The Week 1567

The Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox has raised £10m for the Children in Need charity by running the equivalent of five marathons in five days. Cox, 50, ran 135 miles from Northumberland’s Kielder Forest to Pudsey, Leeds. “It’s just the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said afterwards. “I’ve never known pain like it.” But she said she had been powered on by “the truck drivers honking their horns, the farmers stopping their work just to come and say hi”, and “so many amazing women”. Keepers at a wildlife sanctuary in Hayle, Cornwall, have decided to grant an escaped flamingo the freedom she appears to have craved. Despite having had her feathers clipped, four-month-old Frankie managed to fly away from Paradise Park on 2 November. To her owners’ amazement, a…

What happened Labour’s asylum shake-up Shabana Mahmood unveiled a string of tough measures this week, which she said amounted to the most significant reform of the asylum system since the Second World War. The plans are designed to make the UK less attractive to refugees and make it easier to remove failed asylum seekers. The Home Secretary’s proposals include: making refugee status temporary and subject to review every 30 months; extending the period refugees have to spend in the UK before they can apply for settled status, from five to up to 20 years; requiring asylum seekers with assets to contribute to their upkeep; deploying a new AI age-estimating tool to stop adult migrants falsely claiming to be children; and deporting families whose asylum claims have been rejected if they…

What happened In a series of media briefings, the Treasury signalled that Rachel Reeves will not be raising income tax in next week’s Budget after all. Over the previous fortnight, the Chancellor had strongly hinted that she was planning a manifesto-busting 2p rise in income tax; but last Thursday, sources let it be known that she had “ripped up” those plans, in favour of a range of smaller revenue-raising measures. They are expected to include a gambling levy, and a large increase in council tax on higher-value homes, possibly those worth over £1.5m. Treasury sources said the rethink had been prompted by the Office for Budget Responsibility revising the size of the hole in Britain’s public finances from £30bn to about £20bn. However, it caused Government borrowing costs to soar,…

Controversy of the week The Starmer drama “Keir Starmer’s Labour Party never promised much excitement,” said the FT. Its main appeal, after 14 years of Tory chaos, was the offer of “stability and grown-up government”. The events of the past week have “shredded” that “claim to quiet competence”. Not only did the Chancellor perform a “startling” pre-Budget U-turn on raising income tax, but in an even more bemusing turn of events, sources within No. 10 launched a clumsy briefing operation against Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Anonymous allies of the PM claimed that the ambitious cabinet minister was plotting to oust Starmer, and vowed that he would fight off any challenge to his leadership. Streeting, who is a far better communicator than Starmer, handled the episode with “deft wit” – declaring…

If you think Gary Lineker would love to meet you in the pub, or rejoiced when Taylor Swift got engaged, you may be in a parasocial relationship. Now, Cambridge Dictionary has marked the prevalence of such relationships in the social media era, by naming “parasocial” its Word of the Year. The term was coined by American sociologists in 1956 to describe the way people were developing a feeling of closeness to the personalities who were being brought into their homes by the expanding medium of television. Waitrose says it won’t be selling whole frozen turkeys this year, as Britons turn to gammon, beef, chicken, or no meat, at Christmas. Fewer than half of households are expected to eat turkey this year.…

Curaçao, which became the smallest nation ever to qualify for the football World Cup. The tiny Caribbean island won its spot in the tournament after drawing with Jamaica. Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, the couple arrested last year for repeatedly criticising senior figures at their children’s primary school, after Hertfordshire police agreed to pay them £20,000 in compensation. Six officers arrived to arrest the couple on suspicion of harassment and sending malicious communications. They were then held for 11 hours. The force has now admitted that the “legal test around necessity of arrest” had not been met.…