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Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that, in taking part in a second American air attack on Houthi positions near Sanaa, Britain had ‘acted in line with international law, in self defence, and in response to an immediate threat’. This time the leader of the opposition had not been informed before the attack. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said: ‘We back this targeted action.’ Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the Foreign Secretary, set off to visit the Middle East. The Commons Procedure Committee decided to recommend that the Foreign Secretary should in general answer questions in the Commons by being summoned to the Bar of the House.

Sir Simon Clarke, the former chief secretary to the Treasury, said that the Conservatives ‘will be massacred unless they get rid of Rishi Sunak’. Others called the idea madness. Interest payments on government debt fell to £4 billion in December, £14.1 billion less than in December 2022. The quantity of goods bought in Britain fell 3.2 per cent between November and December. Tata Steel said it was cutting 2,800 jobs in Britain, 2,500 of them at Port Talbot, where only steel recycled from scrap will be produced in new arc furnaces costing £1.25 billion, of which the government will provide £500 million. In 2002, 15,706 asylum-seekers whose applications had remained unresolved after a year were allowed to work in Britain for 20 per cent less than the going rate in trades deemed to be short of workers, such as roofers, care workers and vets. Ofcom countenanced future postal deliveries on only three days a week.

The Covid Inquiry heard that all the WhatsApp messages belonging to Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister of Scotland, from the time of the pandemic, appeared to have been deleted. The UK Health Security Agency declared a national incident as cases of measles increased while 3.4 million children were unvaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella. The King went to hospital for treatment of a non-malignant enlarged prostate. The Princess of Wales stayed in hospital for a second week after abdominal surgery for a non-malignant condition. During reconstructive treatment for breast cancer, the Duchess of York was found to have malignant melanoma. Norfolk Police said it had not responded to a 999 call from a house in Costessey where four people were later found dead. A two-year-old boy was found to have died of starvation after his father died of a heart attack in a flat in Skegness; the flat was burgled after they were found.

Abroad

In the New Hampshire primaries, Donald Trump won convincingly over Nikki Haley, his sole surviving rival. In the Democrats’ primaries in New Hampshire, a party disagreement meant that President Joe Biden’s name was not on the ballot but he won on write-ins. Russell Cook, who has spent 278 days running 7,500 miles the length of Africa, found himself denied entry to Algeria to complete his endeavour.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard blamed Israel for an air attack, which it said killed five military advisers in Damascus, the Syrian capital. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, said that he would press on with the war in Gaza for months, ‘until complete victory’, asserting that Israel must have security control over all land west of the river Jordan. Joe Biden, after a telephone conversation with the Israeli leader, was asked if a two-state solution was impossible while Netanyahu was still in office, and replied: ‘No, it’s not.’ Israeli forces surrounded the city of Khan Younis, which had a population of 200,000. At least 25,490 people had been killed in the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Israel said that it had lost 24 soldiers on one day.

A Russian military aeroplane crashed in the Belgorod region; Russia said that it was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners on the way to an exchange. A Ukrainian drone set on fire an oil storage depot at Klintsy, 50 miles inside Russia, according to Russian officials. More drones caused an explosion at a gas export terminal near St Petersburg. Russia struck blocks of flats with missiles in Kyiv and Kharkhiv. China’s population fell to 1.409 billion – 2.08 million less than in 2022. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, inaugurated a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the city of Ayodhya, on the site of a 16th-century mosque torn down by Hindu mobs in 1992. A Japanese spacecraft landed on the moon but its batteries ran down after three hours.   CSH