Nursery paedophile who used work iPad to record abuse of toddlers jailed for 18 years

A paedophile who used a work-issued iPad to record him abusing toddlers in a nursery – in a campaign of offending described as “every parent’s worst nightmare” – has been jailed for 18 years.

Vincent Chan, 45, operated without detection for almost 15 years as he worked as a primary school teaching assistant, before later being hired as a nursery worker.

His horrific crimes were finally exposed after police uncovered a cache of one million indecent images on his laptop after a colleague at Bright Horizons nursery in West Hampstead, London, raised concerns with managers.

He was initially arrested on suspicion of child neglect after he filmed children in distress – crying, wetting themselves and eating their own mucus – superimposing audio or imagery over the videos in an apparent attempt at humour, prosecutor Philip Stott told Wood Green Crown Court.

But after seizing 69 devices, including hard drives and laptops, officers also discovered footage he had filmed up school children’s skirts as they sat at their desks, pictures of his own genitals taken in a classroom and horrific videos of him sexually abusing four toddlers during nap time at the nursery.

Some of the indecent images are thought to have been taken with his staff-issued nursery iPad, before transferring the material to his personal computer. A number had been organised into folders under the children’s names.

He also used hidden cameras to catch women changing or going to the toilet and sexually assaulted a woman while she was asleep.

In his campaign of abuse and voyeurism, he targeted women and girls who ranged in age from two to a woman in her seventies, the court heard.

This included superimposing photos of victims onto pornographic images and naked pictures of himself. He continued to “harvest” social media images of one child from the primary school as she entered her teens.

Reading from a police statement outlining the wider impact of Chan’s offending, Mr Stott said he has caused “enduring distress”.

“Widespread trust in early years care has been damaged,” he said. Hundreds of families who sent their children to the nursery and school where Chan worked have been written to about the abuse.

“It is every parent’s worst nightmare,” added Mr Stott. “Families can’t put into words the distress caused by receiving such a letter out of the blue.”

Many parents who entrusted Chan with the care of their child are experiencing the “lasting trauma of ‘what if’”, he said, adding: “The uncertainty is unbearable.”

Parents of one of Chan’s young victims said, at the time of his abuse, “our daughter was too young to understand what was happening”; she “relied on those around her to keep her safe”.

“That trust was profoundly broken,” they added in a statement read by Mr Stott.

The parents now live in constant fear about how this may affect their daughter as she grows up, including her ability to trust others.

The fact that the attack was filmed has added to their distress, he said, adding: “She was harmed at a time when she should have been safest.”

A woman who was sexually assaulted by Chan called for his sentence to reflect the “sheer scale” of his depravity, adding: “Justice in this case can’t be lenient, it must be as heavy and as permanent as the trauma he has forced his victims to carry.”

Another victim who was secretly filmed said Chan’s crimes made her feel “violated and humiliated” and left her “paranoid about using the bathroom”.

A statement from a child who was targeted at the primary school, summarised by Mr Stott, said she was “distraught” and has been left “edgy”, “jumpy” and struggles to walk alone after dark.

However, she insisted “the actions of this disgusting person” will not define her.

Jailing him for 18 years, with an extended licence of eight years, judge John Dodd KC said: “Any right-thinking person hearing about your offences would feel revulsion and disbelief.

“Your conduct was utterly wicked, perverse and depraved. You became a sexual predator and someone who had clearly lost all sense of moral compass.”

Appearing in the dock wearing a grey prison-issue tracksuit, he stared straight ahead as details of his depraved crimes were laid out in court.

In December, he admitted to 26 charges: five counts of sexual assault by penetration, four of sexual assault by touching, 11 of taking indecent images of children, and six of making indecent images of children.

In January, he admitted 30 new charges: 12 counts of taking indecent photographs of children, six of outraging public decency, sexual assault on a female, and 11 counts of voyeurism.

Nicholas Jones, defending, told the judge in mitigation: “This is a defendant who, unlike others, accepts he has a problem. He doesn’t want to be the person that he is, and he is willing to accept help.”

Chan worked in a primary school in northwest London for 10 years from 2007. He worked in IT support and as a high-level teaching assistant, before going on to work as an early years practitioner in a nursery for nearly seven years.

A local child safeguarding practice review of Bright Horizons, Finchley Road, is being undertaken by Camden Safeguarding Partnership.

Police have admitted they cannot rule out the possibility that Chan committed further offences which he did not film.

Families said the fear about the “cruel violation” of their children will never dissipate.

“Ordinary memories from early childhood are now tainted with doubt, anxiety and guilt,” they added in a statement read outside court by Detective Superintendent Lewis Basford.

“We are unable to look back on our children’s earliest years with peace, certainty and optimism.

“Instead, memories and photographs of our children when they were most innocent, achieving milestones of walking, talking, reading and writing, would permanently be coupled with doubt, fear and worry about Vincent Chan.”

A group of 50 parents at the branch of Bright Horizons, which has since closed, have put the nursery on notice of legal action. They said they will never know the “full scale” of his crimes and called for the nursery to be prosecuted for failing to safeguard children.

“Every family deserves the truth, and every child who suffered must see justice done,” they said.

“Bright Horizons must also be held to account. We believe their safeguarding failures created the perfect hunting ground for a predator. Chan was not a ‘lone wolf’, and this was not about extraordinary technical skill. He was able to operate for years in a workplace where safeguarding failures were missed, minimised or ignored.”

A spokesperson for Bright Horizons said they have engaged an external expert to carry out a full review of their safeguarding standards, adding that they are committed to “understanding what happened so that we can learn from this terrible episode”.

“Keeping children safe is our most important responsibility,” the spokesperson said. “Vincent Chan broke that trust. His actions were depraved and devious and go against the kindness and care our dedicated professionals provide to children each day.”

Teenage boy who stabbed Leo Ross to death is named for first time

A teenage boy who fatally stabbed 12-year-old Leo Ross in an unprovoked attack has been named for the first time as Kian Moulton.

Leo was knifed in the stomach as he walked home from school in Yardley Wood on 21 January 2025. The 15-year-old was detained for a minimum of 13 years on Tuesday after he admitted to murder during a hearing at Birmingham Crown Court in January.

Leo, a student at Christ Church, Church of England Secondary Academy, is believed to be the youngest victim of knife crime in the West Midlands. His family described him in a statement as an “amazing, kind, loving” boy.

He is not believed to have had any connection with his killer.

The murderer’s name can be published after a judge lifted the automatic anonymity granted to under-18s in court. Speaking during the sentencing on Tuesday, Mr Justice Choudhury KC said, in his view, the killer should be named because of the public interest in the case.

“The defendant has pleaded guilty and falls to be sentenced for very serious crimes, including murder – the most serious of all,” he said. He added the public would want to know “what could have led a child to commit such acts”.

Moulton, who was 14 at the time of the killing, also attempted to drown an 82-year-old woman and attacked two other elderly women days before the fatal incident, a court previously heard.

He admitted two counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent on 19 and 20 January 2025, and assault occasioning actual bodily harm on 21 January 2025, in relation to the separate attacks on other victims, as well as having a bladed article on the day he killed Leo.

Prosecution counsel Rachel Brand KC said the boy had told an 82-year-old woman, “I tried to drown you, but now I’m going to kill you,” after pushing her into a river and hitting her with her own walking pole just two days before Leo’s murder.

The woman was taken to hospital and was found to have sustained multiple bruises and a laceration to her head, a broken nose and black eyes. She had also fractured a rib and two of her fingers, which required surgery.

A second woman, aged 72, was left bleeding “profusely” from a head wound and later required surgery after she was attacked, the court heard.

In a witness statement given to the police, the woman said: “I think this incident will make me feel nervous about going out alone. I feel emotional about what has happened.”

A video released by police after the sentencing shows how the killer hung around to talk to officers at the murder scene, falsely claiming he had stumbled across Leo lying fatally injured beside the River Cole.

He denied assault occasioning actual bodily harm on 22 October 2024 and assault by beating on 29 December 2024 in relation to two further victims, and those charges were ordered to lie on file.

Trump repeals EPA finding that tied greenhouse gases to climate change

The Trump administration has gutted the federal government’s ability to combat climate change by revoking a 15-year-old finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare and removing the legal foundations of nearly all American climate regulations.

President Donald Trump announced the move Thursday alongside Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin, calling the finding “a disastrous Obama era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers.”

He claimed the decision would “eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory cost and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically.”

“This determination had no basis in fact, had none whatsoever, and it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty and all over the world,” Trump said.

“Bad things happened, and yet this radical rule became the legal foundation for the green new scam, one of the greatest scams in history … that is why, effective immediately, we are repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding and terminating all additional green emission standards imposed unnecessarily on vehicle models and engines between 2012 and 2027 and beyond.”

Zeldin said the move represented “the single largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America” by repealing what he described as “the holy grail of federal regulatory overreach.”

“Sixteen years ago, an ideological crusade within the Obama administration set off the most costly regulatory power grab our country has ever experienced. The 2009 Obama EPA endangerment finding led to trillions of dollars in regulations that strangled entire sectors of the United States economy, including the American auto industry,” Zeldin said.

He also accused the Obama and Biden administrations of using the finding to “steamroll into existence a left-wing wish list of costly climate policies, electric vehicle mandates and other requirements that assaulted consumer choice and affordability.”

“The endangerment finding and the regulations that were based on it didn’t just regulate emissions, it regulated and targeted the American dream, and now the endangerment finding is hereby eliminated, as well as all greenhouse gas emission standards that followed. The red tape has been cut.”

Zeldin added that automakers would “no longer be burdened by measuring, compiling or reporting greenhouse gas emissions for vehicles and engines” and said they would “no longer … be pressured to shift their fleets towards electric vehicles.”

The administration’s decision to rescind the landmark 2009 regulation will erase EPA limits on greenhouse gas pollution across industries, adding to dozens of prior rollbacks of federal climate and environmental policy since Trump returned to power last January.

The Obama-era rule underpins nearly all federal limits on planet-heating emissions under the Clean Air Act, including vehicle pollution standards, methane rules and restrictions on emissions from power plants and industrial facilities. Without the finding, the agency’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be severely constrained.

Over the past 15 years, the endangerment finding has helped to reduce climate pollution and protect Americans’ health, bolstering limits on power plants and emissions standards for trucks and other vehicles.

The move effectively rolls back limits on tailpipe emissions that will immediately allow automakers to start producing cars that use far more fuel than currently allowed.

Climate scientists and activists have warned that tossing the 2009 ruling would throttle the nation’s ability to prevent the worst outcomes of climate change, and would endanger people around the world in the name of the Trump administration’s push for energy dominance.

On Thursday, environmental groups and leaders blasted the decision.

“This action is unlawful, ignores basic science and denies reality. We know greenhouse gases cause climate change and endanger our communities and our health — and we will not stop fighting to protect the American people from pollution,” California Governor Gavin Newsom and Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers said in a joint statement.

New Jersey Representative Frank Pallone, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee (which oversees the auto industry) also slammed the decision as “the direct result of having corrupt, dishonest grifters running the White House and EPA, whose only priority is lining the pockets of their wealthy corporate polluter friends” in a blistering statement.

Pallone warned that the EPA decision would cause higher prices for food, power and housing while “unchecked climate pollution wreaks havoc on property values, insurance rates, and jobs.”

“It’s a lose-lose for middle class families and an absolute coup for Trump’s wealthy corporate buddies who are being allowed to run roughshod over our country,” he said.

The Environmental Defense Fund also issued a statement criticizing the move and vowing to see the administration in court.

“This action will only lead to more of this pollution, and that will lead to higher costs and real harms for American families,” President Fred Krupp said. “The evidence – and the lived experiences of so many Americans – tell us that our health will suffer.”

“If you’re busily committing a crime, it’s smart to try and change the law so that it’s not technically a crime any more,” author and Third Act founder Bill McKibben previously told The Independent, on the proposal. “Big Oil is not content to merely wreck the future, they’d like to alter the past as well.”

But Dr. Daniel Swain, a California Institute for Water Resources climate scientist, told The Independent last year that inevitable legal challenges could delay implementation for a year or more while courts consider whether the move was properly executed by the government.

“If this ultimately comes to pass, the consequences will be stark: it essentially would halt all federal actions to regulate heat-trapping and climate change-causing greenhouse gases as a pollutant. That would mark a grim milestone, indeed,” Swain said.

Thursday’s announcement is the latest in a series of moves by Zeldin, a former New York congressman, to gut the government’s ability to measure or respond to human-induced climate change.

He also announced last year that the agency would shutter its Office of Research and Development, which provides expertise for environmental policy and regulation, and analyzes the dangers of climate change and pollution.

This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project

Sarah Ferguson consulted Epstein for advice while he was in prison

Sarah Ferguson asked paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein for advice over bankruptcy while he was in prison, and begged him for a job after he was released, according to emails.

The communications released as part of a tranche of documents by the Department of Justice appear to show the former Duchess of York reaching out to Epstein over her debt troubles, which she called “so so demoralising”.

She appears to have said “death is easier than this” and that she was about to “freak with exhaustion” as she asked the wealthy financier for advice on her debt pile, which she wrote stood at “£6m”.

A year later, she appeared to beg Epstein for a job, telling him she “desperately need the money [sic]”.

Epstein was jailed for 13 months in 2008 after he was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. In one email dated near the end of his sentence, in July 2009, Ms Ferguson appears to consult him over an offer she had received from John Caudwell, the British billionaire founder of the mobile phone shop Phones 4u.

“Jeffrey, you are true friend. Thank you [sic],” she wrote. “A man called John Caudwell. Check him out, he made millions with a company called Phones 4 you.

“He has decided he would like to give me 10 million pounds, but for that he wants 50% of my net profits for life. My debts stand at approximately £6m right now. What say you?”

Epstein replied, telling her to get the offer in writing.

A spokesperson for Mr Caudwell issued a statement saying the pair were “long-time acquaintances” who initially met through charity work. They added Mr Caudwell had been unaware she had consulted Epstein on the offer, and that he decided not to go through with the transaction at the time.

“John Caudwell has never met or had any association or correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein,” the spokesperson added.

The next year, in a message dated May 16, 2010, she appeared to ask Epstein for employment, writing: “but why I don’t understand, don’t you just get me to be your House =ssistant. [sic]

“I am the most capable and desperately need the money. Please Jeffrey think about it”

In the email, she also suggested “Andrew” had met with David Stern, a London-based German businessman with whom Epstein shared hundreds of emails, according to the files, and “he has an update for you”.

Epstein replied that he wanted Andrew to meet the head of JPMorgan. When asked again about whether he could employ Ms Ferguson, he wrote: “I would like to be helpful, lets talk in person.”

Mention in the Epstein files does not mean any wrongdoing.

Ms Ferguson was divorced from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor at the time of writing, but was still the Duchess of York. A lucrative contract with WeightWatchers had just ended and emails appear to show her desperate for funds.

Later emails from September 2010 appear to show Ms Ferguson – named as “Ferg” – asking Epstein: “When are you going to employ me.”

In a response, he says the pair can talk about it when he comes to London “in two to three weeks”.

“Ferg” responds: “Nor I you.. And bever [sic] will. My friendship is steadfast to the end, even after the body is cold .. Love you now and always.. And I know you do tooo.”

If Oat milk was never really milk, what exactly are we drinking?

The Supreme Court has ruled that oat milk is not, at least in the eyes of UK trademark law, milk. Cue predictable consternation, triumphant dairy commentary and a wave of headlines declaring that a beverage poured into millions of flat whites has been officially unmasked.

The more immediate question, however, feels faintly more practical. What exactly are we meant to call it now while ordering coffee? Oat drink sounds vaguely medicinal. Oat beverage suggests airline catering. Oat water is technically honest, but emotionally bleak. Yet “milk” was never really a statement about biology. It described how the product behaves – in tea, in coffee, on cereal – while quietly sidestepping what it actually is.

That linguistic sleight of hand has always done more work than we acknowledge.

What the judgment itself delivered was far narrower than the cultural noise surrounding it. The case centred on Oatly’s “Post Milk Generation” slogan and the legal protections afforded to reserved dairy terms. The court did not rule on nutrition, public health or whether consumers are genuinely confused about the origins of milk. Oats have not changed for millions of years. Nothing inside the carton has changed. Only the language surrounding it has.

But language is rarely neutral, particularly in food.

For years, “milk” has functioned as nutritional shorthand. It signals protein, calcium, satiety and familiarity. Plant-based alternatives adopted the word not because oats resemble dairy, but because the term instantly communicates function and context. It tells consumers what to do with the product. It also, perhaps inadvertently, imports assumptions about its healthfulness.

Oat milk’s rise was built on exactly those associations. Positioned as the plant-based upgrade to almond and soy, it arrived wrapped in a compelling narrative: better for the planet, implicitly healthier than old-fashioned dairy. For many shoppers, the choice was not simply practical but moralised, woven into broader ideas about wellness and sustainability.

Yet oat milk has been nutritionally contested for years, long before judges began weighing its terminology.

Some critics have been characteristically blunt. Jessie Inchauspé, the biochemist known online as the Glucose Goddess, dismissed it in an interview with The Independent’s Helen Coffey: “Oat milk comes from oats, and oats are a grain, and grains are starch. When you’re drinking oat milk, you’re drinking starch juice. You’re drinking juice with a lot of glucose in it. So it leads to a big glucose spike.”

Others have raised concerns less theatrically but no less critically. Functional medicine specialist Sarah Carolides told The Independent that oat milk is “pretty much all carbohydrates”, while nutritionists have frequently pointed to its comparatively low protein content when set against cow’s milk.

Yet even within the same scientific community, caution against overstatement is common. Dr Federica Amati, head nutritionist at Zoe, has urged consumers not to panic over simplified metabolic fears. “If you are drinking occasionally in your tea or coffee, go for the one you like the taste of the most and if you don’t have diabetes don’t worry too much about sugar spikes; your body will likely be able to handle it.”

The disagreement itself is the point. Nutritional science rarely produces the tidy moral clarity consumers crave.

Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College, London, has long argued that processing and food structure matter more than simplistic nutrient hierarchies. “We need to be honest about how processed some of these alternatives are. It’s not just oats and water – you’re looking at a list of ingredients that often includes industrially refined vegetable oils and gums.” His broader warning is not an indictment of oat milk specifically, but of the ease with which products acquire health halos by virtue of category alone.

Which brings us to a deeper, more awkward tension.

In the current cultural reckoning with ultra-processed foods, oat milk occupies an unexpectedly ambiguous position. Transforming oats – a solid grain – into a shelf-stable, milk-like liquid is, by definition, an industrial act. Enzymatic breakdown, homogenisation and stabilisation are not optional quirks but structural necessities. The result may be convenient and palatable, but it sits uneasily within a consumer landscape increasingly suspicious of anything perceived as heavily manufactured.

Plant-based branding trades heavily on the language of naturalness. Production realities are rather less pastoral.

The environmental narrative is no less complicated. Plant-based milks were long presented as the unequivocally sustainable choice, shorthand for reduced emissions and resource use. Yet agricultural systems are not monolithic. Regenerative and organic dairy farming, increasingly visible in the UK, positions well-managed livestock as contributors to soil health and carbon cycles rather than simple ecological liabilities. Buying milk from regenerative farms allows consumers to feel reasonably confident that production methods aim to restore rather than deplete ecosystems.

Oats, meanwhile, are frequently grown within large-scale industrial farming systems reliant on fertilisers, monoculture practices and chemical inputs. Before reaching the carton, they must also pass through extensive processing stages to become something resembling milk – or at least milk’s functional stand-in.

Neither category is environmentally innocent. Both depend on systems consumers rarely see.

Against that backdrop, last year’s revival of full-fat dairy begins to look less like nostalgia and more like another expression of consumer scepticism. As retailers reported rising interest in whole milk and a softening enthusiasm for plant-based alternatives, consumers appeared to be renegotiating what “natural” and “healthy” actually meant.

The Supreme Court ruling does not transform oat milk’s health profile any more than it settles the dairy debate. What it does expose is how much meaning consumers load onto food language, how readily words shape expectations of health, virtue and risk. “Milk” was always shorthand. The real argument was never about vocabulary, but about what people believed they were buying.

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In the country’s north, the dramatic landscapes of the Albanian Alps are scattered with deep river valleys, isolated mountain villages, alpine lakes and national parks. Its south is home to pristine beaches, ancient sites, and breathtaking coastal trails. As well as stunning natural wonders, there is plenty of history to discover, from Greek, Roman and Macedonian ruins to sites which highlight the country’s more recent communist past under Hoxha.

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Experience Albania’s warm and welcoming hospitality in local-run guesthouses, enjoying home-cooked food such as the traditional byrek, a filo-pastry pie with different fillings.

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Only an EU reset can save our flatlining economy from the doldrums

It’s virtually in the chancellor of the Exchequer’s job description to wheel out empty platitudes when confronted with underwhelming economic data. Rachel Reeves’s reaction to the latest miserable UK growth figures lived up to form: “More to do”.

To give her some credit, she and the prime minister, tied by adversity now more than ever, have taxed their way to stabilising the public finances and, some wobbles aside, have managed to retain the confidence of investors rightly concerned about the UK’s debt and deficits. That she has – just – managed to stick to her fiscal rules and maintain the backing of the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England is the markets’ principal concern, and that has been met.

It has come at huge cost in terms of political capital. Ms Reeves is even more unpopular than the prime minister – another occupational hazard for chancellors in tough times.

Yet her success can be measured by the reaction of the financial markets to various Labour leadership crises. If not exactly loved in the City of London and the international bond markets, Ms Reeves is seen as the best of a bad lot. Her fiscal discipline has brought down inflation and allowed the Bank to slowly reduce interest rates, with fiscal and monetary policy in close harmony. These are the necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for longer-term growth.

Beyond that, in the real economy and the here-and-now, there is precious little sign that the government’s so-called “Mission One” to boost growth is on track. The latest national income data indicates that growth in the last three months of 2025 was negligible, and even that was helped by Jaguar Land Rover restarting production in October. Had the software engineers taken longer to recover their systems from the cyber attack, the economy might easily have gone into reverse.

As it is, the building sector fell back noticeably, which is potentially ominous news for hopes of housing and private-sector infrastructure investment. Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis continues, inflation remains above target, unemployment is creeping up, local authorities are running out of money, and businesses are still being hit by high energy bills, taxes and tighter regulation.

Ministers argue, in terms, that all this is necessary to restore the public finances and lay the foundations for growth. But even if that is true, Ms Reeves could have made different, better choices, both economic and political.

She has consistently taken risks with her “fiscal headroom”, leaving a vanishingly slim buffer against financial shocks. The 2 per cent hike in employers’ national insurance contributions was excessive; a better approach would have been to protect businesses and restrain consumption. Her panicky cuts to the pensioners’ winter fuel payment immediately after the election yielded little extra funds but used up so much goodwill that it later made it impossible to implement welfare reforms. She was thus forced to partially reverse the cuts last year.

The government does have a programme for infrastructure investment, but it is not going to be large enough or finished soon enough to deliver economic and political benefits to this government. Yet all is not lost. If she can cash in on some of the confidence she has won from investors to expand her spending on much-needed improvements in transport and education, say, that will signal to the public that Labour is still serious about restoring the economy. She should also reverse the “jobs tax” increase, restart welfare reform and tax spending rather than savings.

Much more promising is what Ms Reeves says about Brexit, a black swan event that is still depressing trade and investment a decade on: “The biggest prize is clearly with the EU. The truth is economic gravity is reality. Almost half of our trade is with the European Union. I’m all up for doing deals with India and the US and Korea. But none of them are going to be as big as what we can get to grow trade relations with Europe.”

Correct – and the “reset” negotiated by Sir Keir was an extremely welcome step change in UK-EU relations. But, as the chancellor so succinctly put it, there is “more to do”. Much more.

Even at this stage, it is plain that Labour will break its hopelessly optimistic manifesto pledge to “secure the highest sustained growth in the G7”. Yet the economy can still improve, with some encouraging signs in the latest numbers that productivity may be rising – and with it real wages. In any case, it will be, as ever, on the economy that the next election will be won or lost. In the summer of 2029, probably the optimal election timing for Labour, the name Morgan McSweeney, like Angela Rayner’s tax affairs and the “passes for glasses” scandal, will be largely forgotten.

Rather, people will ask themselves if Sir Keir and Ms Reeves have, as they pledged in July 2024, built a Britain “with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country, making everyone, not just a few, better off.” The government still has time to get its growth strategy right, but – to say the least – it still lacks visibility. Yet more for the chancellor to do.

US Secretary of State could meet Zelensky as EU leaders gather: latest

US secretary of state Marco ⁠Rubio has said there’s a chance ⁠he could ​meet Ukrainian president ⁠Volodymyr ‌Zelensky at this week’s ‌Munich Security Conference.

Rubio’s arrival comes as European leaders are set to meet at the conference in Germany which kicks off on Friday, hoping for clarity around US president Donald Trump’s inconsistent geopolitical policies and threats that have caused concern for transatlantic relations and the post-World War II international order.

Meanwhile, Zelensky expressed gratitude to Sir Keir and Sir John Healey for a “new and timely air defence package” worth £500 million.

“Russian attacks on our people, energy, and other life-sustaining infrastructure continue unabated, and each strike can inflict significant damage,” he said. as tens of thousands in Ukraine have yet again been left without heat, power and water after Russia battered the country’s energy system with drones and ballistic missiles overnight.

In Kyiv alone, around 3,500 apartment buildings were without heating on ​Thursday after the latest attack knocked out supplies to nearly 2,600 high-rises, on top of the 1,100 already affected by previous strikes, mayor Vitali Klitschko said.