Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, in his speech to the Labour party conference in Liverpool, said that ‘if we take tough long-term decisions now’ Britain would much more quickly reach the ‘light at the end of this tunnel’. He was cheered when he promised to return the railways to public ownership and restore workplace rights to unions and workers. But he insisted that ‘if we want cheaper electricity, we need new pylons over ground otherwise the burden on taxpayers is too much’. He recovered from a fluff when, talking of Gaza, he called ‘for the return of the sausages – the hostages’.
Sir Keir hoped to counteract recent difficulties. He had earlier asserted that he was ‘completely in control’ during a row among government advisers about Sue Gray, the chief of staff at Downing Street, and her salary of £170,000 (more than the Prime Minister’s), a sum leaked to the BBC. She did not attend the Labour conference. Government economic gloom and a warning that the Budget in October would be ‘painful’ were blamed for a fall in consumer confidence; GfK’s long- standing Consumer Confidence Barometer tumbled. There remained in the air the government’s decision not to pay many pensioners a winter fuel allowance. Most embarrassing was Sir Keir’s need to announce that he would no longer accept donations to pay for his clothes, and nor would Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, or Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had declared more
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than £18,000 for clothes and spectacles from Lord Alli, a Labour peer, but they had declared thousands of pounds in work clothing to be general office support. Asked about hospitality tickets to Arsenal matches worth well over £10,000 since December 2019, he said: ‘I can’t go into the stands because of security reasons.’ Among gifts for Lady Starmer were tickets to see Taylor Swift twice this summer. For Sir Keir’s conference speech she borrowed a red dress by Edeline Lee retailing for £1,105.
In the seven days to 23 September, 1,537 migrants arrived in England in small boats. Nurses in England voted against the government’s award of a 5.5 per cent pay rise. Five women said that they had been raped by Mohamed Al Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, who died in 2023, and many more complainants came forward after a BBC documentary. Peter Jay, the financial journalist, ambassador to Washington (thanks to his father-in- law James Callaghan) and chief of staff to Robert Maxwell, died aged 87.
Abroad Israel attacked southern Lebanon with air strikes. Britain prepared the evacuation of its citizens. An Israeli strike on Beirut destroyed a high-rise building and killed Ibrahim Aqil, a commander in the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, and another commander, Ahmed Wahbi. In another strike on Beirut, Israel said it had killed Ibrahim Muhammad al-Qubaisi, a commander of Hezbollah’s missile system. In one day, Lebanon reported 492 killed. A week earlier, Israel had made an official war goal the safe return of residents to northern Israel into which Hezbollah rockets had been fired for months. The day after thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah had exploded, walkietalkies exploded. The total killed in those operations was said by Lebanon to be 37 and the wounded more than 3,400.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visited the United States seeking support. Ukrainian drones destroyed two Russian arsenals in the Tver and Krasnodar regions of Russia three days after destroying an ammunition store at Toropets. Russia advanced in the Donetsk region. Two Russians, Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, left the International Space Station after 374 days, a record stay. The Social Democrats of Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz managed to win an election in Brandenburg by 30.9 per cent of the vote to the far-right’s Alternative für Deutschland’s 29.2 per cent. The left-wing Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected President of Sri Lanka. A leading economist in China, Zhu Hengpeng, has not been seen since April after criticising Xi Jinping’s policies.
The Democratic Republic of Congo released 1,685 ‘seriously ill’ prisoners from Makala Prison in Kinshasa, where 129 died in an attempted jailbreak at the beginning of September. Swiss police arrested several people on suspicion of being accessories to suicide after someone died inside a capsule designed to suffocate with gas. Amazon ordered its staff back to the office five days a week. CSH
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