Man convicted of murdering ‘Good Samaritan’ by driving car into wedding crowd

A driver who killed a “Good Samaritan” when he ploughed into the middle of a wedding brawl has been found guilty of murder.

Hassan Jhangur, 25, hit five people with his Seat Ibiza when he arrived at his sister’s wedding reception, where a fight had broken out between the two families.

Sheffield Crown Court heard Jhangur first drove into the father of the rival Khan family, who was standing in the street, throwing him over the vehicle’s bonnet.

He then crashed into a group of four people, including Chris Marriott, 46, who was out for a post-Christmas walk with his wife and two sons and had stopped to help one of Jhangur’s sisters as she was lying in the road.

Jurors heard devout Christian Mr Marriott was killed and the three others were injured, including off-duty midwife Alison Norris and Jhangur’s own mother and sister.

The defendant then got out of the car and stabbed his new brother-in-law, Hasan Khan, several times.

The court heard he later told officers at the police station: “That’s why you don’t mess with the Jhangurs.”

Jhangur, of Whiteways Road, Sheffield, denied the murder and manslaughter of Mr Marriott but pleaded guilty to causing Mr Marriott’s death by dangerous driving.

After 18 hours of deliberations, on Wednesday a jury found him guilty of the more serious offence of murder by a majority of 10 to two.

He was cleared of attempting to murder Hasan Khan, but guilty of wounding, and convicted of four charges of causing grievous bodily harm with intent to Alison Norris, Ambreen Jhangur, Nafeesa Jhangur and Riasat Khan.

His father, Mohammed Jhangur, 57, of Whiteways Road, Sheffield, was found guilty of perverting the course of justice after he concealed a knife.

Prosecutor Jason Pitter KC told the jury at the opening of the trial that Jhangur was guilty of murder because he intended “at the very least to cause really serious harm” when he used his car as a weapon.

He said that although Jhangur’s target may have been the Khan family, “the law says your intentions can be transferred from one person to another, even if he did not intend to hit that particular person”.

Mr Pitter said the “public spirit” of Mr Marriott and Ms Norris “brought them unwittingly into the midst of a family dispute”, which had spilled out into the street in the Burngreave area of Sheffield on December 27 2023.

Mr Pitter said a wedding between Amaani Jhangur and Hasan Khan, which had taken place that morning, “appears to have been at the heart of the tension”.

He told jurors an issue arose over the timing and location of the wedding and escalated to Amaani falling out with her own mother and sisters, and none of her family ultimately attended the wedding at the mosque.

The court heard that when Amaani was at the Khan family home in College Court later, her mother Ambreen Jhangur and sister Nafeesa Jhangur arrived, and an increasingly “unpleasant” argument in the street escalated into violence, and led to Nafeesa Jhangur being rendered unconscious.

Mr Marriott, who was out with his family on a post-Christmas walk, saw Nafessa Jhangur lying in the road and decided, “fatefully”, to see whether he could help, while his wife and children returned home.

Ms Norris, who was also out walking with her partner and children, did the same thing.

The court heard Jhangur had been told about his sister being injured, and arrived at the scene in a Seat Ibiza, driving into Hasan Khan’s father, Riasat Khan, who was standing in the middle of the road talking to a 999 call operator.

The Seat then hit a group of four people in the road – Nafeesa Jhangur, Ambreen Jhangur, Ms Norris and Mr Marriott – before coming to a stop in a nearby front garden.

Mr Marriott was wedged completely underneath the car and showed no signs of life when emergency services tipped the vehicle to get to him.

Mr Pitter said Jhangur got out of the car while the engine was still running and stabbed Hasan Khan multiple times to the left side of his head and to his chest, with a knife he had taken with him.

In his speech to the jury, Richard Thyne KC, defending, said that although the “unintended consequences” of Jhangur’s dangerous driving were “terrible”, “it was neither murder nor was it manslaughter”.

Mr Justice Morris told Jhangur, who was convicted of murder following a retrial, that he faces a life sentence.

He will be jailed on a date to be set.

The judge thanked those in the public gallery, including widow Bryony Marriott and her family, for the “quiet dignity and courtesy you have shown throughout the trial”.

She did not visibly react when the guilty verdict was returned.

How Girl Power Geri turned into Christian Horner’s ‘surrendered wife’

She was the girl who sewed a Union Jack tea towel onto a black micro-mini dress, creating an image that would remain lodged in the national consciousness forever – Geri Halliwell, the Spice Girl with her knickers on display and blonde streaks in her flame-red hair. She was cheeky, fun, supremely confident: the embodiment of 1990s Girl Power. Men were nice, they declared, but women didn’t need them to make their dreams come true.

But that was almost thirty years ago. Now, Halliwell-Horner, aged 52, cuts a very different figure as the wife of Christian Horner. The former Red Bull F1 boss was this week sacked from his prestigious role, months after facing the since-cleared allegations of harassment by a female employee. The claims emerged as a slew of text messages, many of a sexual nature, allegedly sent between Horner and the employee, were leaked last year.

At the time Horner immediately denied the “inappropriate behaviour” allegation made against him and maintained that it was “absolutely business as normal” for the team. Geri, meanwhile, made a somewhat excruciating public display of her support at the Bahrain Grand Prix shortly after the scandal broke. For her fans, it appeared that she had undergone a transformation so radical that she was barely recognisable; no longer fiery Ginger Spice, but the “surrendered wife”.

For anyone who once admired Geri’s irrepressible chutzpah, her humiliating appearance in Bahrain was truly dispiriting. Wearing a demure shift dress in her now-customary white, she allowed him to manoeuvre her around with a hand gripping hers tightly, or positioned almost proprietorially at the small of her back.

Previously so outspoken, she appeared quietly accepting of the situation and when Horner’s team won, she planted a dutiful kiss on his lips – just as the couple’s PR advisers must surely have instructed her to do. It was, said more than one online commentator, like watching the withering of Girl Power in real time.

As the innocent party in the unfolding sordid affair, the reaction to her from fans came a place of concern more than anything. Many took to social media to express their sense of sadness at what had become of their feisty heroine, and those who’ve known her a long time struggled to recognise her. “The old Geri had attitude in abundance,” says one close to her inner circle. “It was so sad to watch.”

Since Geri and Horner share an eight-year-old son, Monty, it’s understandable she would want to fight for her marriage. And, of course, the scandal that Horner found himself caught up in isn’t of her making.

But, the curious thing is that while she was clearly devastated by the accusations about him, those who know her say they wonder if she truly doesn’t believe he’s done anything wrong.

“If feels that she is committed to him and their life together with every fibre of her being,” says the insider. “The other Spice Girls have reached out with supportive messages, but she’s gone dark. If feels like she doesn’t want to hear what the people who really know her would say.” 

Her absence at Mel B’s wedding this weekend was notable, so could standing by him in this way be a sign she is choosing him over her own legacy? Maybe, but in truth, her friends also understand that this new, surrendered iteration of Geri might just be the latest.

She has a long history of constant reinvention, donning new personas like they’re outfits: from topless model to pop star to boho yoga bunny to “serious” children’s author, and her most recent, chatelaine of a vast country estate. “To keep becoming different people, who are always taking her further from who she started out as, has always required a degree of self-delusion,” says one person who knows her.

That she was a spirited chancer was a crucial part of her charm when she first burst onto the scene, like a cartoon pin-up in platform boots. Just going for it was what fuelled her dream of being a star during her tough childhood on a Watford council estate, with a Spanish cleaner mother and much older father, who hit her with a belt and had explosive fights with her mother before leaving them.

In her autobiography If Only, she described winning a place at Watford Grammar School for Girls: “I was the token poor kid from the rough end of town – a fact I was never allowed to forget.”

Escaping into a fantasy world got her through. From the earliest age, she said, “I suffered from a cuckoo mentality. I imagined that I’d somehow been swapped at birth and placed with the wrong family.”

Wealth and fame, she imagined, would “fill a void inside me”; she pursued it via every route possible, including Spanish game shows and nude modelling. She couldn’t sing or dance, but when she met the other Spice Girls, she was the one pushing hardest for their break. Nobody wanted it more.

She left the group midway through a world tour in 1998 and immediately morphed into someone new, even staging a funeral for her Ginger persona in the video to her first solo single, “Look At Me”.

She went blonde, lost a lot of weight and became obsessed with yoga. Her personal life was turbulent: she suffered bulimia at times and flings with the likes of Robbie Williams fizzled out. In 2006, she gave birth to Bluebell Madonna, her daughter with screenwriter Sacha Gervasi, with whom she had a brief relationship, later admitting that raising her alone was lonely.

When she began dating Christian Horner in 2014, she saw it as her chance for the happy ending which had eluded her, despite her fame. The former racing driver split up from his long-term partner Beverley Allen six months after the birth of their daughter; eight months later, Geri and Horner announced their engagement in The Times. They married in 2015 at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, with Geri wearing a beautiful, understated white Phillipa Lepley dress.   

Her “loving relationship” with Horner brought with it a sprawling family estate near Banbury, Oxfordshire, complete with donkeys, horses, goats and boating on the duck pond.

Together, they share a reported £80m fortune, and their home is filled with signs of their devotion to one another, including scatter cushions featuring phrases such as “Mr & Mrs Horner, est 2015.”

At 44, she gave birth to their son, Monty, and since then, she has poured her considerable energies into writing children’s books. With her latest, Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen, “She wants nothing less than JK Rowling levels of success,” according to a source. “She also talks about wanting to study English at Oxford University.”

Her transformation into lady-of-the-manor Geri means dressing all in white, cream and ecru, and eschewing most media barring upmarket magazines such as Country and Town House. She even appears to be known as Geraldine nowadays, judging by the documentary F1: Drive to Survive, which showed her husband to be quite the limelight-hogger.

The door to the past firmly shut, questions about Bluebell’s father are off-limits to journalists and when Mel B seemed to confirm that her and Geri’s relationship had once gone beyond platonic when they were in their pop era, she released a statement saying, huffily, that it had been “hurtful to her family”.

Now, the current scandal, none of it her making, threatens to ruin all the hard work she’s poured into crafting the perfect life, perhaps even exposing it as all surface. Her instinct, say those who know her, is to simply hope it goes away. In 2022, she switched her PR team, leaving Alan Edwards, with whom she’d worked since her Spice Girls days, for Pippa Beng at Premier Management. 

She has stood by her husband until now, even it feels at odds with everything that she had previously stood for. “She wouldn’t have gone to Bahrain if her old team had still been looking after her,” claims an insider. “They’d been there from the start so they’d know how at odds fawning over Christian would seem with the Geri the public loved.”

She also joined her husband in Saudi Arabia the following weekend, despite previous reports that she wouldn’t attend as she had “other commitments in the diary”. One source told The Sun: “It’s been tough but Geri has been a rock for Christian through all this and he has spoken out about how much that means to him.

Note how different this is from her reactions in the past like the robust way the Spice Girls sacked Simon Fuller as their manager, or when Geri quit the band at the height of their fame, only to go straight to No 1 with her first solo single. That would show the world that the old Geri is still there.

Instead, we are still left with with all evidence of Girl Power Geri fading like a polaroid in an old scrapbook. As her husband starts to work out what his next chapter looks like, one can only hope a new Geri-power era isn’t too far away.

Southport survivor, 7, was stabbed 33 times trying to shield friends, says mum

Parents have revealed how their seven-year-old daughter, who survived more than 33 stab wounds, crouched over to shield her friends as children were caught in a “stampede” trying to escape the Southport knife attack.

The brave girl has told her mother, “I’m glad I could help them” as she relived details of the traumatic day last July, a public inquiry into the tragedy heard.

She and other survivors have been left struggling with panic attacks and flashbacks as they try to rebuild their lives after Axel Rudakubana, then 17, launched a rampage at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday dance class.

The attack claimed the lives of Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and left eight more girls and two adults wounded.

The killer, who will simply be referred to as “the perpetrator” or “AR” in hearings out of respect to victims and their families, has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 52 years.

The mother of the survivor, who cannot be named and is known only as C1, told the second day of the public inquiry into the atrocity how her daughter desperately tried to help her friends.

She shielded them at the top of the stairs before helping them to escape the Hart Space studio, only to be pulled back inside by the knifeman, who rained down yet more blows which felt like punches.

In a powerful statement read to the hearing at Liverpool Town Hall, she said her daughter recalls the class rushing out of a narrow doorway and downstairs, following their wounded teacher, Leanne Lucas.

“She describes it as a stampede,” she said. “In the chaos, she was knocked over and found herself trapped and huddled with two other children at the top of the stairs.

“She talks quietly of how she put her arms around the girls as he began to attack them. She tells me with such clarity that a moment came were one of the girls was able to get up, she put the girl’s hand on the handrail and told her to go – to get down the stairs – and she did.

“The attack continued, she was still holding another girl, ‘I crouched over the top of her,’ she says. ‘I told her it would be okay,’ She recalls this with such purpose and determination, like it was her responsibility.

“‘It happened so fast, but I helped them, I’m glad I could help them, Mum,’ she tells me.”

Harrowing CCTV, seen by the parents during the attacker’s court hearing, showed how she managed to make it to the exit – only to be pulled back inside by the knifeman.

“Somehow, she emerges from the building – and we see her, for a brief moment on CCTV,” she continued. “Escaping. Finding help. Showing so much strength. But her arm is badly injured, and it’s trailing behind, and he grabs it.

“In a flash of struggle, she’s gone again. For 11 seconds, she is out of sight. And then there she is again. She has stood up after enduring another attack of more than 20 stab wounds to her back and shoulders.

“She stumbles outside to the windows, reaching for help. She eventually falls and, soon after, is carried to safety.”

The girl lost her entire blood volume and had to learn to sit, stand and walk again as she recovered from a total of 33 stab wounds, the mother said.

The mother told the hearing that her daughter “may be a survivor of this attack, but she is still trying to survive this, every single day”.

She struggles with panic attacks, which make her daily life “difficult and exhausting” and “needs an enormous amount of support and scaffolding to do normal things”.

“In the shops we have to avoid the news section for fear of his face, or other images being on the front pages again,” she said, adding that they had removed knives from their home and replaced them with blunt-tipped ones.

She called for the inquiry to answer her daughter’s questions over how anyone could carry out such an attack and why he was not stopped.

“She deserves an apology … our girls deserve an apology,” she added. “Backed up by the promise that changes will be made, and this will not be allowed to happen again.”

Another parent, whose daughter survived three stab wounds, said it was “patently clear that lessons need to be learned from what happened, and processes need to be changed”.

Sitting beside the girl’s mother in the witness box, he said: “Our nine-year-old daughter was stabbed three times in the back by a coward she didn’t even see.

“Although she didn’t know what was happening – she knew she had to run.”

He said they had since seen CCTV footage of her running from the building looking “scared, confused and pained” and hiding behind a parked car, before jumping to “relative safety” through an open car door.

He added: “We remain eternally grateful that we were lucky that day, and that the skill of the paramedics, surgeons and medical staff meant we got our little girl back.”

Describing his daughter as his “hero”, the father said she remained “the positive, caring, funny, enthusiastic, courageous girl she always was”.

He added: “She wears her scars with a dignity and defiance that is remarkable.”

The mother of another girl who was at the event, referred to as Child Q, said arriving to collect her daughter to find screaming children fleeing from the building was “the most horrific experience of my life”.

In a statement read by the family’s legal representative, she said her daughter was “an anxious little girl” who had taken a “significant step” by attending the dance class, as she often struggled socially outside school.

The girl’s mother said: “Although physically unharmed, she has struggled with the psychological impact of the trauma and to this day has been unable to talk to us about what happened and what she witnessed.

“Our daughter became very withdrawn, emotional and had so many worries. In her words, due to what she witnessed, ‘How will I ever be normal again?’

“She is even more anxious about not being with us or being dropped off at another event without us. She is scared when she hears a siren or sees an emergency vehicle. Q is still unable to sleep alone and struggles with falling asleep.

“She always asks for doors to be closed when we enter or leave a room; this helps her to feel safe.”

Opening the inquiry on Tuesday, chair Sir Adrian Fulford described the 29 July attack as “one of the most egregious crimes” in UK history.

The tragedy and triumph of Superman’s Margot Kidder

Before she died in 2018 at the age of 69, Superman actor Margot Kidder told her friends her final wish. If they ever find her body, keep her death a secret. Wrap her in a bedsheet, take her to the forest outside her home in the mountains of Livingston, Montana, and leave her for the wolves. Kidder loved those wolves, regularly feeding them from her back porch. Kidder’s friends, understandably, didn’t abide by her request. But there would have been something oddly fitting about this fate – Hollywood’s wildest movie star, at least for a few years in the Seventies, vanishing into the mysterious recesses of the Montana woods, never to be seen again.

Kidder went back and forth on her own stardom. “After Superman came out, I found it very difficult and hard to deal with,” she said in 1997, of the Lois Lane role that briefly propelled her to international renown. “There is a sense of having to put on this phoney face when you go out in public. I wasn’t very good at it, and it filled me with anxiety and panic. I had to hide the manic depression, for one thing. I just felt inadequate for the job.”

But it always made sense why Kidder was asked to do that job, why Hollywood felt they could harness her undeniable presence on camera and use it to sell romcoms and horror movies. Kidder’s charisma – along with those sharp, beguiling features and whip-crack of a line delivery – is visible from the off in Black Christmas, which turned 50 in 2024. Along with Brian De Palma’s trippy 1972 psycho-thriller Sisters, the Canadian slasher film made Kidder’s name, announcing her as an actor of unusual verve and bite, whose glamour was always a little chaotic, her spikiness a little sad.

Kidder isn’t the star of Black Christmas, which revolves around a sorority house menaced by a murderous prank caller. That spot is reserved for Olivia Hussey, playing the sorority’s pretty, haunted naif. Kidder, on the other hand, is its trainwreck Barb, a traumatised alcoholic with a messy sex life and a guilt complex, who reacts to deviant phone calls from a killer with swagger and outrage: come and get it if you think you’re tough enough, she more or less barks back at him. Black Christmas doesn’t judge Barb, or punish her for her apparent sins. She’s its most human component. But that effect is also down to Kidder’s performance, which feels startlingly alive and rich in empathy.

Black Christmas was part of a short-lived run of hits for Kidder, which included the Robert Redford drama The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and the goofy haunted house blockbuster The Amityville Horror (1979). Superman came in 1978, her smart, sassy and hopelessly romantic Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane serving as the blueprint for the many actors who played that role in the aftermath, from Teri Hatcher and Amy Adams to, this week, Rachel Brosnahan in James Gunn’s divisive franchise reboot. Lois’s initial sit-down with Christopher Reeve’s Superman – who flies onto her apartment balcony for an interview – is full of blushing, pining and frazzled pauses. It’s one of those great Seventies movie star performances, perfectly matched by Reeves’ effervescent wholesomeness. Of course, Kidder was propelled to the A-list.

The problem, though, was that Kidder was a bit too offbeat and interesting for all of that. When she moved to Los Angeles from her native Canada in 1970, she lived in a somewhat notorious Malibu beach house that played host to the likes of a young De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon and Martin Scorsese. Powders were snorted, sex was rampant and the next big ideas in filmmaking were formed. (Famously lily-white Spielberg, it should be said, reportedly only ever took part in the last one.) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s seminal 1998 tome on Seventies Hollywood, made this all out to be somewhat sordid, which Kidder disputed. “It was drugs and sex, yes, but it was sweet,” she said. “We were just a bunch of kids who had no money and wanted to change the world.”

Kidder was political and opinionated, and lived smack-dab at the centre of the sexual bohemia of the era. She had flings with De Palma, Richard Pryor and the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. And when Hollywood came calling, she rebuffed the squarer conventions imposed on her. The makers of The Amityville Horror were hungry for publicity stunts and asked her to tell the press the set was haunted – she called it “hogwash” and refused. When Superman’s director Richard Donner was fired from the film’s sequel, she publicly admonished its producers, and was allegedly punished for it – that’s why, it’s long been speculated, Lois is barely a presence in the franchise’s third instalment.

She also posed for Playboy, but only on the assurance that she could write an accompanying essay, which is quite literally all about how looking at pictures in Playboy as a teenage girl entirely destroyed her self-esteem. “Fourteen is a nervous age for a girl,” she wrote. “You want to be perfect and no one will tell you how. Your self-confidence is frail as glass, easily shattered. Playboy used to smash mine regularly.”

At the turn of the Eighties, high-profile work dropped off. It coincided with a number of health struggles, Kidder having received a diagnosis of schizophrenia in her twenties, followed by years of a repetitive cycle: a new round of medication, then a round of destructive self-medication, then back again. “None of us ever thought of Margy as mentally ill,” her friend Jennifer Salt said in 1997. “She was bright, courageous, a brilliant actress with extraordinary energy and intelligence … [but] it’s hard to know where the illness leaves off and the greatness begins.”

Kidder’s personal struggles were largely kept out of the spotlight until the early Nineties, when injuries from a car accident left her unable to work and ultimately in debt. Tabloids mocked her when she was photographed selling jewellery in New York to make ends meet. In 1996, a manic episode left the then-47-year-old wandering the streets of Los Angeles for several days, and she was found in a stranger’s garden. A year later, she was upfront about her personal difficulties.

“What’s it like to be the most famous crazy person in the world? It’s a dubious honour,” she joked to The Los Angeles Times in 1997. In 2001, while receiving a Courage in Mental Health award from the California Women’s Mental Health Policy Council, she also thanked the homeless people who kept her safe during the worst days of her crisis. “I was, in common terms, cuckoo,” she said. “But they had compassion and understanding. They knew that my confusion did not negate my humanity. What people need when they’re crazy is not to feel separated from the rest of humanity, but to have that hand reach out with love, and say, ‘OK, this is who you are right now. That’s fine. I’m here for you’.”

Kidder continued to work, often in horror movies or on television, and would happily poke fun at her less-than-glittering acting career. “I’ll [make] practically anything – I’m the biggest whore on the block,” she joked in 2008. “Unless it’s something sexist or cruel, I just love to work. I’ve done all sorts of things, but you just haven’t seen them because they’re often very bad and shown at four in the morning.”

She also pivoted more substantially to political activism in the mid-Noughties, working with a womens’ protest group in Montana initially called Bushes Against Bush (“We couldn’t go public with that name, so we became Montana Women For,” she’d say). Later, she would campaign for leftist Democrat Bernie Sanders and protest against the construction of oil pipelines. A memoir never happened, but she often teased it. “I’m going to call it I Slept With Everyone on Television,” she said in 2009. “I was in the airport in Minneapolis, and I thought, ‘S*** – what you have to do is have something that catches the eye of people going from Minneapolis to New York that looks like a good, easy read on a plane.’ So that title would sell out right away.”

Little is known of Kidder’s final months. Friends said she harboured addicts in her Livingston home, in a last act of charity and empathy. Or, as her daughter Maggie suggested in a statement, because of her own addictions in the end. Her manager said she died in her sleep, but a coroner later ruled she died from a “self-inflicted drug and alcohol overdose”. “It’s a big relief that the truth is out there,” Maggie said. “It’s important to be open and honest so there’s not a cloud of shame in dealing with this.”

It made sense. Kidder had, after all, never herself been one for shame – quick to a self-deprecating joke, a plea for compassion and a worthy fight. And even when asked to play doomed slasher movie characters – fated to be introduced and then speedily killed by a gruesome predator – she could always find the tiny cracks of humanity.

Verstappen responds to Horner’s sacking by Red Bull F1: Latest

Christian Horner has been relieved of his duties as Red Bull’s Formula One team principal this morning.

The Red Bull chief had led the team since its inception in 2005, guiding them to six constructors’ titles and eight drivers’ championships. However, just one year after a personal scandal involving alleged “inappropriate behaviour” with a female colleague – an accusation Horner was cleared of twice – the 51-year-old lost his job on Wednesday morning.

Horner, who is married to Spice Girl pop star Geri Halliwell, has been replaced by Laurent Mekies as CEO of Red Bull Racing. Mekies was previously the team principal at sister team Racing Bulls. Red Bull CEO of Corporate Projects and Investments, Oliver Mintzlaff, said in a statement: “We would like to thank Christian Horner for his exceptional work over the last 20 years. With his tireless commitment, experience, expertise and innovative thinking, he has been instrumental in establishing Red Bull Racing as one of the most successful and attractive teams in Formula 1. Thank you for everything, Christian, and you will forever remain an important part of our team history.”

Red Bull endured a race to forget at the British Grand Prix on Sunday, and the team are now a distant fourth in the constructors’ standings, but this announcement still comes as a shock to the team at Milton Keynes and the whole F1 paddock. Horner was the longest-serving team boss in F1 and guided Red Bull to 124 grand prix victories during his time in charge.

Max Verstappen, who won all four of his world titles under Horner at Red Bull, posted on Instagram: “From my first race win, to four world championships, we have shared incredible successes. Winning memorable races and breaking countless records. Thank you for everything, Christian!”

Follow all the latest updates on this breaking news story below:

How Macmillan Cancer Support built a movement that reaches everyone

PM opens door for stealth tax extension as he tries to balance books

Sir Keir Starmer has failed to rule out extending so-called “stealth taxes” – as well as the introduction of a wealth tax – as his government struggles to balance the books following his recent U-turns.

The prime minister reiterated that Labour would stick to its manifesto pledge and ruled out increases to income tax, VAT and national insurance, but he did not confirm whether the government was planning to lift the freeze on income tax thresholds in 2028.

Sir Keir and chancellor Rachel Reeves are seeking billions of pounds in savings after the government’s recent U-turns on welfare and winter fuel payments left a black hole in the nation’s finances, while a report out this week from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) gave a damning verdict of the state of Britain’s “vulnerable” public finances.

Asked by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch whether he could guarantee he would keep the manifesto pledge of not increasing income tax, VAT or employee national insurance contributions, Sir Keir gave a one word answer: “Yes!”

But when she asked if it is still the government’s policy to unfreeze income tax thresholds, Sir Keir said: “No prime minister is going to write the Budget in advance, but we are absolutely fixed on our fiscal rules”.

At the last Budget, Ms Reeves promised to end the freeze on income tax thresholds after 2028.

But if it were extended to the end of the parliament it could raise £9bn-10bn a year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think tank, as workers are dragged into higher tax bands as earnings rise.

The think tank says extending the freeze would mean an additional 400,000 people would be eligible to pay income tax, while another 600,000 would be pulled into higher and additional rates by 2029-30.

Pressed on the issue after PMQs, the prime minister’s spokesperson repeatedly refused to say whether the government plans to go back on the chancellor’s promise to unfreeze tax thresholds.

“As you know, tax decisions are taken at the Budget”, he said. “I’m not going to comment on tax speculation ahead of a fiscal event.”

When the previous Conservative government introduced the freeze on tax thresholds, Labour – in opposition – dubbed the move a “stealth tax”.

Meanwhile, the prime minister also failed to comprehensively rule out the introduction of a wealth tax amid growing pressure from trade unions and party grandees, most notably Neil Kinnock. The Labour peer said over the weekend that the government should consider such a measure to balance the books.

Pressing on the issue in the Commons, Ms Badenoch asked: “What is more worrying is that now he’s flirting with Neil Kinnock demand for a wealth tax. Let’s be honest about what that means. This is a tax on all of our constituents, savings, on their houses, on their pensions. It would be a tax on aspiration. Will the prime minister rule this out?”

Instead of the earlier direct response he gave on income tax, VAT and national insurance rises earlier, the prime minister appeared to duck the question.

He said: “We will not be asking for [Tory] advice. What we did in the Budget was stabilise the economy through the measures taken by the chancellor. What does that link to? For interest rate cuts for mortgage holders. That’s hugely important, because what happened on the Liz Truss mini-Budget.”

“So no, we don’t need lessons from them”, the PM added.

Starmer admitted “we can’t just tax our way to growth” when pressed on the wealth tax issue later in PMQs by Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay – but still did not rule out the move.

The failure to answer had echoes of the mini-crisis the prime minister created last week when he avoided an answer on the chancellor’s future as she sat in tears behind him in PMQs.

The incident saw panic on the markets at the prospect of Ms Reeves getting the sack until the prime minister scrambled to provide assurances she is safe.

Last week, an embarrassing climbdown on welfare saw the government’s benefits reforms gutted almost entirely. Savings from the bill were slashed from £5bn to nothing, leaving a gaping hole in the public finances which ministers are now scrambling to fill.

A Conservative Party spokesperson said: “The prime minister emphatically ruled out any rises in income tax, NI or VAT. But he wouldn’t repeat the promise his chancellor made in the autumn to lift the freeze on income tax thresholds.

“He also refused to rule out a retirement tax and wealth taxes. The only reasonable conclusion is that a toxic cocktail of Labour tax rises are coming in the autumn Budget.”

Experts warned the prime minister that bringing in a wealth tax would be counterproductive.

Dhana Sabanathan, a partner in the tax, trusts and succession team at national law firm Michelmores, said: “A wealth tax has long been debated in the UK; the broad concept being that the wealthy may be able to control the amount of income and gains that accrue to them personally, and so a tax on their assets may be a fairer way of ensuring a level playing field.

“However, in practice, implementing such a tax faces many practical issues. Due to rising house and land prices in some parts of the UK, there are many asset-rich individuals (such as elderly homeowners and farm owners) who simply would not have the liquidity to pay the tax, without selling their main asset or home.”

Trump ‘blindsided’ by Pentagon’s decision to halt weapons to Ukraine as he pledges more arms

Donald Trump was caught off-guard by the Pentagon’s decision to announce a pause in some weapons deliveries last week to Ukraine.

An official close to Trump, who is said to have privately expressed frustration with Pentagon officials, claimed the President had been caught “flat footed” by the announcement.

The news came before Russia launched its largest air attack on Ukraine overnight, launching 728 drones and 13 missiles at targets around the country, Kyiv’s air defence said on Wednesday.

The Trump administration is in the eye of a storm after the Pentagon announced last week that it would hold back some air defence missiles, precision-guided artillery and other weapons pledged to Ukraine because of concerns that American stockpiles were running short on supply.

Reports emerged that US defence secretary Pete Hegseth did not tell the White House before pausing those weapons shipments, but the Pentagon denied that Hegseth acted without consulting the president.

Trump made a U-turn on Monday and said the US will have to send more weapons to Ukraine, effectively reversing the move, as he showed signs of growing frustration with the Russian leader.