Pilot dies after Nato jet crashes moments after takeoff in Turkey

A pilot has been killed after an Nato F-16 fighter jet crashed moments after take-off.

The incident took place early on Wednesday morning near a highway in western Turkey.

The Turkish Air Force plane took off from the 9th Main Jet Base in the province of Balikesir at 12:56am local time (9.56pm GMT), according to the national defence ministry.

“Our pilot was martyred. The cause of the accident will be determined following an investigation by the crash examination team,” the ministry said in a statement.

Emergency services, including firefighters, medical teams and security forces, rushed to the scene of the wreckage with debris scattered near the Istanbul-Izmir Highway, according to local media.

National defence minister Yasar Guler identified the pilot as Air Force Major Ibrahim Bolat.

“Our heroic comrade-in-arms was martyred on 25 February 2026, as a result of the crash of our F-16 aircraft,” he said in a message of condolence.

Justice minister Akin Gurlek said the Balikesir chief public prosecutor’s office had launched an official investigation into the crash.

He added that the chief public prosecutor, deputy chief public prosecutor and two public prosecutors were at the scene of the incident, according to local media.

“The cause of the crash will become clear following the technical examination by the relevant crash investigation team,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Vice president Cevdet Yilmaz insisted that the crash would be “meticulously examined both judicially and administratively”.

Turkey has been a member of Nato since 1952. In an update unrelated to the incident, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkish Nato forces had been engaged in military exercises this week.

“In the Nato Steadfast Dart 2026 Exercise, our army, together with the Bayraktar TB3 and our TCG Anadolu ship, literally wrote an epic,” he wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

“In this important exercise, the Bayraktar TB3 performed live-fire missions under the challenging weather conditions of the Baltic Sea, executed a safe landing on TCG Anadolu, and delivered one of the most striking performances that Nato has ever seen.

“Remaining airborne for 8 hours in coordination with Eurofighter fighter jets, the Bayraktar TB3 covered a total distance of 1,700 kilometers and demonstrated its superior capabilities one by one.

“I sincerely congratulate every single one of my brothers and sisters who contributed to these achievements that have brought a fresh breath to the naval aviation concept.”

Musk cutting Starlink to Russia’s drones has delivered ‘enormous’ boost to Ukraine, says frontline general

Russia’s drone campaign in Ukraine has been cut by up to 40 per cent, allowing Ukraine to regain territory after Elon Musk blocked Russia’s access to his Starlink satellite network, according to one of Ukraine’s most senior army chiefs.

Andrii Biletski, commander of Ukraine Third Corps, says the impact of SpaceX switching off Starlink in areas of Ukraine now held by Russia’s invading forces had been “enormous”.

“After the blocking of Starlink for the Russians, the level of their efficiency compared to ours has sharply decreased because Starlink is practically irreplaceable as a combat communication system,” the brigadier general tells The Independent.

“Starlink can only be replaced with another Starlink. Therefore, the impact of Starlink on the current course of the war is enormous.

“In the last two weeks, there has been a significant deterioration in the effectiveness of Russian strikes, by about 20 to 40 per cent.”

Biletski, the founder of the Azov brigade and later of the Third Brigade, is a former historian, right wing agitator and veteran of fighting in Ukraine since Russia’s 2014 invasion, and now in command of about 12 per cent of the 1,300km front line.

His forces are concentrated in several brigades in some of the most violent parts of the front where drone warfare has changed the nature of conflict into a 15km-wide “kill zone” dominated by drones, where soldiers hide and flit about a blasted landscape.

In recent weeks, Ukraine has recaptured territory around Pokrovsk, north of Lyman in his area of operations, and south, near Huliaipole, since the Starlink access was recently blocked to Russia.

The small laptop sized Starlink units are the backbone of communications on both sides. They are also fitted on larger drones, Russian Shahed missiles, and used for all battle communications on the ground.

In Ukraine, SpaceX provided free terminals for the early stages of the defence against invading Russians.

But Russia was a quick private adopter of the technology and Ukraine’s ministry of defence now believes Moscow has lost almost every terminal it was using on its operations here.

Biletski believes the damage to Russia’s capability may be long term: “It’s a great opportunity for Ukraine, and I think – this is a subjective opinion – that within a month or two, they will partially regain their efficiency with the help of other means, Russian satellite communications, and so on.

“But they will never be able to fully restore the level of efficiency they had with Starlink in the foreseeable future. I don’t think we’re even talking about three or five years.”

So that’s been a significant strategic blow to the Russians, just that one flicking of a switch.

“Indeed,” he continues. “Americans have an absolute advantage over any army in the world right now – and that’s Starlink.”

He says that if Ukraine also lost its Starlink connection then “we will be on the same level as the Russians again, as it was three weeks ago”.

But the saga of the satellite terminals shows how vulnerable modern armies are to individual systems and in a fast evolving war over technology, daily mutations of cheap relatively low-tech drones can overwhelm the most expensive and conventional armed forces.

Ukrainian drone pilots, who destroyed Nato forces in a battle exercise last year involving thousands of troops, warn that Russia’s unmanned weapons pose a formidable danger to the West.

A small unit of 10 Ukrainian drone operators were able to destroy 17 armoured vehicles, damage another 30, cripple the capacity of an attacking division, and even deliver humanitarian assistance.

They were fresh from the real front line. For them routing Nato forces was a breeze.

One of the pilots, Mykola, call sign “Nick” from 412th Nemesis Brigade, says he was “surprised” Nato forces did not appear to have studied the war in Ukraine which has evolved into a drone conflict in which large assaults by armoured groups have ended.

“Massive armoured vehicle assaults do not work any more,” he says. “Because now there is a kill zone that is growing. And the quantity of the different kinds of UAVs in the sky – half of them just working to find the target – half of them going after the target – means there is a very fast reaction time between being seen, and being destroyed.”

The 2025 exercise, Operation Hedgehog, was intended to reveal the extent to which Nato had to change its tactics, senior officers said.

“This was a Nato-led and organised exercise set up to allow us to experience lessons from a drone- experienced army to enable us to learn fast and adapt,” one general, a former Nato commander, explains. “So a success – not some disaster for Nato that shocked us. Nato knows it needs to develop fast on drones.”

Russia is also learning in real time on the battlefield. This puts pressure on Nato defence doctrine as rapid expansions of arms buying has been partly stalled by the break-neck evolution of modern weapons.

Some of the roles of helicopters and fighter bomber aeroplanes are being replaced by much cheaper drones.

“It changes every month. Every month we find something new and start using it effectively. After a month they find something to defend against this technology. And all the time the kill zone is growing and the quantity of different UAVs is going up,” warns Mykola.

He is currently fighting near Pokvrosk, the scene of Russia’s hardest push. Here the “kill zone” is up to 20km deep – where human beings cower for survival under a drone-filled sky.

Medical evacuations have been almost impossible and force the use of remote controlled ground drones. Infantry, hiding in bunkers, are resupplied from the air by “heavy” bomber drones dropping around 10kg of water, food, batteries and ammunition. The barest essentials to life in the kill zone.

Sudden shifts in technology can have an immediate effect. The key is how fast one system can be replaced with another.

Ukraine is already backing up its own communications in case Starlink is cut.

Alongside European allies, Ukraine is also setting up alternative satellite intelligence feeds amid fears that the US may cut them off if so-called peace talks with Russia break down.

And close to the battlefield in the eastern front, drone operators hunker down in workshops where they modify, repair and update their equipment daily.

Many are sent by European arms manufacturers for testing. None, they say, are as useful as Ukraine’s products which are cheaper and more plentiful – mostly, they say, because the motive for arms manufacture in Europe is money not national defence.

“Here we could be struck with Russian missiles any minute. Or with deep strike drones or even middle range drones or with aviation bombs. We’re pretty pretty close to the front line,” says Eugene.

He was “bought” from another Ukrainian unit for a pickup truck – traded like a football player – because he’s a premier division UAV engineer.

Is being close to the front important?

“Yeah, because we don’t have a lot of drones, we have to quickly repair them, adopt, modify, and we have to stay in constant communication with units that do all the fighting,” he says.

“We go to them ourselves. We are constantly trying to understand how we’re using our drones, what do we need. Now it’s going to be a change in season which will bring a whole lot of new difficulties.”

Dirty Business creator on how his water crisis drama has caused ‘fury’

The creator of Dirty Business, the campaigning Channel 4 drama that’s drawn comparisons to Mr Bates vs the Post Office, says he has been inundated with “furious” messages from Brits who feel powerless in light of the raw sewage scandal – and are calling for change.

Dirty Business, which airs its finale tonight, dramatises two Oxfordshire residents’ 10-year investigation into raw sewage contaminations by water companies in the UK.

The three-parter has been hailed as a five-star hit, with critics and viewers alike full of praise for its unflinching look at how faeces, condoms and dirty nappies made their way into England’s rivers and seas.

“The situation we have is just about the worst possible situation that we, the British people, will accept without there being some kind of revolution,” writer and director Joseph Bullman tells The Independent. “It’s just the worst imaginable thing, other than pouring s***e through our taps – so you hope there’s going to be some change.

“People feel impotent. They feel like whatever we say to our political class, we get the same policies, election after election, government after government. Everyone wants our system to be different, no one knows how to elect a government that’s going to change it.”

In the series, two middle-aged Cotswolds neighbours, biologist Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) and ex-copper Ash Smith (David Thewlis), begin investigating why the local wildlife has abandoned their increasingly browning River Windrush. While being fobbed off with countless emails from dismissive Environment Agency representatives – who are meant to be regulating the water companies – they discover via whistleblowers that water companies have been illegally pumping vast amounts of raw sewage into the waterways.

Bullman was fresh from creating Channel 4’s Partygate – a satirical take on the political scandal under Boris Johnson’s leadership – when he stumbled upon an article on the privatisation of British water suppliers. As explored in the show, Thames Water was owned by Australian bank Macquarie before being sold to Canadian pension fund OMERS and the Kuwait Investment Authority in 2017.

“I thought to myself, surely there’s some kind of story there, and I very quickly realised that all our water companies are owned by overseas investment banks or private asset management firms,” he says.

He worked on the project for two years, but used the decade-long research of campaigners Smith and Hammond as the basis for the films. “They’re national heroes, Ash and Peter, and should become knights of the realm because they have worked for 10 years to bring this to the attention of everyone,” he says.

For Bullman, factual dramas are vital to raising awareness of scandals like these. “When you do something that strikes a chord with people’s lived experiences, you get a response that resonates in a way that you don’t get with a lot of conventional dramas,” he says.

“I feel a swelling up of anger on this and people connect to it because it’s about something they can see in their own lives.

“There’s some good drama made in this country, but a lot of it feels very homogenised and made with the international streaming market in mind – lots of serial killers, strong female detectives, missing children. I think that feels a bit remote for people.”

One particularly harrowing scene in Dirty Business sees the parents of eight-year-old Heather Preen cling onto her lifeless body after she’s infected with E-coli, two weeks after falling into a pool of allegedly contaminated water on a Devon beach. A jury returned a verdict of misadventure during an inquest into her 1999 death, with South West Water and the Environment Agency denying responsibility.

With tragic stories like these being portrayed throughout the series, Bullman wanted to bring some humour and levity to other parts of the investigation – and some of the Environment Agency’s responses were prime comedy material.

“Looking at Dirty Business and the water industry, it’s such an incredibly Byzantine, complex story and some stuff is funny. I thought, ‘Can I ask audiences for three hours to watch this ecocide, where they’re killing everything that lives in the rivers and putting people’s lives at risk?’ Why make it relentlessly bleak because that’s not what life is like?

“Episode three gets inside the Environment Agency and the policies that they’ve implemented are so farcical. At one stage, they took cars off of the employees inside the agency who investigate the sewage works because they said they were trying to turn the needle on climate change, so they had no way to drive to the rivers and coasts to look into it.”

Last year, several water companies were handed large fines over wastewater treatment failures, with South West Water agreeing to pay £24m, while Thames Water was hit with a record £104m fine by Ofwat in May over environmental breaches involving sewage spills.

However, Bullman is hoping that water regulation will go even further.

“The Environment Agency, for many years, has been operating a policy called operator self-monitoring, which means they invite the water companies to regulate themselves,” he says. “The agency has been defanged and gone on to do the bidding of the water companies – that has to end. We need a real regulator.

“No water company executive has ever been prosecuted, no water company owner, board member or investor has ever gone to prison,” he adds. “What we need in the first instance is for our laws to be enforced.

“Boris Johnson’s government and this government said they were going to introduce tough legal sanctions but they’ve existed for decades now and they’ve never been enforced. We need the regulation to be taken seriously.”

A spokesperson for the Environment Agency told The Independent that their “sympathies are with the family of Heather Preen” and that the show raises “important issues about water quality, the actions of water companies and regulation of the sector over recent decades”.

“Our priority is always to protect the environment for people and wildlife, and the organisation has undergone significant changes in recent years to better tackle water pollution,” they said. “More people, better data and increased powers mean we will always act on intelligence of potential offences.

“This year we are on track to do 10,000 inspections of water company assets, rooting out wrongdoing and driving better performance. Since 2015, we have concluded 69 prosecutions against water and sewerage companies securing fines of over £153m.”

Zelensky announces new talks with US after Trump promises to ‘stop the slaughter’

President Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed that new talks with the United States will take place this week.

In a statement to reporters on WhatsApp, he said that the discussions would continue on Thursday.

Talks are to centre on a “prosperity package” and post-war reconstruction as well as preparations for a trilateral meeting that would include Russia, which Kyiv hopes will take place in early March.

During his annual address to Congress, President Donald Trump said: “We’re working very hard to end the ninth war, the killing and slaughter between Russia and Ukraine, where 25,000 soldiers are dying each and every month.

“Think of that, 25,000 soldiers are dying a month. A war which would have never happened if I were president, would have never happened.”

It comes as the British government rubbished Russia’s claim that Ukraine is trying to obtain a nuclear weapon with British and French help.

Russia‘s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) did not provide evidence for the claim. A British government spokesperson said: “This is a clear attempt by Vladimir Putin to distract from his heinous actions in Ukraine. There is no truth to this.”

Ukraine dismissed the claims as “absurd”, as it marked four years since the full-scale Russian invasion.

Tate’s Tracey Emin show proves she’s our greatest woman artist

If you’re one of the many who are still trying to pick apart the reality from the tabloid controversy surrounding “Mad Trace from Margate”, as Britain’s leading woman artist has cheerfully styled herself, Tate’s major retrospective – her biggest to date – is the best possible place to start.

Don’t be misled by the show’s subtitle, A Second Life. Referring to the period following Amin’s recovery from cancer in 2020, and the lease of life she feels it unleashed, it gives the impression we’re in for one of those “career surveys” that are substantially made up of very recent work and light on the greatest hits. But fear not, a good 90 per cent of the exhibits are very much from Emin’s first life.

And what a life it was, one of the most extensively documented in the history of art, when Emin turned the British art world on its head with works such as the infamous “My Bed” and “Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With”, while garnering more outraged tabloid spreads than the Renaissance and Impressionists combined.

The emphasis here, however, is squarely on the art. The curatorial team led by Tate’s outgoing director Maria Balshaw opt for a slightly austere scholarly discretion, with most of the well known works, plus a few surprises, strikingly presented against deep teal backgrounds, with negligible context: no Sun newspaper covers and barely a mention of the YBAs with whom she found fame.

“Hotel International” (1993), one of Emin’s classic hand-embroidered blankets, appears like an innocuous celebration of her childhood family life with shoutouts to close relatives, but reveals masses about her endlessly disrupted upbringing as you home in on her hand-scrawled additions. The well-known video “Why I Never Became a Dancer” (1995) gets a new lease of life in this “high art” context. Recounting the story of how a group of louts chanted “slag-slag” as Emin took to a dance floor in a nightclub in her hometown Margate, it closes with Emin rising above it all, grooving to Sylvester’s “You make me feel mighty real.” I felt like cheering her right there in the gallery for getting this tale of small town nastiness out into a snooty art world that is probably more dominated by privilege now than it was when she made the film.

Among the lesser known works, handwritten texts, such as “Exploration of the Soul” (1994) give us Emin’s backstory in even greater depth: racial abuse (on account of her part-Turkish heritage), rape, rejection by her school friends and their families, a botched abortion which continued during her taxi ride home. And that’s not the half of it.

The Emin represented here could have been a lost cause with a very different fate. Her ability to create her own chances from a deep-seated belief in her own talent and value comes over as frankly heroic. And anyone who can sew the words “Every time I pass Dunkin Donuts I think of you“ onto one of their major works – “Mad Tracey from Margate” (1997), her again – without it feeling unbearably arch gets my vote every time.

Even early student paintings, which Emin destroyed after her first abortion (they loom large in the show), exhibited here as tiny photographs, show a feel for expressive painting that many mature artists would envy. That instinctive feeling for pain feeds into the large figurative canvases that have dominated her recent exhibitions, with their veils of dripping paint, sexually explicit postures and raw unfinished look. The sudden appearance of a group of these works early in the exhibition disrupts its chronology. If the intention is to give a sense of continuity of Emin’s work, with similar themes emerging over decades, it dulls the sense of standing by the art as it develops that you tend to want from a retrospective exhibition.

After passing down a corridor, lined with wistful photographic self-portraits from 2001 along one wall, and brutally graphic naked post-surgery selfies from 2020 along the other, we find ourselves confronting her most famous work, “My Bed” (1998). A recreation of Emin’s unmade bed after a serious depressive episode, all shambolic duvets, full ashtrays and contraceptive packets, this once notorious work just gets more popular. Met by incredulity at the time, it feels now prophetic, of our current age where mental health is less stigmatised and people routinely reveal their intimate lives online. Emin was ahead of the game in making art that was almost entirely about herself, and sufficiently consistently that it doesn’t – contrary to everything you might expect – feel self-indulgent.

Yet while it’s lit for maximum impact, framing “My Bed” with recent works makes it feel something of an afterthought in Emin’s development, rather than the high point of her early career.

While the later paintings are often highly seductive, with their beautifully fluent lines and visceral colour – I particularly enjoyed the poster image “I Never Asked to Fall in Love” with its field of dripping red – the narrowness of the colour palette, dominated by red and blue, becomes monotonous, and the once refreshing unfinished look now feels like an affectation. Nearly 20 years into this “new” way of painting, I’m still waiting for it to be taken to the next level.

After a room devoted entirely to paintings from Emin’s post-cancer “second life”, which differ from earlier works only in that the figures tend to be single rather than in couples, the exhibition ends all too soon. I was left wanting a lot more. The work has never looked better, though a shade more on the way her art emerged – all that fame undoubtedly impacted on Emin’s art – and a bit more humour would have given us a fuller experience. But of Emin herself, I was entirely convinced. In contrast to just about everything else being produced in art today, every detail of the work here is genuinely and deeply felt. Britain’s greatest living woman artist? Oh, I think definitely.

‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ is at Tate Modern from 27 February until 31 August

‘I swapped supplements for LaVita – here’s what I learned’

If you’ve ever experienced “pill fatigue”, you’re not alone. Every day we’re bombarded with ads for capsules, gummies and vitamin pills. But once we’ve bought them, it’s often unclear whether they’re safe to take alongside other supplements – or whether they even work effectively without being paired with something else.

The wellness industry frequently glorifies having a personalised supplement “stack”, or borrowing a fitness expert’s recommended routine. In reality, bottles of pills tend to clutter up our cabinets, and most of us don’t stick with influencer-approved protocols for long.

Experts consistently tell us that a whole-food diet is the best way to get vital nutrients into the body, rather than relying on pills. But no matter how well-intentioned you are, there are days when you simply can’t hit your nutrition goals. Many people struggle to eat 30 plants a week, and on a daily basis we’re often busy or eating on the go.

When our nutrient intake is inconsistent, it can affect how effectively we absorb essential vitamins and minerals. Certain minerals help enzymes function properly, while vitamins often work in tandem to regulate metabolic pathways – meaning we need balance, not excess, to feel our best.

According to the most recent national dietary data in the UK, only a third of adults eat the recommended five to seven portions of fruit and vegetables a day. The figures are even lower for children, who can be notoriously fussy eaters.

I decided to try a liquid concentrate that promises to eliminate the all-too-familiar problem of too many pills and not enough time – or willpower – to eat perfectly. LaVita is a product that aims to replace multiple supplements with a single, science-backed daily drink derived from whole foods. It sounds almost too good to be true – but could it really replace my carefully planned “stack”?

LaVita’s founder, former athlete Gerd Truntschka, explained that he stopped believing more pills equalled better health once he began considering how nutrients work in combination, and how staying close to the original food source can improve absorption. He set out to create an all-in-one liquid that mimics the natural matrix of whole foods.

The liquid contains more than 70 plant-based ingredients. It’s a living concentrate that includes enzymes, omega-3s and trace elements, designed for optimal bioavailability – something many pills struggle to offer.

The first thing I noticed about LaVita was the glass bottle. I try to avoid plastic packaging where possible, and in an increasingly toxic world – where everything seems to be served in plastic or bulked out with preservatives and fillers – it was refreshing. The ingredients list also looked promising.

I popped it in the fridge before my first taste test. Once chilled, I poured a tablespoon of the liquid into a glass of filtered water and stirred. It blended well, but even better with the small electric whisk I usually use for greens powders and electrolytes.

The taste was surprisingly pleasant. With so many ingredients, I expected something far more challenging, but there was nothing offensive about it – likely because it’s 70 per cent fruit juice, alongside 18 per cent vegetable juice and five per cent herbal extracts. The rest is made up of oils and trace minerals. Compared to swallowing 10 or more pills a day, it felt like a win.

Ingredients that don’t usually feature in everyday diets – such as rosehips, milk thistle, fennel and sea buckthorn – bring some of the more unusual, bitter flavours. While these can be an acquired taste, modern diets are severely lacking in bitter foods, so it was encouraging to see them included, especially given their benefits for digestion and gut health.

After a few days, the mental relief of simplifying a complex health routine into one daily drink was surprisingly rewarding. For the purposes of the trial, I stopped taking supplements containing iron, vitamins C, A, D, B6 and B12, folic acid, copper, selenium and zinc, as LaVita contains all of these in recommended doses. I normally take them in various combinations to support energy, immunity, brain health, and hair, skin and nails, alongside a healthy diet.

I also appreciated that LaVita is free from preservatives and additives. I’m selective about supplements because many contain bulking agents and preservatives that aren’t great for gut health over time.

Liquid supplements are often praised for better bioavailability, and there’s truth to this. Because they’re already dissolved, the body doesn’t need to break them down in the same way, meaning nutrients can enter the system more efficiently. They can also be gentler on the stomach. LaVita is also vegan, lactose-free and gluten-free.

I was curious about the inclusion of cold-pressed oils and learned that they help the body absorb fat-soluble vitamins such as D, E and K more effectively. I also found that taking the drink with breakfast worked best for me. While you can have it on an empty stomach, I prefer not to take anything containing green tea or B vitamins without food.

Throughout the testing period, the drink was easy to incorporate and enjoyable to consume. I didn’t experience any dip in energy and, reassuringly, noticed no negative changes to my skin – something I’d been quietly concerned about after ditching my usual supplements.

Each bottle contains 50 servings, meaning it lasts almost two months when taken daily. While I still made an effort to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, it was comforting to know that on days when a healthy breakfast was replaced by pastries, or dinner turned into pizza, I was still getting a broad spectrum of plant-based nutrients.

I’ll admit, I initially thought this liquid superdrink might be too good to be true. But the pros far outweighed the cons, and I was impressed by the overall experience. Anyone accustomed to regular juice or squash might find the taste slightly bitter at first – largely due to the lack of added sugar – but the ingredient quality more than makes up for it.

I was pleased with my skin, my energy levels, and the fact that I managed to avoid the cold that was circulating the office while testing LaVita, which hopefully suggests my immune system approved too.

While it’s not a replacement for a healthy diet, as a supplement swap LaVita ticks a lot of boxes: thoughtful packaging, strong ingredient sourcing, and a genuinely easier way to support nutrition. I can see it being a particularly helpful option for busy parents, fussy teens, older adults, and anyone who struggles to eat 30 plants a week – or swallow tablets at all.

Ready to simplify your supplements? Make the switch to LaVita today

John Davidson told ‘swearing would be edited out’ of Baftas

John Davidson, the Tourette syndrome campaigner whose life inspired the film I Swear, has said that he was told any involuntary expletives would be cut out of the Bafta Film Awards broadcast.

Sinners stars Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan were presenting a prize at the Royal Albert Hall awards ceremony on Sunday when Davidson began involuntarily shouting out the N-word as a tic.

While host Alan Cumming explained to the audience that “a person with Tourette syndrome” was in the crowd and that he had “no control over his language”, the racial slur was not edited out of the show when it was broadcast on a delay later that evening.

Speaking in his first interview about the Baftas, Davidson – who saw actor Robert Aramayo take home the award for Best Actor for portraying him in I Swear – spoke about how “upset and distraught” he had been since the Baftas, having allegedly been told that any offensive involuntary tics would be cut from the broadcast.

“[Film studio] StudioCanal were working closely with Bafta, and Bafta had made us all aware that any swearing would be edited out of the broadcast,” Davidson told Variety. Sinners’ studio, Warner Bros, has also said that it immediately flagged its concern with Bafta during the ceremony and had been assured the request would be passed on to the BBC and that the racial slur would be removed from the broadcast.

Davidson, meanwhile, said that the awards body and broadcaster should have been more prepared for such an incident. “I have made four documentaries with the BBC in the past, and feel that they should have been aware of what to expect from Tourette’s and worked harder to prevent anything that I said… from being included in the broadcast,” he said.

The campaigner claimed that there was a microphone “just in front” of where he was sitting, adding: “With hindsight I have to question whether this was wise, so close to where I was seated, knowing I would tic.”

The Independent has contacted Bafta for comment.

Following the event, a BBC spokesperson said: “Some viewers may have heard strong and offensive language during the Bafta Film Awards. This arose from involuntary verbal tics associated with Tourette syndrome, and as explained during the ceremony it was not intentional. We apologise that this was not edited out prior to broadcast and it has been removed from BBC iPlayer.”

In an internal memo, BBC staff were also told that the slur had aired “in error” as producers had not heard the word, and that another had been cut from the broadcast.

Bafta also apologised, saying that a “comprehensive review” was underway and that they took “full responsibility for putting our guests in a very difficult situation”. They also apologised to Lindo and Jordan.

Davidson suffers from coprolalia, a version of Tourette’s which involves involuntary cursing or making socially inappropriate remarks. During the Baftas, he chose to leave the auditorium shortly after realising that Lindo and Jordan had heard his tic from the stage.

After Lindo said on the night that nobody from Bafta had spoken to him or Jordan afterwards, Davidson revealed that he had reached out to the Sinners studio to apologise to Lindo, Jordan, and production designer Hannah Beachler, who he also shouted the slur at.

Explaining that he was often triggered by his surroundings, Davidson explained: “I want people to know and understand that my tics have absolutely nothing to do with what I think, feel or believe.”

He said that this part of the condition, called echolalia, had led to him shouting “perhaps 10 different offensive words” during the Baftas. He said that he had yelled “boring” at the Bafta chair and said homophobic comments and “paedophile” towards Alan Cumming when he made a joke about himself and Paddington Bear.

“Tourette’s can feel spiteful and searches out the most upsetting tic for me personally and for those around me. What you hear me shouting is literally the last thing in the world I believe; it is the opposite of what I believe,” he explained.

“The most offensive word that I ticked at the ceremony, for example, is a word I would never use and would completely condemn if I did not have Tourette’s.”

Following the backlash over the decision to include the slur in the broadcast, the BBC removed the Baftas from streaming service iPlayer.

Households energy bills to drop as Ofgem energy price cap is lowered

Household energy bills are set to drop in April after energy regulator Ofgem lowered the energy price cap by seven per cent.

The reduction aligns with Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ promise that £150 would be cut from the average household bill.

Ofgem announced on Wednesday morning that it had reduced the energy price cap by £117 to £1,641 a year for a typical dual fuel household.

Sir Keir Starmer said: “Energy bills are at the front of everybody’s mind, and I know they’ve been too high for too long.”

The prime minister said the price cap drop will mean lower energy bills for millions across the UK, but added that “there is more to do and my government is pulling every lever to bear down on the cost of living and protect the pound in the pockets of working people.”

The energy regulator estimated the change to the energy price cap amounted to a reduction of around £10 a month for the average household using both electricity and gas.

In November, Ms Reeves promised to cut £150 from the average household bill from April. On Wednesday, she said: “Cutting the cost of living is this government’s number one priority and I know energy bills are one of the biggest concerns, that’s why at the budget I said we would bear down on energy bills.”

The price cap, which was first introduced by the regulator in 2019, limits the maximum amount energy suppliers can charge for each unit of gas or electricity used.

It also sets a maximum daily standing charge – the cost of having your home connected to the grid.

The headline price cap figure of £1,641 provided by Ofgem indicates what a household using gas and electricity, and paying by direct debit, can expect to pay if their energy consumption is typical.

Energy secretary Ed Miliband said the energy price cap drop was “happening because of the actions we took in the budget”, but added to Sky News, that the government knows it has “got further to go”.

He said: “The price cap in 2025 across the year was lower in real terms than 2024. We want to drive it down even lower, so it’s up to £300 lower.”

Tim Jarvis, director general of markets at Ofgem, said: “The main driver of today’s reduction is the change to policy costs announced by the chancellor in the budget.

“Our focus at Ofgem remains on bearing down on the costs within our control and unlocking the investment needed to support the transition to a more stable energy system over the longer term.”

It is important to note that it does not limit a home’s total bills because people still pay for the amount of energy they use – so if it is above the average they will pay more, and if it is below they will pay less.

Speaking before the energy price cap announcement, Which? energy editor Emily Seymour said: “Households can expect a significant cut to their energy bills in April, which will come as a relief to millions of people struggling with cost-of-living pressures.

“The bulk of this change is expected to be applied to your electricity price per unit, so your exact savings will depend on your usage; look out for communications from your energy provider in the coming weeks to see how it will affect your bills.”