creatures used were:
Mice 596,800
Zebra fish 108,446
Rat 31,711
Fowl 5,344
Sheep 1,512
Frog/toad 1,155
Hamster 988
Cattle 648
Rabbit 616
Pig 544
Guinea pig 381
Beagle 76
Rhesus monkey 16
Cat 6
Source: Home Office
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