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The temperature reached 38.1ºC at Kew Gardens, Surrey. In the West Midlands a wildfire at Stourbridge burnt down 19 houses and damaged 18. The government sent out a loud siren sound and a message to all mobiles in England and Wales warning of a ‘very high risk of wildfires’. So-called Statutory Guidelines temporarily banned the sale of disposable barbecues. More than 8,000 South East Water customers in Kent found supplies disrupted. A burst water main cut off travel by road between Heathrow’s terminals. Two passengers were seriously injured when three carriages of a train from London Victoria to Eastbourne were derailed and fell onto their sides near Lewes. A train from Southend to London Liverpool Street was derailed at Wickford. Virgin was given permission by the Office of Rail and Road to run 20 daily return services through the Channel Tunnel for a decade from October 2030. Inflation rose from 2.6 to 2.9 per cent.
Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister, exchanged text messages with someone posing as Susie Wiles, the chief of staff to President Donald Trump of America. Mr Burnham announced that disabled people in England would be able to use their free bus passes at any time of day from next April. He said every rough sleeper in England would be offered accommodation this winter. Nigel Farage won the by-election in Clacton for Reform, with 22,239 votes, 63.3 per cent of those cast, and more than the 21,225 votes that he won in the 2024 general election. But none of the main parties fielded candidates. Count Binface came second with 9,455 votes, and none of the other 32 candidates polled more than 500. The turnout was 44.37 per cent. The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner resumed his inquiry into whether Mr Farage broke the rules by not declaring a gift to him of £5 million. Reform suspended the former Conservative Tim Montgomerie from the party after he criticised senior figures including Mr Farage.
Jason Arday, 41, was found dead in Battersea, south London. He had resigned nine days earlier as a professor at Cambridge after being accused of plagiarism and challenged over his strange claims about his life, such as running 600 miles in six days. In A-level results, 28.5 per cent of grades were A* or A, with slightly more boys achieving those grades than girls; more applicants than ever were accepted by universities. Sainsbury’s suspended facial recognition technology at its East Dulwich branch in London after a customer was wrongly accused of shoplifting.
Abroad
Russia said that Britain would pay for acting as ‘an accomplice and accessory to the bloody crimes and terrorist attacks of Ukrainian neo-Nazis’ by supplying drones. Andy Burnham responded by saying Britain would ‘support Ukraine 100 per cent’. Mykhailo Fedorov, sacked as Ukraine’s defence minister in July, called for national elections. Ukraine destroyed the biggest warehouse belonging to Wildberries, the Russian online retailer, at Podolsk, in the Moscow region. Ukraine struck a Russian rocket centre in Samara. An overnight attack by Russia destroyed a book market in Kyiv. Earlier Ukraine said it had hit four Russian warships at Novorossiysk, where most of Russia’s Black Sea fleet is docked. Romania thanked Spain for using a fighter jet to shoot down a drone in its air space. Romania shut down its only nuclear power station because of the low level of the Danube.
Regarding negotiations to open the Strait of Hormuz, Mr Trump said: ‘If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.’ He also said that America would ‘substantially reduce’ joint military exercises with South Korea because of his ‘very good relationship’ with Kim Jong Un, the ruler of North Korea. Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s Middle East envoy, met Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, a day after holding talks with Hamas. Israel conducted air strikes on southern Lebanon and bombed Syria’s Abu Duhur airbase, which Turkish officials had been helping to renovate. An earthquake of magnitude 4.8 shook Granada.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo the number to have died of the Ebola virus since 15 May reached 2,325. Fifa sacked Kevin Lamour as its chief operating officer after he criticised its president, Gianni Infantino. Five teenage boys died when their car, travelling the wrong way down a motorway in County Kildare, collided with another car; Justin Kelly, the Commissioner of the Garda, condemned a trend for perilous driving undertaken for social media attention. CSH
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