NHS hospitals are increasingly charging patients for treatment, with income rising by a quarter in just a year.

The figure is expected to keep rising, with trusts hoping to take advantage of Labour’s “relaxed” attitude to the private sector.

Analysts said that hospitals – which are facing a deficit of more than £2 billion this year – were seeking to maximise potential income from patients facing huge waiting lists.

Many offer patients private rooms and hotel-style accommodation, including fruit baskets and daily newspapers.

Five of the top 10 central London NHS trusts have released accounts that show combined forecast revenue of £197 million. Great Ormond Street Hospital, Barts Health and Royal Free saw the biggest growth, followed by Guy’s and St Thomas’, and Chelsea and Westminster.

Analysts said growth was similar across the country, with average increases of around 23 per cent at the two-thirds of trusts that had published their accounts.

Across the sector, that could mean more than £770 million raked in by NHS hospitals for private patients in the past financial year – a record, and up from £675 million in 2019-20.

Estimates suggest the figure could reach £1 billion by 2025-26.

Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has vowed to go further than Sir Tony Blair in using independent sector capacity to ease NHS pressures, while saying the health service must remain free at the point of use.

Last week, an independent investigation by Lord Darzi found that NHS hospitals were doing less work for their patients despite being handed more money.

His report warned that productivity had dipped sharply, with medics wasting ever more time owing to a lack of beds, diagnostics and other kit.

The figures on income from private patients also come amid warnings from Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, that next month’s Budget will involve “difficult decisions” to plug a £22 billion black hole.  The national debt – the sum total of every deficit – is now 100 per cent of Britain’s gross domestic product.

Many NHS trusts with long waiting lists offer patients fast access to consultations, diagnostics and treatment if they choose to pay for it.

Some have found other ways to bolster their funds, by charging NHS patients extra to stay in better accommodation.

Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust has begun offering single private rooms to patients for up to £205 a night with an en suite bathroom. The hotel-style package, which began being offered earlier this year, includes a basket of fruit, a widescreen television and a daily newspaper.

NHS hospital trusts are permitted to generate up to 49 per cent of their income from private patients. In recent years, most trusts which earned private income received much less, with most getting less than 10 per cent.

Analysts said the combination of long waiting lists and straitened NHS finances meant hospitals were increasingly trying to maximise their income from private patients.

Experts said hospitals without private patients units were losing out on income, because patients with health insurance were often prepared to use it, but struggled to find private hospitals that could carry out the treatment required.

Many large private chains focus on low-intensity, high-volume surgery, such as cataracts and hip and knee operations.

NHS trusts with private patient units – which can mean a whole wing, or just a few beds – are often more able to carry out complex work, including cancer and heart treatment, and revision surgery, and have the back-up of intensive care facilities.

Philip Housden, of Housden Group, a specialist healthcare consultancy, which analysed the accounts of major trusts with private patients units, said: “If patients with health insurance can’t be seen in a private hospital – perhaps because the case is complex – then the NHS will often end up having to treat them, and footing the bill. It means the public purse is effectively subsidising private health insurers.

“All of this adds to pressures on NHS waiting lists, and costs for hospital trusts. I imagine that the Labour Government will be thinking about this.”

He said NHS trusts were estimated to be losing around £1 billion a year in treating patients that could have been treated as private patients, using health insurance.

He said increasing use of private services in the NHS was a way of “placing more of the rising costs of the NHS on to the broadest shoulders”.

However, another senior health service source described NHS private patient units as the “dirty secret” of the NHS, because facilities funded by the taxpayer were used for those who were able to pay, although staffing costs were paid for by the private sector.

England’s health system is forecasting a deficit of around £2.2 billion across its services for 2024-25.

Health leaders say that despite £165 billion funding for the NHS – a record, outside of the pandemic – trusts are struggling to make ends meet, partly because of major costs in recent years, such as the £3 billion covering strikes.

One NHS source said trusts were seeking ways to maximise their income, while cutting waiting times. He said many trust leaders felt encouraged by the stance taken by the Health Secretary, who has said he will go “further” than Sir Tony in using the private sector to ease NHS pressures.

He said: “I think Labour is in some ways happier to see the grey area between public and private spending, there is a tendency to be more relaxed about it.

“There are some ironclad rules, it can’t come at the expense of NHS patients, but the Health Secretary has made clear his interest in use of the private sector, and trusts will act accordingly”.

Under Sir Tony, Labour introduced Patient Choice, allowing patients to have NHS treatment carried out by the private sector. Meanwhile, private healthcare groups were given contracts to carry out block contracts of work for the NHS, such as cataract operations and hip and knee surgery.

Use of the private sector is expected to feature heavily in the 10-year plan for the NHS, due to be published next year.

The senior NHS source said: “The public is quite pragmatic, as long as the outcome is good they don’t care who provides it.

“Often you have got the same consultants who would be working privately elsewhere doing that work on your site, and bringing in income to your trust.”

The trends come as the public grows increasingly resigned to paying for their care.

A survey by the  Independent Healthcare Providers Network shows that almost seven in 10 people (67 per cent) say that they would consider using private healthcare.

Data from the Private Healthcare Information Network show record numbers of hospital admissions of private patients, with 238,000 in the first quarter of 2024, up from 199,000 admissions in the same quarter in 2019.

Sir Julian Hartley, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospitals, said: “Providing some private care allows NHS trusts to reinvest that income in services for patients. Faced with growing demand and a tough financial climate, trusts have cut the longest waits for treatment and continue to work flat out to see patients as quickly as possible.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “The NHS is broken, forcing many patients who can afford it to choose to go private for faster healthcare. Meanwhile, those who can’t are left behind in a two-tier system.

“This Government will take a principled but pragmatic approach to the use of the private sector to cut the NHS care backlog. In the long-term, our 10-Year plan will reform the NHS so no one feels forced to pay for treatment.”

Popping to your local shop could be costing you as much as £832 extra a year than going to the supermarket.

Which? collected price data on 42 items which were commonly purchased from Morrisons Daily, Tesco Express and Sainsbury’s Local and compared the cost of the same items at big supermarkets.

The data shows Morrisons customers will pay 21 per cent more – around £16 – on average a week,  if they buy at the supermarket’s convenience store, Morrisons Daily.

The basket of shopping – which includes cheese, blueberries, and ice cream –would cost a shopper £832 more over the course of a year than if they bought the same items from a supermarket.

A 400g tin of chickpeas at Morrisons costs more than double in its Daily stores, while a 165g pack of Philadelphia soft cheese was £1 more.

For Sainsbury’s, the difference between big- and small-shop prices is five per cent without a Nectar card, and 14 per cent with one.

Tesco Clubcard holders pay an additional 11 per cent more, compared to 10 per cent without one.

At both supermarkets, this adds more than £500 to the cost of shopping over 12 months.

Basics including milk and bread were also more expensive in convenience shops.

A medium white Hovis loaf cost 12 per cent more at Sainsbury’s Local and Tesco Express, and 14 per cent more at Morrisons Daily.

All three supermarkets charged eight per cent more for two pints of own-brand milk in their convenience shops.

Ele Clark, Which? retail editor, said: “Convenience stores may often be easier to travel to and handy for shoppers who need to stock up on a few essentials, but people who have to use them regularly will be spending significantly more over the course of a year than those with access to larger supermarkets.”

She added: “This latest research shows that more can still be done to increase the range of affordable product options for those consumers who rely on convenience stores.”

Clare Bailey, of Retail Champion, said that customers had to be prepared to pay for convenience. She said: “The customer wants the convenience and the customer is increasingly moving away from the big weekly shop.”

The retail expert said that the costs of running the smaller shops were higher for supermarkets, as rent is more expensive in “convenient” locations. She said that being in city centres also makes deliveries and waste collection more difficult.

Ms Bailey said: “I don’t see it as necessarily costing the consumer more. It’s a lifestyle choice.”

Convenience shopping has become more popular in recent years, and the sector grew by an estimated 5.3 per cent in 2023, according to Mintel, the market research company.

Tesco is estimated by analysts to account for nearly a third of the convenience store market in the UK. It opened 60 new Tesco Express stores last year, according to its 2024 annual report.

Both Waitrose and Asda have opened smaller versions of their shops. Britain’s third-largest grocer, Asda, unveiled 110 in February in an effort to catch up to Sainsbury’s.

In August, Waitrose said it was ramping up investment in stores, with plans to spend £1 billion new and existing sites over the next three years. As well as opening 100 new shops by 2029, it will refurbish and update almost half of its existing stores, equivalent to 150 shops.

A Sainsbury’s spokesman said: “There may be price differences between convenience stores and supermarkets. This is because our Sainsbury’s Local stores, which tend to be located in city or town centre locations, often have higher operating costs relative to their size, such as rents and business rates.”

A Morrisons spokesperson said: “We’re always working hard to keep prices down and competitive for our customers while maintaining high standards and availability in all our stores.

“Last year, we became the first supermarket to introduce our budget ‘Savers’ range into Morrisons Daily stores nationwide.”

Tesco was contacted for comment.

A tornado has swept through a Hampshire town, causing damage to properties and felling trees.

No one was hurt during the weather event in Aldershot, which happened at 12pm on Friday according to the local council.

The Tornado and Storm Research Organisation said it had tracked the length of the movement of the tornado to be 2km.

The organisation’s investigator posted on X, formerly Twitter, that it had given the tornado a preliminary T1 or T2 rating, which would rate it as light or mild.

Louise Le Poidevin, a local resident, said: “I was coming back and it was really, really cloudy, and as we got home the thunder started and the rain started – it was really torrential rain. The trees in the back garden were bent over and it was freaking us out – everything was lifted off the ground, the leaves were in a big spiral going round.

“I thought the doors and windows would come in. The noise was terrifying, then a gazebo came flying over onto next door’s fence. Then as soon as it started, 30, 40, 50 seconds later, it had gone.”

Ms Le Poidevin, who runs a grounds maintenance business, added: “I thought it was a tornado because of the spiral. I have never seen anything like it, and I am quite a weather watcher. Thankfully no one was hurt – I do not know how, because it was at midday.”

A Met Office spokesman said there had not been any official confirmation that it was a tornado, but added: “Looking at the evidence on the radar at the time, it definitely suggests that it could have been”.

Residents took to social media to share their surprise at the rare weather event. One posted on X: “Freak weather has put our little town on the map.”

A Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said: “Firefighters were part of a joint response at an incident in Aldershot yesterday after a number of properties and trees were damaged in strong winds.

“Crews from Rushmoor and Surrey FRS were first called shortly after midday and worked closely with partner agencies to make the scene safe.”

In a statement, Rushmoor Borough council said: “There was a weather event in Cadnam Close, Aldershot, which caused damage to two blocks of flats and brought down several trees. Luckily, no one was injured.

“Damage to property has also been reported nearby in Lower Farnham Road, Osprey Gardens, Basing Drive, Andover Way, Ayling Lane, Sandown Crescent and Boxalls Lane. We are now working closely with all of our partner agencies to make the scene safe.”

Alex Baker, the Labour MP for Aldershot, posted on X: “I’ve been out talking to residents whose homes were damaged. Thank you Rushmoor Fire Brigade, the teams from Vivid Homes and everyone else who came out to help with the clear-up – a great community effort.”

The Met Office has issued a yellow weather warning for the rest of the weekend, with thunderstorms expected on Saturday covering Wales, large parts of the Midlands and parts of southern England. Heavy rain is expected to follow on Sunday in the southern half of the UK.

A Met Office spokesman said heavy thunderstorms are developing again and “we could potentially see some localised flooding particularly across south Wales, Gloucestershire and Somerset”. 

Rainfall totals could be as high as 50-80mm in South Wales and parts of south-west England, which could mean some areas see “about a month’s worth of rain within the space of 24 hours” and in those areas there will be a risk of localised flooding.

Cornwall has been the most affected area so far on Saturday. Becky Mitchell, a Met Office meteorologist, warned there was “probably quite a lot of water on the road” after reports of about 30mm of rainfall in the area, which could lead to “tricky driving conditions”.

“The only other place I’ve seen some thunder strikes was quite early this morning, about 6am, and that was in the Surrey and Oxfordshire region,” she said. “We have got heavy showers across Wales and London at the moment too.”

A weather warning for rain will come into force on Sunday for Wales and central south-west England before another comes into effect on Monday, covering areas further east and north.

It is 33 years since Catherine and Natacha left Harrods, and more than a year since their abuser Mohamed Fayed died, yet one emotion still grips them as they talk about their former employer: fear.

It takes immense courage for anyone who has suffered sexual abuse to talk about it in public, but these brave women, who were among the victims of Fayed who took part in last week’s BBC documentary unmasking him as a serial rapist, also had to overcome the very genuine belief that they might be putting themselves in danger by speaking out.

So chilling were the threats he made to them and their families to silence them that to this day they worry that someone might come after them.

“It’s 30 years later,” says Catherine, who is now in her early 50s, “but we still have the same feeling of that level of threat to our safety. I genuinely had to sit down and think, do I want to be that exposed? Will they come after me?”

Almost 40 women are now involved in legal action against Harrods and around 60 more have been in touch with lawyers to say they, too, were victims of a man we now know to have been a prolific serial sex attacker.

Fayed was so brazen about the fact that he was molesting and raping young female employees that one former manager at the store told the BBC that anyone who worked in a senior position for Fayed who claims not to have known what he was up to is a liar.

He even sexually assaulted Catherine in front of three of his own children and then tried to force himself on her when they were asleep in a nearby room.

Natacha says she was sexually assaulted by him on a weekly basis whenever she was alone with him in his office.

Neither of them, in common with all of the other victims – or survivors as they prefer to be termed – had anyone they could turn to for help within Harrods, whose monstrous owner used money and menace to shut down any attempt to get a message to the outside world about what really went on inside the world’s most famous department store.

Fayed never paid for his crimes, despite being questioned by police on several occasions, and the process of seeking justice for his victims is only just beginning. 

On Friday Natacha joined other survivors at a press conference in London where the legal team, led by Dean Armstrong KC, said Harrods must be held accountable for a “system” within the business that enabled Fayed to abuse women at will.

Employed as ‘potential prey’

Natacha and Catherine say they “come as a pair” and were only able to speak out thanks to the strength they draw from each other. Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph after the press conference in a hired function room on the edge of Hyde Park, they are exactly the sort of people you would imagine Harrods would have hired: well-spoken, well-mannered, immaculately turned out.

They innocently thought the same when they were hired in 1990, but they now have no doubt they were hired not as model employees, but as potential prey. They tell of a modus operandi that was repeated down the decades by Fayed to ensure a steady conveyor belt of victims who were hired, befriended, groomed, molested and then, in some cases, raped.

“I was a country bumpkin,” says Natacha, as she describes the naive 19-year-old she was when she fell into Fayed’s orbit. “I had a rural upbringing walking dogs, riding horses, not streetwise. I knew [Fayed] was chairman of Harrods but I didn’t know of his reputation.”

Natacha and Catherine, who was also 19, were signed up with the same recruitment agency, which sent them both for interviews as assistants to Fayed’s personal assistant within months of each other in 1990. Both were slim, blonde and pretty, and both now suspect the agency sent them to Harrods knowing that was what Fayed preferred. Both unexpectedly found themselves being interviewed by Fayed himself.

Asked to describe Fayed’s office, Catherine comes up with one word: “Gold.” Natacha says: “That sense of opulence and grandeur was quite overwhelming at that age.” Each was hired straight away, believing they had landed their “dream job”, says Natacha, and for the first few months all seemed well, apart from the fact that there was precious little to do. “We spent a lot of our time doodling,” says Natacha.

Fayed “was like an uncle or a father”, she adds, telling her to call him Papa. “We were lulled into a false sense of security. He would say that ‘if you do your job well you will be part of our family and you will want for nothing’. He was charismatic, he put you at ease.”

Catherine says: “He had his own children. He had two daughters. He was married. Even if you’re grown up you don’t suspect someone like that [of being a threat].”

Shockingly, however, Catherine was to discover that Fayed was even prepared to use his young children as a means of disarming his victims and catching them off guard.

Four or five months into her employment, she was asked to go to Fayed’s mansion in Oxted, Surrey, to help his daughter Camilla with piano lessons one Saturday.

‘It almost excited him more to see you petrified’

“When I got there he introduced me to his children and his wife,” says Catherine. “He made you feel that if you worked for him, you were like family.”

She was led to a huge playroom that contained a piano but also a ball pit, “and out of nowhere he picked me up, put his hand right up my skirt and sort of groped, and threw me in. I remember being submerged and resurfacing and all of them were laughing at me.

“I felt a sense of humiliation, of ‘what just happened?’, it all happened so quickly.

“It almost excited him more to see you petrified or terror-struck. The more vulnerable you were, the more he seemed to get some satisfaction or pleasure out of it.”

Later that night she had dinner with the children’s nanny and went to bed in a room down the corridor from the children’s bedrooms. “He came into the room and tried to get into bed with me and assault me,” she says. “I resisted and he didn’t like that at all, he was angry. He said something along the lines of maybe next time you’ll want it or welcome it.”

Terrified, and trapped in the country mansion with no means of fleeing, she used her pager to contact Natacha, who told her to drag a chest of drawers across the door. The next morning she was put on a train back to London as though nothing had happened.

Like other victims hand-picked to work in Fayed’s office, Natacha was sent for a medical when she joined Harrods, during which she was subjected to a gynaecological examination and tested for Aids and sexually transmitted diseases without her consent. She was never given the results, but we know from other victims that the results would routinely be sent straight to Fayed. She was, she says, being “checked for my purity”.

Private meetings with Fayed were initially above board, but then came the forced kisses and the groping that would happen without warning. “It was so quick,” she says. “It wasn’t like he’s gonna sidle up really slowly – he would grab you.” She says that “the fear left me paralysed”.

Despite working in the same office, Natacha and Catherine were not allowed to chat to each other at work, they were forbidden from taking lunch at the same time and never once left work together. If they wanted to communicate at work they had to secretly pass notes to each other, making sure they were not spotted by Fayed’s PA.

They did, though, pluck up the courage to meet up at weekends, becoming firm friends, though they never told any of their colleagues they were socialising together for fear that it would be reported back to Fayed. Anyone who talked, of course, might discover they were not the only victim, and Fayed was no doubt anxious to avoid that happening.

“We had to keep our meetings very secret,” says Natacha, “because you didn’t know who to trust. To us it was obvious others had succumbed [to the Fayed regime] because they had store cards, they had cars, Cartier jewellery, expensive clothes.”

‘He was very scary’

It is easy for anyone hearing the victims’ stories to wonder what stopped them from simply quitting their jobs.

Part of the answer, they say, is that they needed “to pay the rent”. Neither came from well-off families, and Catherine had lost her father when she was a child – as Fayed knew because he had probed her about it in her job interview and “probably saw a vulnerability, not having a father figure”. Natacha says that despite everything “I still wanted that job to be the job I thought I was going for”. On top of that, of course, was the fear.

“He turned,” says Catherine, her voice trembling and tears starting to form in her eyes, “and he was very scary. The tone in which he threatened you left you in no uncertain terms that he meant it, and he would send his security, and they did know where we lived, and if we ever said anything, not only would we never work in London again but they would come and find us.”

One victim has even described how John MacNamara, Fayed’s head of security, told her that she was a girl all alone in London and “someone could jump out of the bushes at you or you could have a sudden accident”.

None of the women regarded such talk as idle threats, hence the reluctance of Catherine and Natacha to take part in the BBC documentary when they were approached.

Both of them were so afraid of Fayed when they left Harrods that they left the country for lengthy periods because they no longer felt safe in London or even the UK.

In Natacha’s case, the end came when she was invited to Fayed’s Park Lane apartment for what she was told was a job review, and when she got there the door was locked behind her and Fayed’s bedroom door was open with sex toys on view.

She sat on the sofa and Fayed “pushed himself onto me”. They fell to the floor with him on top of her and she managed to kick herself free before running for the door. He laughed at her and told her that if she ever breathed a word to anyone, she would never work in London again, adding that he knew where her family lived. She never went back to the office.

In Catherine’s case she was sacked after she pushed Fayed away, hard, when “he tried to go up my blouse”. Both women were gone within eight to 10 months of starting.

Yet the ordeal did not end there. Natacha describes losing confidence and going abroad to find work, where she struggled with male bosses and for a time struggled with male relationships, though happily she says she is “all good now”.

‘I believed I was gonna get hunted down’

Catherine left the country to go travelling because: “I really, truly believed I was gonna get hunted down.” She suffered “a lot of nightmares”, she says.

For other women, the damage done by Fayed went even deeper. One woman was subjected to threats over the phone even after she left Harrods, became suicidal and had to spend six months in a psychiatric hospital. She was unable to form romantic relationships and missed out on the chance of having a family as a result of the trauma that Fayed had left her with.

Catherine and Natacha, who have waived their right to anonymity, agreed to this interview, and the BBC documentary, on the basis that their surnames would not be used. They do not want details of their current circumstances or even their employment history to be made public because they fear that someone might be able to use that information to find them. Someone with links to Fayed.

They insist that the road to justice goes straight through the doors of Harrods, rather than via any individuals who might have enabled Fayed’s internal human trafficking operation or helped keep it quiet.

Harrods was bought by the Qatar Investment Authority in 2010, but barrister Mr Anderson has a ready answer for anyone who suggests the post-Fayed Harrods should not be accountable for what went before.

“If you buy a house it’s your obligation to check the rafters aren’t rotten and the roof isn’t about to fall in,” he says. Fayed’s sexual abuse of employees was well documented as early as the 1990s, not least by Tom Bower in his 1998 biography, which detailed the medical examinations, the molestation and the threats.

Harrods says it has accepted “vicarious liability” for Fayed’s conduct, that it has reached settlements with the “vast majority” of people who have approached it since 2023 and that it is now “a very different organisation” from the one presided over by Fayed.

Mr Anderson is not satisfied. “They say they didn’t know about al-Fayed’s behaviour until 2023. That is simply not true.”

The victims’ legal team now includes Gloria Allred, the US attorney who has represented the victims of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Cosby, among others. She says that Fayed’s abuse was “not a secret” when Harrods was sold and was “widely known by its employees”. The victims, she says, need “meaningful accountability for what they have suffered”.

The path to justice, then, may be coming into focus after women spent decades suffering in silence. The fear, though, may never go away.

Neither woman had told their families the full details of what happened to them before the BBC documentary was broadcast, and talking about it clearly drags up memories that they do not want to revisit.

“I’m sorry if I’m a bit intense,” Catherine unnecessarily says. “When you go back over it, you realise just how scary it was. You were in a complete terror-struck zone of absolute fear.”

Kamala Harris’ strategy for winning the White House could be best summed up as: tread as carefully as possible.

The US vice president has shunned the traditional stable of national media interviews, frequently ducked grillings by journalists, and only recently added a policy platform to her campaign website.

It is perhaps the most restrained approach to a presidential election in recent years, a highly disciplined effort to build the broad voter coalition she will need if she is to beat Donald Trump.

The 59-year-old Ms Harris has reason to believe this tactic could work – and it comes from across the Atlantic: Sir Keir Starmer’s Ming vase strategy.

Cautious and calculated, Sir Keir and the Labour Party eschewed bold policy announcements for a safety-first, data-driven approach to winning back disenfranchised working class voters while retaining its more urban, liberal base.

Insiders say the Harris campaign has taken note of Labour’s route to victory this summer.

It is understood there have been numerous exchanges between Democratic figures and Labour MPs, including at the Democratic National Convention last month.

Top Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s general secretary David Evans, Jon Ashworth, head of the think tank Labour Together, and several Labour MPs were among those to attend the four-day gala in Chicago.

This month, two of Sir Keir’s former top advisers – Deborah Mattinson, Sir Keir’s former head of strategy, and Claire Ainsley, his former director of policy – also travelled to Washington to brief Democratic strategists and Harris campaign figures on their insights.

‘Strategic dilemma for the centre Left’

“That strategic dilemma for the centre Left of, how do you win over what you might call the squeezed middle, that is a really central dilemma for both parties,” said Ms Ainsley. “And so therefore there was interest in, how did Starmer start to turn this around?”

In polling and focus groups conducted in key swing states for the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute, Ms Mattinson and Ms Ainsley found “real parallels” to the preoccupations of their target demographic – what they termed “hero voters”.

Here’s the overall picture as is stands.

For Labour, these were disaffected working class voters struggling to make ends meet, who perhaps voted for Brexit and backed Boris Johnson in 2019.

Ms Harris’ campaign has also launched a calculated effort to win back a similar demographic – undecided voters, many of whom are parents, without a college degree and living pay cheque to pay cheque – who abandoned the Democratic Party for Trump in 2016.

“Politically, there are some major differences [between Britain and America], not least our voting system,” said Ms Ainsley. 

“But there are some similarities, and what we wanted to do was see if we could apply some of the approach that Deborah and the Labour team took to understanding the voters that we needed to reach.”

Who Labour targeted, and why

What they discovered, she said, was that these target groups “are certainly open to voting for Harris in the way that they were open to voting Labour, but they really wanted to hear what the economic offer was”.

Labour’s response was to release a pledge card that outlined its proposed first steps in government: stabilising the economy, reducing NHS waiting lists and controlling migration better.

Ms Ainsley said the Harris campaign had done well to acknowledge the cost of living crisis, but suggested the vice president could do more to “crystallise” her economic message.

She cited the Harris campaign’s proposed policies on price gouging, affordable housing and tax cuts for small business owners. “Those are the sorts of things that those voters are wanting to hear more about,” she said.

The similarities between Ms Harris and Sir Keir go beyond their political style. Both are former prosecutors from modest backgrounds, something they have both drawn on in their campaign pitches.

Both Ms Harris and Sir Keir also lack the personal, charismatic appeal of Bill Clinton and Sir Tony Blair – the most recent Democratic and Labour leaders to have an intensive trans-Atlantic dialogue around political strategy.

A counterbalance to Right-wing populism?

But Ms Harris’ allies, like Sir Keir’s, have argued this may in fact be a strength: an appealing counterbalance to prevailing Right-wing populism.

However, critics have suggested that the so-called Ming vase strategy could have downsides for the Harris campaign. 

With many of its economic policies untested during the election campaign, Labour has faced questions by independent analysts over its proposals and polls suggest the Government has struggled to find popular support for some.

Karen Finney, a veteran Democratic strategist and close Harris ally, said there were clear differences given Ms Harris was a sitting vice president.

“To some degree, she has a record that she’s running on,” she said, but as the presidential candidate Harris has also “talked about what she wants to do around housing, small businesses that are slightly different priorities in some ways, than where the the Biden Harris administration has been.”

Harris’s late entry a factor

Ms Finney said while there were some parallels to be drawn with Labour’s approach, Ms Harris’ strategy was partly borne out of her late entry into the presidential race.

“We’re in a very unique situation in that she became the nominee in July, and so there isn’t as much time for a big, [vastly different] policy rollout,” she noted.

“Given the accelerated time frame that this election is happening on, message discipline is all the more important, because every communication with voters is critically important,” she said. “If you make a mistake, there isn’t as much time to try to recover from it.”

Ms Finney also defended the Harris campaign’s decision to shun traditional media in favour of online streaming, such as Thursday night’s event with Oprah Winfrey.

“They clearly decided that they want to use the majority of the candidate’s time directly communicating with voters… So the events that they do, all the digital communication, the other platforms that they’re using,” she said. “It remains to be seen if that will work”.

Garry South, a Democratic strategist in Ms Harris’ home state of California, said there was some truth to the criticism that the vice president has not discussed policy enough.

But he said his years of experience running campaigns, polling and focus groups had reinforced to him that “voters, for the most part, are not policy-heavy when they vote for president.”

He argued that veteran party operatives such as himself “have no problem with Kamala Harris not giving hour-and-a-half interviews with every news outlet – because I just don’t think that voters are into that”.

“I would rather have my nominee being careful and being cautious than shooting their mouth off every three minutes, like Donald Trump,” he added.

She has always been a familiar face to the German public, cropping up constantly on TV news debates and even taking part in a cookery show where she made îles flottantes.

Now Sahra Wagenknecht, a stalwart of the German Left, is stirring up trouble in politics with a new party that could become a major player in Germany’s next general election.

Set up in January this year, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) combines old-school Left-wing economics with a deeply populist streak on migration, as well a distinctly Kremlin-friendly attitude towards Ukraine.

It could be a dangerous recipe for Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, as many supporters of his centre-Left SPD party are disillusioned with his military support for Kyiv and failure to tighten up the country’s border security.

More importantly, it reflects a major shift at the heart of German politics: after decades of bland but predictable leadership, voters are abandoning the centre en masse and embracing colourful populist figures.

With the BSW polling around 10 per cent nationwide, about the same as the Green faction in Mr Scholz’s coalition, it could potentially be a kingmaker in coalition talks after the German general elections in September 2025.

It is also set to perform well in this weekend’s state elections in Brandenburg where, along with the hard-Right AfD, it is striking a chord with war-weary East Germans.

Conservatism and Marxism

Born in East Germany under the communist GDR, Ms Wagenknecht was raised by her German mother after being abandoned by their Iranian father.

In her early career she was a member of the GDR’s ruling party, the Sociality Unity Party (SED), where her blend of social conservatism and Marxist economics went down well with her decrepit communist elders.

After the unification of Germany, she ended up in Die Linke, German’s hard-Left party. But allies say she never felt truly at home there due to her scepticism towards mass migration, which ultimately led to her departure.

“Many politicians have chosen not to speak about migration… but Sahra Wagnknecht kept talking about it, and criticised her party, Die Linke, about it,” said Steffen Quasebarth, a newly elected BSW MP in the Thuringia state parliament.

“Her criticism got ever stronger, and it led to a rift, and she ended up deciding to form her own party to address that precise problem.”

Unfortunately for Die Linke, she took many of the party’s brightest stars with her, although none outshine her as the most recognisable face of the new party.

At a rally this month in Frankfurt an der Oder, ahead of the Brandenburg elections, Ms Wagenknecht turned up 45 minutes late and apologised to the crowds, blaming a traffic jam near Berlin.

‘Why have energy prices exploded?’

The small border city is connected by a bridge to the town of Słubice in Poland, one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters. And the rally itself was held on a stage right next to Frankfurt an der Oder’s Friedensglocke (peace bell), a relic of the post-war border treaty between the former GDR and Poland.

The crowd had already been fired up by lead candidate Robert Crumbach, who complained that migration had overwhelmed Brandenburg’s hospitals and schools.

When Ms Wagenknecht took the stage – after a rendition of the anti-war German pop anthem “99 Red Balloons” – she wasted little time getting onto Russia’s war in Ukraine, accusing the German government of hypocrisy on energy politics and its stance on other conflicts in the Middle East.

“Why have our energy prices exploded? Because we have a government that sees itself as the moral master of the world,” she said. “And their view is that as they have the loudest morality and hypermorality, we can no longer buy the evil Russian gas and oil. So instead, we get the good gas from Qatar, an Islamist dictatorship that funds Hamas.”

She added: “It’s true, the world is complicated, there are many wars, but other European countries live in the same world, and despite this their economies are growing, they are investing, they are not closing their industries, and the prices are not as explosive as ours are.”

There is also a populist jab at Scholz’s coalition, which includes the Greens, whom she claims are too busy “sipping oak milk macchiatos with their friends” in gated communities to worry about the concerns of normal voters.

‘She brings change’

Several hundred East Germans had turned up for the rally, mainly old Die Linke voters who crossed to BSW with Ms Wagenknecht.

“She brings imagination, she brings change, she brings energy, and she’s a good woman,” said Veronika, 65. “It’s time we have a change of leadership.”

Lydia, 72, a retired schoolteacher, said: “We have the impression that Scholz has said too much and done too little. People here are very unhappy with his performance. We’ve also experienced so many Ukrainian refugees coming here and we just don’t have the funds for them… we are waiting a long time for doctors appointments, and there are no places left in the schools.”

To her critics, Ms Wagenknecht’s foreign policy, which sees Germany as being pushed around by the United States and dragged into wars against its best interests, is dangerously close to making her a pro-Putin fifth columnist.

She was humiliated in February 2022, when she confidently predicted on a TV panel show that Vladimir Putin would never dare to invade Ukraine – shortly before he did precisely that.

She then tried to save face, criticising Putin over the invasion, but has since slipped back into a more cynical attitude towards Russia, suggesting that he is no worse than US leaders when it comes to warmongering.

“She’s on the very pro-Russian end of the spectrum, a Left-wing populist who grew up in East Germany and thinks Marxism and communism is superior to capitalist democracy,” said Rafael Loss, a German politics and European security analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“While she at times is critical of Putin, she has always added a big ‘what if’, at the end, usually pointing to US failures or trying to minimise the damage that Russia has produced,” he added.

Police in Canada have issued an appeal seeking a woman who posed as the potential buyer of a Porsche before stealing it and running over the owner.

Video footage of the theft released by police shows a woman knocking on the victim’s door and feigning interest in the white Porsche SUV parked outside his house.

She then climbs into the car and suddenly hits reverse, ploughing into the owner, who had been standing at the rear.

He received serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local media.

The suspect reverses out of the driveway, but appears to be having difficulty putting the car into gear, at which point the video ends.

Canadian police are seeking the driver of a second car seen in the video, whom they suspect is an accomplice to the theft.

In a statement, Peel Regional Police said: “On Friday, Sept 6 2024, at approximately 2pm, the suspect attended the victim’s residence near Winston Churchill and Eglinton Avenue, Mississauga, in response to an Auto Trader advertisement.”

They added: “The victim was selling his vehicle, a 2022 Porsche Cayenne. While viewing the vehicle, the suspect reversed rapidly, striking and injuring the victim before fleeing with the stolen vehicle.”

Police described the suspect as “as a female, South Asian, 5’5”, 120lbs, thin build, long brown hair, brown eyes, wearing a white long-sleeve shirt, brown skirt, and leather-strapped sandals.”

They have appealed for anyone who recognises her to come forward.

Peel police added that the public should be “vigilant” when selling valuable items online.

They recommended that residents use special designated zones at police stations for valuable trades in goods.

The Ukrainian government has banned the use of the Telegram messaging app on state and military mobile phones in a bid to prevent Russian spying.

Telegram, an online messaging service similar to WhatsApp, has been a key tool for sharing information about the war in Ukraine, but Kyiv’s intelligence services fear it is also vulnerable to Russian cyber attacks.

The Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council (RNBO) said it took the decision to ban Telegram to “minimise” those threats, such as Russia being able to intercept messages even after they have been deleted.

Ukraine’s ban only applies to official mobiles and other devices issued to government and military staff, with the use of Telegram on their personal phones still permitted.

“Telegram is actively used by the enemy for cyber-attacks, the distribution of phishing and malicious software, user geolocation and missile strike correction,” the RNBO said in a statement.

It said the ban of Telegram on official government devices was decided after a presentation by Kyrylo Budanov, the military intelligence chief of Ukraine, who showed how Russia could be able to hack the system.

“I have always supported and continue to support freedom of speech, but the issue of Telegram is not a matter of freedom of speech, it is a matter of national security,” Mr Budanov reportedly said of the ban.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Telegram quickly became a major source of live updates on the war for the public.

Telegram is said to be the most popular messaging site in Ukraine, used by 72 per cent of the population according to one recent survey.

The app was founded by Russian-born tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov and his brother in 2013.

Mr Durov fled Russia after refusing to shut down critics of the authorities and headed to France, where he has citizenship. But he was then arrested last month as part of an investigation into organised crime.

According to Mr Durov, Telegram has around 900 million active users worldwide.

It came as Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said he had not yet received approval from the US or UK to use long-range missiles inside Russia.

“Neither America nor the United Kingdom gave us permission to use these weapons on the territory of Russia, on any targets at any distance,” he said on Friday, adding that both countries feared an “escalation” of hostilities.

“We did not use long-range weapons on the territory of the Russian Federation.”

Iran unveiled an upgraded attack drone at a major military parade in Tehran on Saturday.

The Shahed-136B drone has new features and an operational range of more than 2,500 miles, almost double that of its predecessors, Iran’s IRNA news agency said.

Older Shahed 131 and Shahed 136 drones have been used extensively by Russia to attack infrastructure targets in Ukraine, and have reported ranges of 600 miles and 1,600 miles respectively.

The drones are unmanned “kamikaze” weapons that can be fitted with a warhead of up to 50kg.

Typically launched in swarms, they are flown into targets where they detonate on impact.

A new “Jihad” ballistic missile was also revealed by the Iranian military at Saturday’s parade.

Iranian state media said it runs on solid fuel and was made by the aerospace wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It reportedly has an operational range of more than 600 miles.

‘Sacred defence week’

The parade was held in commemoration of the 44th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war as part of an annual event series called “sacred defence week”.

Pictures showed large formations of troops, armoured vehicles, missiles and other weaponry parading past the mausoleum of Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Masoud Pezeshkian, the new Iranian president, attended the parade and reaffirmed Tehran’s commitment to opposing Israel.

“Today, our defensive and deterrent capabilities have grown so much that no demon even thinks about any aggression towards our dear Iran,” he said.

“With unity and cohesion among Islamic countries… we can put in its place the bloodthirsty, genocidal usurper Israel, which shows no mercy to anyone, women or children, old or young,” he added.

Britain, France, Germany and the United States announced new sanctions on Iran earlier this month, alleging that it had been providing ballistic missiles for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

Western countries have repeatedly accused Iran of providing Russia with drones and missiles, a charge that Tehran denies.

Iran used hundreds of Shahed drones and ballistic missiles to attack Israel on April 13, in what it said was retaliation for an Israeli attack on its consulate in Syria.

A new eco “incineration tax” risks pushing councils to the brink, local authorities have warned.

Emissions from burning waste will be taxed from 2028 as part of Government efforts to encourage the uptake of greener technologies.

Around half of all household waste collected by councils is burned every year in facilities that produce the same greenhouse gases as around three million homes.

But the carbon tax could cost as much as £6.5 billion by 2036, and £747 million in 2028, according to research by the Local Government Association (LGA), the County Council Network (CCN) and the District Councils Network (DCN).

The tax, which currently applies to aviation, power and industry, adds around £65 per ton of carbon produced. Councils could be forced to raise taxes or cut other vital services unless the tax burden is shifted, the LGA warned.

All three bodies are calling for the taxes to be shifted to the industries that manufacture the materials, such as packaging, textiles and furniture.

Councils argue that they have no way of reducing the amount of waste they have to collect, while manufacturers can move to more recyclable materials.

The taxes would put an extra burden on councils already struggling to meet their financial obligations. Half of councils are warning of effective bankruptcy within five years amid rising social care costs, growing populations and caps on tax increases.

“Current proposals risk councils and local taxpayers facing enormous costs, which simultaneously risks the scheme failing to meet its objectives while exposing councils to significant additional financial risk,” said Cllr Adam Hug, the environment spokesman for the LGA.

Cllr Richard Clewer, the infrastructure and planning spokesman for the CCN, added: “If these costs are to be borne by councils, they will have to paid for by council tax or by reducing highly-valued services, so we are calling on the new Government to rethink these proposals.”

Waste incineration is the main destination for household rubbish that is not recycled, and the number of plants is expected to increase by 30 per cent in coming years.

But the practice has been criticised by environmental campaigners for the amount of emissions and air pollution produced, and over concerns that recyclable waste also ends up in incinerators. One analysis found that more than half of plastic that ends up incinderated is either “readily recyclable” or “potentially recyclable”.

Cllr Andy Graham, the DCN environment spokesman, said: “Taxing councils for the waste we have little option but to incinerate would be a bombshell for the delicately-balanced funding of local waste services – including district councils’ successful efforts to increase recycling.

“We want to make it easier for our citizens to recycle materials like clothing and medical waste so it doesn’t need to be incinerated. We can only do this through action from producers, who should be incentivised to produce recyclable goods and penalised if they don’t.”

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said: “We are committed to expanding the UK ETS [emissions trading scheme] to include waste incineration and energy from waste facilities from 2028. We will continue to engage with the sector on our proposals, and will publish further detail in due course.”

When he was 18, the Duke of Sussex vowed to finish the work started by his mother, Princess Diana.

More than two decades on, he remains true to his word. On Monday, he will take to the stage before a global audience to champion two causes intrinsically linked to her legacy: landmines and young people.

Prince Harry, 40, will be the star guest at five high-profile events held over two days in New York during UN General Assembly High-Level Week and Climate Week, which will also see him focus on conservation, sustainable travel and the many crises facing the tiny African country of Lesotho.

But it will be his first two appearances that honour that birthday pledge; when he steps out on behalf of the Diana Award, which works to create positive change for young people, and the Halo Trust, the charity for which the late Princess famously issued a clarion call for action by walking through an Angolan minefield in 1997.

Tessy Ojo, the chief executive of the Diana Award, hailed the Duke’s continuing support as “truly priceless”, while the Halo Trust said that in a time of “unprecedented conflict” the Duke’s voice was needed “more than ever”.

The appearances will come amid a flurry of activity for the Duke, marking something of a shift in his public profile as he takes centre stage, solo, to further his own charitable causes.

Travelling without the Duchess of Sussex, he will undertake a busy schedule somewhat evocative of his days as a working royal, with back-to-back charity engagements in place of glitzy award ceremonies and television interviews.

It comes after his 40th birthday celebrations, when he said that his mission was “continue showing up and doing good in the world”, and before a return to London, where he will appear at the annual WellChild Awards.

His involvement will also help to position the Duke and Duchess’s relatively nascent Archewell Foundation, alongside big philanthropic big-hitters such as the Clinton Global Initiative on the international stage.

In an interview to mark his 18th birthday in 2002, the Duke said that his mother had inspired him to carve a future role for himself in championing lesser-known causes.

“I want to carry on the things that she didn’t quite finish,” he said.

In 2016, he expanded on the same subject. “All I want to do is make my mother proud. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,” he said.

When he steps out at the Sheraton Hotel in Times Square on Monday morning, he may well cast his mind back to that pledge.

The Duke’s first engagement of the week will be on behalf of the Diana Award, a charity set up to reflect the late Princess’s belief that young people can change the world – and the only one to bear her name.

He will take part in a panel discussion with Christina Williams and Chiara Riyanti Hutapea Zhang, two young recipients of the Diana Award, and Dr Ojo on the current mental health crisis engulfing young people.

The event coincides with the award’s 25th anniversary celebrations, and Dr Ojo said that the continuing support of both the Duke and the Prince of Wales was critical.

“It’s incredibly helpful to have people in positions of power, especially a non-political position, and especially in a system when young people are feeling more and more unheard and unseen, speak up for us,” she said.

“To have people who have that platform, who have that power, not only to listen to young people but help amplify their voices, is truly priceless and we are deeply honoured and grateful to have both of them involved in our work, lending their voices to the challenges that young people face.”

As the Diana Award celebrates its 25th anniversary, it is particularly keen to address the mental health struggles faced by young people.

Dr Ojo acknowledged that the topic had been a long running thread through both of the brothers’ work, highlighting the “pivotal” and “groundshifting” Heads Together campaign, which was launched in 2016 and is spearheaded by the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

While his brother took up the issue of homelessness, the Duke has followed in their mother’s footsteps in championing the anti-landmine Halo Trust.

In 2010, he travelled to Mozambique to tour a minefield with the charity, dressed in a visor and protective vest.

The Halo Trust’s New York event is being held in partnership with the Angolan government and comes almost five years to the day since the Duke retraced his late mother’s footsteps through a former minefield in Huambo, in 2019.

He also visited a minefield near the south-eastern town of Dirico, calling for an international effort to clear landmines from the Okavango watershed in the Angolan highlands.

A spokesman for the Halo Trust said that the Duke was very interested in landmine clearance in that particular area because “he understands that without it, you cannot gain access for conservation”.

She said that the charity had always “really hugely appreciated that special connection he has to Angola”.

She added: “He understands it is a long-term commitment, he has not forgotten the people of Angola, he stays in touch with us, he’s interested, he cares about our work and is in regular contact with us.”

The Duke was particularly interested when the charity had to move from the front line in Ukraine, expressing great concern for staff welfare. He spoke to two employees caught up in the siege of Mariupol on Zoom.

“We are living in an unprecedented age of conflict and are grateful to the Duke for his support as we need it more than ever,” the spokesman said.

Lord Goldsmith is reportedly to marry for the third time after becoming engaged to Ian Fleming’s great niece.

The 49-year-old Conservative peer, who has six children, separated from his second wife last year and has now reportedly asked partner Hum Fleming, 34, to marry him.

Ms Fleming, whose great uncle was the James Bond author, is a public relations executive in the fashion and lifestyle sector and a member of the Fleming private banking dynasty.

She suffers from epilepsy, and is an ambassador for the Young Epilepsy Foundation. Earlier this year she shared footage of one of her seizures on social media to raise awareness about the condition.

In an interview with The Telegraph two years ago, she described how her seizures have become convulsive in adulthood and how at night she sometimes bites her tongue so hard it bleeds.

A friend of the couple confirmed their engagement to the Daily Mail. “They are engaged,” the friend said. “Hum was wearing a big sparkler on a night out in Mayfair this week and said she and Zac were to be married.”

Lord Goldsmith’s split from his second wife, Alice Rothschild, 41, was revealed last year. The couple had been married since 2013 and share three children.

Their spokesman said at the time: “Alice and Zac have made the difficult decision to separate. They do so amicably and are committed to jointly raising their three children in a happy and healthy environment.”

Friends of the couple insisted that no one else was involved.

The environmentalist served two stints as an MP for Richmond Park in London in 2010-16 and 2017-19. During this time he held several junior ministerial positions, including for the foreign office, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and international development.

He and his first wife, Sheherazade Goldsmith, also have three children.

The Telegraph has contacted Lord Goldsmith for comment.

Sir Mick Jagger has said that he is “so sad” at the death of Cleo Sylvestre, “the first female vocalist to sing with the [Rolling] Stones”.

Sylvestre, also known as Cleopatra Palmer, who had been a feature of film, stage, television and music since the 1960s, died at the age of 79 on Friday morning, according to a statement from Fulcrum Talent.

The veteran screen and stage star was known for playing Melanie Harper, Meg Richardson’s adopted daughter, in ITV’s Crossroads and sang as Cleo, with the Rolling Stones backing her on a cover of To Know Him Is to Love Him in 1964.

Sir Mick, the lead vocalist of the Rolling Stones, said in an Instagram story: “So sad to hear of the passing of my old friend, the actress and singer Cleo Sylvestre, the first female vocalist to sing with the Stones.”

The 81-year-old shared a black-and-white photo of the band with Sylvestre.

In an interview with Masterpiece PBS, Sylvestre had said that her mother would often cook for the band.

“I mean, the Stones were always round, especially Brian [Jones] and Mick [Jagger],” she said.

“We lived in a council flat with a tiny little kitchen, and she’d do meals for 15 people.”

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) posted on X: “We’re saddened to hear of the death of Cleo Sylvestre, who performed as Audrey in our As You Like It production last year.”

“Our thoughts are with Cleo’s family and friends at this time.”

Theatre at the Tabard, a theatre in Chiswick, west London, said in a social media post that it was “saddened to hear of the passing” of Sylvestre, who “graced our stage last year” for “a wonderful sold-out blues night.”

The US-born playwright and author Bonnie Greer wrote on X that Sylvestre was “one of the reasons that from my vantage point in NYC that I thought that this country has the best anglophone theatre, and the best place to be a black woman in it”.

She added: “I still think that. Thank you, Cleo!”

Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, the UK’s first sickle cell nurse specialist, also wrote that she was “devastated”.

She added: “My wonderful, kind friend. Amongst many activities, she was a great supporter of the Mary Seacole Statue Appeal.”

Dame Elizabeth shared a photo of Sylvestre dressed as Jamaica-born nurse Seacole at the unveiling of the memorial statue.

A statement from Fulcrum Talent on Friday said: “It is with deep regret that I have to announce the sad news that Cleo Sylvestre MBE died this morning.

“Much loved and admired by her peers, she will be remembered as a trailblazer and a true friend. She will be sorely missed by so many.

“We ask that you respect the privacy of her family at this difficult time.”

In 2023, Sylvestre went to Buckingham Palace where she was made an MBE for services to drama and charity.

Her most recent screen roles included the ITV thriller Platform 7, and Channel 5’s revamp of All Creatures Great and Small.

Sylvestre made her debut at the RSC in As You Like It last year after a long theatre career, which included Wise Child at Wyndham’s Theatre and Under Milk Wood at the National Theatre.

Her film roles have ranged from the 2014 film Paddington and 1993’s The Punk, while her TV appearances included The Bill, New Tricks, Till Death Us Do Part, Grange Hill, Doctor Who and Coronation Street.

Jostled by others on a packed commuter train, or crowding into a noisy pub, it’s easy to forget that recent inflection point when the world pressed pause on normal life. It is scarcely four and a half years since the UK Government, along with others globally, imposed the first national lockdown to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. But, in some ways, the trauma of that time was swiftly forgotten. We moved on with relief, and shudder today at those distant, bewildering memories of social distancing. 

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests we haven’t truly turned the page on what now sounds more like a chapter from dystopian fiction. Instead, the effects of the Covid lockdowns endure, and will continue to be observed and charted for many decades to come. “We’ll probably be studying the impact of this for as long as we live,” says Adam Hampshire, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at King’s College London (KCL).

A startling reminder of the long-term fallout of those unprecedented restrictions came just this week, as new figures revealed that the number of people on sickness benefits rose to 3.9m, an increase of almost 40 per cent since the pandemic first hit. 

That came hard on the heels of news this month that lockdowns may have caused premature ageing to teenagers’ brains. Research from the University of Washington found the measures resulted in “unusually accelerated brain maturation” in adolescents, and that this was far more pronounced in girls than boys. While the average acceleration in the development of the male adolescent brain was 1.4 years, for females it was 4.2 years. 

If girls were more dramatically affected, this could be due to their heavier reliance on social relationships, the researchers have suggested. 

But this cohort is not the only one subject to the long-lasting impacts of lockdown. Across every age group, a wide range of effects has already been mapped. Experts believe that more will emerge in time. 

Indeed, it turns out that the way we managed Covid has dramatically affected every generation. Here’s how.  

Young children

The first 1,001 days of a child’s life are deemed critical for their cognitive, emotional and physical development. When a cohort of children was born into the abnormal state of affairs seen in 2020 and 2021, a massive social experiment was inadvertently launched. The long-term effects on these so-called lockdown babies have been playing out ever since. Research suggests that many of these infants are developmentally behind where they should be. In 2022, an Irish survey found babies born in lockdown were slower than usual to reach milestones such as talking, pointing and waving goodbye. By the age of one, only 77 per cent of pandemic babies could say one meaningful word, compared to 89 per cent born before Covid. While almost all (93 per cent) of those born pre-pandemic could point, only 84 per cent of lockdown babies could do so by 12 months. 

Study author Dr Susan Byrne of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland attributed these lags to lack of social contact during the Irish lockdown (which was even stricter than the British one). 

Last year, the Irish researchers further reported that by age two, although they were now at the expected level in other areas of behaviour and development, pandemic babies’ communication skills still lagged behind those born pre-Covid. “Tiny social circles” were cited by the researchers. 

For primary school pupils, many of whom were reliant on overworked, underqualified parents to teach them the curriculum at home, academic attainment was found last year to remain markedly lower than pre-pandemic levels. Sats results showed the proportion of Year 6 pupils meeting expected standards of reading, writing and maths was only 59 per cent in both 2023 and 2022 – down from 65 per cent in 2019. 

For Dan Paskins, interim executive director at Save the Children, such longer-term effects are hardly surprising. “There’s been a really big impact on the expected levels of children’s social and emotional development in their first few years,” he says. “There’s been some really rapid regression.”

The lockdown babies are now starting school, and the impact of their extraordinary early days is stark. “There’s a school in Birmingham where more than half the children entering [Reception] were still wearing nappies,” says Paskins. “Before the pandemic there might have been one or two. Now more than half have that developmental delay, and what that means in terms of how children are able to learn and function.”

Across the country, teachers now say almost a quarter of children in their Reception class are not toilet trained, according to a survey by the Kindred Squared charity published in February. Pupils are losing, on average, a third of their learning time each day as teachers are spending time supporting children who are not school-ready, the research highlighted.

Although decline in school readiness has been a growing trend since well before the pandemic, lockdown is thought to have exacerbated it. “The year group coming into Reception now are the lockdown babies and you can really see it in the extent of the social need, difficulties with behaviour, [struggles] with separation, sharing and language development,” says Liz Robinson, chief executive of Big Education, a multi-academy trust. “If a child is in nappies and needs to be changed, it drains the resources. It means those staff [changing nappies] are not in the classroom interacting with the other children.”

Molly Devlin, early years network lead for the Ark Schools group, where she supports Reception classes, says she has seen “more [children] than ever before” starting school in nappies this year and last. This reflects the disruption to children’s services during lockdown, she says. “There was a complete stop to services like health visitors and two-year [developmental] checks were happening over the phone and therefore were totally dependent on parent self-reporting.”

Parents experienced “significant isolation”, as Devlin points out. Those who didn’t know what milestones their infants should be meeting were cut off from the professionals and peers who could have informed them, and from the help they might otherwise have received.

While not all children were adversely affected (some benefited from their parents being at home more) a question mark hangs over whether those who suffered the worst effects will ever catch up. “It wasn’t like it was a rubbish time but that’s all over,” says Paskins. “That impact is continuing.” 

Without intensive support, things are likely to get worse for these children over time, not better, he warns. “You’re less likely to learn and get good exam results and a good job. We’re going to be seeing the impact of this for decades to come.” 

Teenagers 

Holed up in their bedrooms for hours each day, with just social media for company, teenagers missed crucial face-to-face interaction with peers at a formative, and quite often turbulent, life stage. The impact of lockdowns on their mental health has been well-documented. Disruption to their education and prolonged social isolation “exposed young people to many known risk factors for mental illness, raising serious concerns about their wellbeing,” researchers at KCL wrote in 2022. 

One of the university’s studies, published in May 2021, found nearly half of 11 to 12-year-olds in this cohort reported an increase in symptoms of depression, while a quarter reported an increase in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. A systematic review led by KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience found lockdown was associated with psychological distress, loneliness, boredom, fear and stress among young people. Again, girls were found to have been hardest hit. 

So have these effects endured, or have teenagers bounced back? Research by University College London and the Sutton Trust, published last November, found a third of 17 and 18-year-olds reported the legacy of Covid was still harming their education and mental health. The study of more than 11,000 pupils found 44 per cent of Year 13 students could be classed as experiencing high psychological distress between November 2022 and April 2023 (when normal life had resumed), compared to 35 per cent in 2017.

School absences have also risen sharply since the pandemic, with one in five (19.4 per cent) pupils classed as being “persistently absent” last autumn, meaning they missed over 10 per cent of school days. This was up from 10.9 per cent before the pandemic. Recent research has suggested parents can be complicit in this. For example, unauthorised absence rates are 20 per cent higher on Fridays, and Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, has pointed out that, “Parents are at home on Fridays… We’ve had evidence from kids [who say], ‘Well, Mum and Dad are at home, stay at home’.”

Then there are the downstream effects of the cancellation of exams. Instead of sitting their GCSEs and A-levels in 2020 and 2021, pupils were awarded grades based on teacher assessments. Under this improvised temporary system, a record number of pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland secured top A-level grades. If this sounds like a win for the students concerned, some paid the price later, Paskins notes. “What it meant is there were young people who had better grades [than they might have done otherwise] and went on to college or university, then couldn’t do the work and so dropped out,” he says. “That can impact mental health [too].”

While neither grade inflation nor poor mental health explains every case, it’s notable that more than 18,000 students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland had dropped out of university courses by February 2022, an increase of more than 4,000 compared with the same point in 2021, and 3,000 more than the figures for February 2019, according to experimental Student Loans Company data. 

The main reason students cite for leaving university early, according to separate analysis last year from KCL and the Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education is down to one key factor: mental health.

Young adults

As with children, the physical risks to healthy young adults posed by Covid itself were far smaller than for older generations. But the impact on them of measures taken to protect the more vulnerable sections of society was serious. 

Undergraduates missed out on the rite of passage that the cut and thrust of student life represents. Twenty-somethings entering the jobs market while working from home missed out on crucial opportunities to learn from more experienced colleagues. New mothers found themselves cut off from many support services and social opportunities. 

This month, an alarming snapshot of Generation Z graduates emerged in a report by the NHS Confederation and Boston Consulting Group (BCG): tens of thousands are moving straight from university into long-term sickness, they found. In 2021-22, almost 63,400 people aged 16 to 24 followed this trajectory, up from less than 37,000 in 2019-20.

This subsection of young people has increased by 18 per cent since before the pandemic, making it the fastest-growing group of economically inactive adults, according to the report’s author, Raoul Ruparel, director of BCG’s Centre for Growth. The surge was attributed largely to an “acceleration” of mental health conditions post-Covid. 

Earlier research by Prof Hampshire and others during the first Covid wave found young adults appeared to be particularly exposed to lockdown’s suspension of normality. “In terms of disrupted lifestyle, that was being reported more by people in their 20s and 30s,” he says.

While their drug use decreased significantly, as nights out became out of bounds, alcohol use increased. “We asked people why and a lot of it was boredom,” says Prof Hampshire. 

Within this cohort existed a subset of young people who increased their illicit substance use “because they were having trouble sleeping, felt lonely and down, and those problems can persist longer term and [turn into] dependency,” he adds. “Where they report they were using it as a prop, they tend to continue.”

The long-term health effects of increased alcohol or drug use prompted by lockdown are yet to fully hit home. But the excess drinking alone could lead to thousands of extra deaths and hospital admissions over the next 20 years, research from NHS England and the University of Sheffield has indicated. Young adults aged 25 to 34 who were already heavier drinkers than their peers pre-pandemic were more likely to up their alcohol intake still further during lockdown than any other age group, the study found.

Worryingly, such behaviour is thought to have persisted, in this and other age groups. “Roll forward, and all the groups that were drinking more during the pandemic have continued drinking more since the pandemic, and in some cases it’s increased,” says Richard Piper, chief executive of Alcohol Change UK. “The reason is that alcohol is an addictive substance. It’s hard to bring it down. So you will find a lot of those home drinkers have never returned to pre-pandemic levels and have often increased their drinking.”

The middle-aged

Perhaps counterintuitively, this cohort was already drinking more than young adults before the pandemic. Less surprisingly, lockdowns did little to make them stop, in most cases. 

These are the at-home drinkers, typically parents in their late 30s, 40s and 50s, more likely to open a bottle of wine in front of a box set than prop up a bar. During lockdown, about a quarter gave up (typically the lighter drinkers), and about three quarters started drinking significantly more, says Piper. “It wasn’t just the fact [they were] at home for longer. There were lots of triggers. If you’re triggered when you walk past your fridge, people were going, ‘oh my God, I’m reaching for a glass of wine at 4pm when I wouldn’t normally.’”

Added to this was the acute anxiety, stress and boredom of lockdown, which drove so many to self-medicate with alcohol. Among them were those who were furloughed or laid off, and found the boredom propelling them into a vicious cycle whereby “someone who’s not working starts drinking then finds that drinking escalates, and then they’re just not motivated to get into work, and they’re more bored,” says Piper. “Lots of people were bored in the pandemic and were drinking more.”

The fatal consequences have started to make their way into the statistics. The number of alcohol-related deaths recorded in 2022 was 4.2 per cent higher than in 2021 (9,641 deaths) and 32.8 per cent higher than in 2019 (7,565 deaths), Office for National Statistics data from this year shows.

Mothers of school-age children meanwhile experienced their own particular stresses, from the switch to homeschooling. The resulting damage to maternal mental health was comparable to that caused by divorce, University of Essex research showed in 2022. Professor Birgitta Rabe, who led the study, cannot say to what extent these effects continued after schools reopened. But, she says, “One thing we do know from the mental health literature is that smaller stresses tend to accumulate. So if things happen to you over and over, it accumulates into a bigger problem.”

A married 46-year-old mother from Buckinghamshire, whose two children were aged 12 and eight, and at separate schools, when the pandemic began, says: “Juggling teaching children and working during the pandemic was a complete nightmare. It was the guilt that neither of us could teach them, because we were both working full-time. 

“One school did a really good job of online classes, but the other school did no teaching so we had to teach. All they did was issue homework lists – and it was really hard to find the time to do that. 

“They weren’t very focused, it was lots of topics like history and maths, and also science experiments which required lists of ingredients that we didn’t have.”

Pensioners

It was, perhaps, understandable that the middle-aged juggling work and homeschooling while trying to stave off imminent nervous breakdowns were sometimes apt to envy their Boomer parents. There were those in good health in their late 60s and 70s who arguably didn’t have the worst time of it, with their routines less disrupted.  

But this possibly masks the harmful and irreversible impact of lockdown on so many of pensionable age. Last year, a study led by the University of Exeter and KCL found cognitive function and working memory in older people declined rapidly during the first year of the pandemic, whether or not they actually contracted Covid. The pattern continued into 2021-22, with researchers citing the heightened loneliness and depression suffered during the lockdowns by this cohort, as well as a decrease in exercise and – again – increased drinking. 

The fact that cognitive decline can lead to dementia underscores the importance of supporting this group, the researchers suggested.

“If you think of all the things you’re supposed to do or avoid to mitigate age-related decline, such as [limiting] drinking, [doing] exercise, socialising – a lot of those changed for the worse,” says Prof Hampshire, who co-authored the study. Those affected would be unlikely to recover from the cognitive decline suffered as a result, he suggests. 

Having severely restricted their day-to-day activities and interactions, often irrevocably, the pandemic, and associated restrictions, robbed many at the older end of this age group of the final years of their life in which they could have expected to enjoy themselves in the company of family, friends and neighbours. 

Bella Fowler, 68, from west London, says: “I was looking after my mother who had Alzheimers. She was on her own with me, obviously, she didn’t have any other stimulation so that was hard. She was 92 when Covid struck and thank goodness she hadn’t gone into a nursing home.

“In a way, it was good that we were able to have her, but in a way it was tough because we had her all the time.

“The other thing that was really bad about Covid and the lockdown was that we were threatened with the idea that if we passed it on to somebody, we’d almost be responsible for their death. It just made life so miserable.”

She adds: “A lot of people have never really quite recovered. I would say it took me at least two years, and even now lots of my friendships are impacted.”

Future fallout

So far what we have seen is a steady stream of studies hinting at just some of the damage done. There is also strong evidence that the absence of any preventative measures would have resulted in a far greater number of Covid deaths and in our hospitals becoming overwhelmed. 

Undoubtedly there were trade-offs to be made, and the argument over whether the benefits of lockdown outweighed the harms will continue to rage.

But only in the coming years, it seems, will the full impact of our national shutdown be revealed: in the educational and career impacts on those who were young at the time: in the future alcohol deaths; perhaps in the proportion of pandemic pensioners who go on to suffer from dementia. 

We almost certainly haven’t yet seen the last of it. “There was a prolonged impact on people’s lifestyles and mental health,” says Prof Hampshire. “That is going to have downstream consequences.”

Additional reporting by Natasha Leake and Ben Butcher

Rickshaw drivers are secretly shifting the decimal point on credit card machines to “swindle” tourists in London out of hundreds of pounds, newly released data show.

A dossier of complaints collected by Transport for London (TfL) reveals how some drivers have even charged £1,300 for trips of just a few hundred yards.

Others have billed customers twice to rip off those touring the capital’s landmarks in their garishly decorated pedicabs.

The complaints log was released following a Freedom of Information request and illustrates the techniques used by some unscrupulous riders who view tourists as easy targets.

One customer claimed she was swindled out of £1,300 for a 500-yard rickshaw ride.

She wrote to TfL: “I was swindled after taking transportation from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace.

“We rode a few blocks going towards the Palace and something broke. We exited the rickshaw, and I paid the vendor and asked for a receipt. He said: ‘No.’

“I called my husband immediately to make sure he charged me correctly. My husband called me back and said the vendor charged me £1,278.96.”

Another woman wrote: “I took a rickshaw from Mayfair to High Street Kensington, and I was charged £336 instead of £33.60. I believe that it was intentional.”

She added that she believed she and her friend were targeted because they were women, adding: “He was enjoying it.”

A couple who flagged down a pedicab to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella at a West End theatre were told they would be charged £9.40.

The theatregoer wrote: “I tapped my card. It wasn’t until the interval when I checked my online banking app and saw that I had been charged £94.40.”

These examples suggest the vendor had added another zero to the bill, shifting the decimal point and hoping the customer would not check properly.

Two complaints stated that the driver insisted the fare was real because he had a “handheld meter”.

A mother contacted TfL with a picture of their crashed rickshaw saying: “Not only is it daylight robbery – he tried to charge me £130 for the journey – but it is also very unsafe.

“He tried to go through the cycle lane tunnel on Bermondsey Road and crashed at the end as there wasn’t enough space. He got very aggressive.”

There were also complaints from people who said that their payments had been pushed through twice – doubling the bill.

One couple was charged £296 for a 13-minute trip to the theatre.

They eventually agreed to pay £110 but reported the scam to their hotel, who encouraged them to make a formal complaint.

‘Pedicab industry should be banned’

Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association, said “rip-off rickshaw riders” give London a bad name and the pedicab industry should be banned.

“TfL now have the powers they need to take action and stop this once and for all, and it’s high time they used them to keep visitors to our great city safe from these scam artists.”

The Conservative government brought in new rules allowing TfL to start regulating drivers who tout for passengers in the city’s tourist hotspots.

A TfL spokesman said it welcomed new “robust and effective” powers it will have under the Pedicabs (London) Act 2024.

“We are engaging with the pedicab industry and other interested parties to help us shape proposals ahead of a public consultation, including carrying out an impact assessment.

“Once these proposals are developed, we will launch a public consultation and we hope to do so in early 2025. Feedback from our consultation will help shape these important new regulations and will enable us to confirm a timetable for their introduction.”

In July, Henry Winkler, the actor who played the Fonz in the American comedy Happy Days, used social media to warn others about how he was ripped off by a rickshaw driver when visiting London with his family.

Winkler, 78, posted a “travel tip” saying: “Do not take one of those bicycle taxis without absolutely negotiating the price first.

“This person in London rode us around in circles then finally to our destination seven blocks away for $170!”

Traffic analysis by the Sunday Telegraph revealed that two rickshaw drivers carrying London visitors had shot red lights weaving between pedestrians on Westminster Bridge Road.

Stockton Rush styled himself as a cross between an Ernest Shackleton style explorer and an Elon Musk-esq business visionary.

But at the hearings into the tragedy which saw the Titan submersible owned by Rush’s OceanGate company implode on the way to the wreck of the Titanic last year, a very different figure emerged.

The inquiry in Charleston, South Carolina, opened on Monday and heard from a host of former OceanGate employees who issued scathing rebukes of Rush, the company’s CEO and founder, accusing him of “arrogance” and claiming he ignored expert advice, flaunted regulations and put profit ahead of safety in his determination to reach the wreck of the ocean liner.

The submersible lost contact with its mothership about two hours into its descent to the Titanic, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in June last year triggering an international rescue effort that ultimately recovered no survivors.

The five people killed in the disaster were Rush, Hamish Harding, a British explorer, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French diver, and Shahzada Dawood, a British-Pakistani businessman, and his 19-year-old son Suleman.

Since its fateful dive, the Titan and its creator have come under close scrutiny in the undersea exploration community, in part because of the vessel’s unconventional design and Rush’s decision to forgo standard independent checks.

“The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” said David Lochridge, the company’s former marine operations director, who claimed he repeatedly raised the alarm but was ignored. “There was very little in the way of science.”

Mr Lochridge was made an operations director at OceanGate in January 2016 after moving his family from their native Scotland. In hotly anticipated testimony, he said that he was not directly involved with the design or construction of the Titan’s original hull, but that Rush still had him inspect a prototype of the vessel as it was nearing completion in early 2018.

‘He liked to do things on the cheap’

What he found was “an abomination of a sub,” he told the hearing, adding that he later learned that many components were “reused” in the second version of the Titan hull that was involved in the disaster.

“Stockton liked to do things on the cheap,” Mr Lochridge testified.

Referencing a 2018 report in which he raised safety issues about OceanGate operations, Mr Lochridge said he had “no confidence whatsoever” in the way Titan was built.

He said leadership dismissed his concerns “on every single occasion”, adding that “all the standardised rules and regulations” were bypassed as the company scrambled to “push” for a launch so they could “start making profit”.

“It was inevitable something was going to happen. It was just a [question of] when,” he said.

Mr Lochridge’s concerns about the speed of production and related safety issues were echoed by OceanGate’s former engineering director, Tony Nissen, who kicked off Monday’s hearing.

Mr Nissen told investigators he worked on a prototype of the hull several years before the Titanic expedition and felt pressured to get the vessel ready to dive.

Damning testimony from the prototype pilot

However, when asked to pilot the prototype submersible, Mr Nissen said he told Rush: “‘I’m not getting in it.”

Of particular concern was the design of the submersible’s hull, which was made out of carbon fibre rather than titanium or steel.

An hour and 45 minutes into its 13,000ft descent, the Titan lost contact with its mothership, the Polar Prince, with intense ocean pressure thought to have triggered a massive implosion that caused the craft to collapse in on itself.

Footage of the moment the submersible’s wreckage was found, released publicly for the first time this week, shows the Titan’s cracked tail cone on the sea floor surrounded by fragments of debris and a knot of wires.

The hull needed to be built to withstand underwater pressure of around 6,000 pounds per square inch at the Atlantic seabed – roughly 400 times the pressure at the ocean’s surface.

Asked by Rush to assemble a quality inspection report of the Titan in 2018, US court documents show Mr Lochridge raised major concerns about the choice of material, warning that it would deteriorate with every dive.

Mr Nissen said the submersible was struck by lightning the same year, leaving a crack in the hull which he didn’t believe was salvageable. As a result, he refused to sign off on a planned expedition for the following year, which he said led to him being sacked.

Giving testimony on Friday, Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate operations and engineering tech contractor, said a customer reported hearing a “loud bang” during a 2022 dive that was “as loud as an explosion”, with the company’s engineers later discovering the Titan’s carbon fibre hull had moved.

Ms Wilby said she wanted to go to the board of directors following the incident but was warned against doing so by a colleague who said she could be sued for speaking out.

Staff sacked after voicing concerns

Mr Lochridge claimed he too was sacked, in January 2018, after voicing his concerns about the vessel’s hull, for which he was labelled “anti-project”.

In a 2018 counterclaim lawsuit against OceanGate, he warned that the Titan’s carbon shell wasn’t properly tested to ensure it could descend to the depth of the Titanic.

He said in court papers that after he complained that passengers’ lives would be at risk, he was given “10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk”.

Mr Lochridge told the hearing that OceanGate was struggling internally and attempted to drum up business by convincing wealthy people to pay tens of thousands of dollars to go on deep-sea dives in its submersibles. Each passenger on the fatal voyage paid $250,000 for a seat on the vessel.

However, he claimed that the company’s sunny online presence was used to distract from the vessels’ many design flaws. “It was all smoke and mirrors,” he said. “All the social media that you see about all these past expeditions, they always had issues.”

The Titan was dogged with problems in the years before its final fatal expedition, with officials noting that during three dives to the Titanic in 2021 and 2022, the submersible experienced 118 equipment malfunctions.

This included an incident in the days before the vessel’s final voyage when its platform malfunctioned, leaving one crew member hanging upside-down.

The company’s former scientific director Dr Steven Ross told the inquiry: “The rest of the passengers tumbled about. I ended up standing on the rear bulkhead. One passenger was hanging upside down.”

Did weather play a role?

While offering a historical look at the Titan, officials noted it was never subject to third-party testing and had been left exposed to weather and other elements while in storage.

“Everything that came in had anomalies or deficiencies in the product itself,” said Mr Lochridge, adding that all the parts of the final vessel were repurposed from prototypes, with the exception of the carbon fibre hull.

Underlying the myriad issues with the craft uncovered by the public hearings, the witnesses described a company culture, presided over by Rush, in which safety concerns were shrugged off in the pursuit of accomplishing feats no other deep-sea exploration company had achieved because they were considered too risky.

“It’s total disregard for safety, not just for himself, but everybody else,” Mr Lochridge said. “He didn’t care.”

In response to a letter from fellow deep-sea explorer Rob McCallum warning Rush that he was exhibiting the same hubris of those who said of the Titanic: “she is unsinkable”, he responded by claiming that regulation would stifle innovation.

He said OceanGate’s “engineering focused, innovative approach… flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation”

Mr Lochridge told the inquiry Rush was “very impatient” and decided to carry out all engineering of the Titan in-house, despite having “no experience building submersibles”, and refused to work with experts at the University of Washington.

He added that there was a high turnover of staff and said that the company’s engineering team was made up of “children that were coming in straight out of university. Some hadn’t even been to university yet”.

“They think they could do this on their own without proper engineering support,” he said.

Multiple former associates of Rush accused him of having a volatile temperament, with Mr Lochridge claiming he would “fly off the handle”.

Mr Nissen said Rush could be difficult to work for and was often very concerned with costs and project schedules, among other issues.

He added that he tried to keep his clashes with Rush, including about its carbon-fibre hull, “behind closed doors”, but said that “most people would eventually just back down to Stockton”.

Mr Lochridge said his relationship with Rush broke down in the summer of 2016 after he “embarrassed” his former boss following a heated confrontation during an exploration mission aboard a Titan predecessor to the wreck of a different vessel – the Andrea Doria.

Rush ‘assaulted’ colleague with PlayStation controller

During the expedition to the ocean liner, which sank off the coast of Massachusetts in 1956, Mr Lochridge claimed he was assaulted by Rush after the CEO rammed the submersible into the side of the wreck at full speed, temporarily trapping the vessel underneath.

Mr Lochridge claimed that Rush initially refused to hand over the PlayStation controller, used to steer the vessel, to him before throwing it at the side of his head. The operations director said he then picked up the controller and steered the submersible to safety.

Despite the alleged challenges of the mission, Rush did an interview afterwards in which he claimed the submersible’s technology “worked beautifully” and said the voyage heralded a new age of deep-sea exploration.

“We’re going to take mankind to the bottom of the ocean,” Rush said, “and discover things that no one can even imagine”.

OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after Titan’s implosion. However, the disaster has raised questions about the role of regulation in deep-sea exploration.

Asked why the company did not make any effort to comply with certification or regulatory standards for the vessel, Mr Nissen said the company’s founder did not show any interest.

“I wouldn’t say there was no effort,” he said. “There was no desire by Stockton to go do it.”

The family of French diver Nargeolet, who died in the fatal Titan disaster, is suing OceanGate in a wrongful death lawsuit worth more than $50,000,000.

Accusing the submarine operator of gross negligence, the lawsuit claimed the waiver and release “failed to disclose many key, relevant risk factors, […] regarding the design and operation of Titan or the materials used in its construction.” In particular, it mentioned the submarine’s carbon fibre hull, which was reportedly “not properly tested for integrity”.

Addressing the inherent risks involved in taking part in the voyage, OceanGate’s former mission specialist Fred Hagen told the inquiry on Friday that getting into the Titan submersible and going to see the Titanic wreckage “wasn’t supposed to be safe.”

“It was supposed to be a thrilling adventure,” he said. “Anyone that wanted to go was either delusional if they didn’t think that it was dangerous, or they were embracing the risk.”

Mr Lochridge told the hearing he felt the tragedy could have been prevented if a federal safety agency of the United States had investigated his complaint.

“I believe that if OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s] had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised on multiple occasions, this tragedy may have been prevented,” he said.

“As a seafarer, I feel deeply disappointed by the system that is meant to protect not only seafarers but the general public as well.”

The inquiry continues.

Nadhim Zahawi has warned that Europe cannot take “half a billion” migrants from Africa.

The former Tory MP said that migration will become the biggest threat to the Western world, and believes millions of people “south of Libya” are now mobile and motivated to migrate northward into Europe.

In a talk with his former ministerial colleague Michael Gove at the Cliveden Literary Festival on Saturday, Mr Zahawi said: “I genuinely believe that in the next decade or two, the greatest challenge to Western democracy, Europe, the US, is going to be migration.

“Take Libya. Anything south of Libya, there are half a billion people who are now much more mobile and are going to come under huge pressure; economic, social, political, environmental. Clearly Europe cannot absorb half a billion people.”

He warned that a vast influx would leave nations and their public services “overwhelmed”.

Inward migration to the UK in 2023 was 1.2 million, with most arriving to work. A recent report by the Office of Budget Responsibility found that, over their lifetimes, unskilled migrants are a net burden to the Exchequer.

Mr Zahawi has supported calls for a Parliamentary debate on the value and extent to the UK, and decried the “polarisation” of the issue, warning about the reductive view of some that “if you speak about illegal [Channel] crossings, you are a racist”.

The Baghdad-born former minister said that illegal migration “offends every Brit” because “it goes against the sense of fairness which I think is a value that is inherent to our country”.

He has also set out concern about the societal impact of migration, saying that the majority of British people now routinely witness “people are being intolerant” but are nevertheless “tolerated” by the establishment.

He said: “We need to be intolerant of intolerance, otherwise the social fabric will begin to be ripped apart.”

A successful business and founder of the polling company YouGov, Mr Zahawi believes that Donald Trump will win the upcoming US election, and that Sir Keir Starmer would be a one-term Prime Minister.

A giant rodent may be the stuff of nightmares for some people, but in the case of Cinnamon the capybara its owners were “absolutely delighted” to get the animal back after a daring escape.

The disappearance of the one-year-old animal from its enclosure at Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World in Shropshire on Sept 13 prompted an extensive search operation and global headlines.

It was found seven days later in a pond near to the park, forcing the zoo’s owners to wade into the water to coax it out.

Zoo owner Will Dorrell said they had to enter the pond, which measures around 50 by 20 metres, to catch the capybara and return it to its family.

“I had a call from my wife Becky, who is also one of the owners here, she had been out all afternoon tracking Cinnamon through our woodland and through the area,” he told Hits Radio News, adding that she found Cinnamon in the middle of the pond.

Cinnamon is now back with its twin brother, Churro, who is “very happy”, he added.

He told the BBC: “I’d love to say it was nice and easy getting her out of the pond but it wasn’t. Several of us got very wet.

“Cinnamon was quite happy in the pond so we had to get in with her and slowly try to coax her into the cage.

“I know that there will be lots of people who will be very excited to see her, but nobody more so than her own mum and dad.”

The capybara looks like a giant guinea pig and it is native to South America. It is the world’s largest living rodent.

Its stout appearance belies impressive survival skills – the animals are able to hold their breath underwater for up to five minutes and run up to 20 miles per hour.

Cinnamon made its daring bid for freedom last Friday when keepers entered the enclosure to mow the paddock, but didn’t realise the animal was hidden in long grass by the gate.

When the gate opened, it slipped out. Mr Dorrell said measures are now in place to prevent a similar incident.

He had previously told the BBC that Cinnamon was “probably living her best life” in the marshland and riverways near the zoo, which were a natural habitat for the animal.

It had been spotted in a field next to the zoo on Tuesday night, but escaped into impenetrable undergrowth when zoo staff approached.

The search team then paused its efforts until Thursday so that Cinnamon did not become too stressed.

“We’re absolutely delighted to have Cinnamon back at the zoo,” said Mr Dorrell.

The VAT raid on private schools could hit four areas in the UK harder than anywhere else, Labour has been warned.

The Government has been told that some cities and boroughs “do not have the capacity” for students in the state sector who could be displaced by cutting the VAT exemption on school fees.

Think tanks and industry figures have said that the policy will cause an influx of pupils into the state sector as a result of the changes to come into force in January.

But Labour has insisted the number of students leaving independent schools will be “minimal” and that “there are more than enough state school places for pupils who may move from a private school”.

However, evidence presented to Bridget Phillipson has suggested that the cities of Bristol and Salford have significant numbers of children in independent education and high occupancy in state secondary schools.

Sixth forms in the London boroughs of Richmond-upon-Thames and Camden are half full and completely full respectively, raising questions about the areas’ capacities to take on more students.

In a letter to Ms Phillipson, the shadow education secretary said it was “no help for there to be large numbers of unfilled places in state schools if these are not in the geographic areas where they’re needed”.

Damian Hinds wrote: “The widest impact of all will be that felt by children and their parents in the state sector.

“This tax could see many thousands of pupils move to the state sector, increasing class sizes and cost for the taxpayer, and ultimately making it less likely a parent will secure their preferred choice of school.

“Moreover, the haste with which this policy is being brought in – and part-way through a school year – risks great disruption not only to displaced pupils’ education, but to state schools, and to local authorities responsible for ensuring place-sufficiency.”

The Tories have demanded that the Government publish an assessment of the capacity in state schools by region and by year group before the Budget on Oct 30.

The shadow education secretary said that the information was needed as soon as possible “so that parents, schools and local authorities have the information they need”.

Mr Hinds pointed to Department of Education data, which showed that over half (59 per cent) of secondary schools are at or in excess of capacity in Bristol.

More than 900 children in the city are already in places that exceed their school’s capacity.

In Salford, 94 per cent of state secondary places were filled in the academic year 2022-23, Mr Hinds said, as he warned that the large number of children at independent faith schools in the area could cause capacity issues.

The Government also admitted earlier this month that 100 per cent of school sixth forms in Camden were at excess capacity, along with 50 per cent in Richmond-upon-Thames.

Mr Hinds described the figures as “concerning”, and said that they showed “areas of England… simply do not have the capacity for students that may be displaced through your rush to tax education”.

A government source attacked Mr Hinds for having “spent more time in his first two months in opposition defending the interests of private schools than he ever did working for state school-educated children while in government”.

They added: “He and his party have learned nothing from their crushing election defeat.”

A spokesman for the Government said: “We will ensure all children have the best chance in life to succeed.

“As part of our mission to deliver opportunity, we’re ending tax breaks for private schools from the start of 2025, to better invest in the 93 per cent of pupils in state education.

“Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows the number of pupils who may move schools as a result of this change is likely to be minimal.”

Ukrainian forces have blown up one of Russia’s largest ammunition storage bases in a drone attack, causing a huge explosion in the southern region of Krasnodar.

Video footage posted on social media showed the moment of the attack, on a depot near the city of Tikhoretsk, which created an enormous explosion that lit up the night sky.

Ukraine also struck a weapons depot in the western Tver region as part of its ongoing drone offensive against key Russian army infrastructure.

In a statement, the Ukrainian army said the strike in Tikhoretsk had targeted one of the “three largest ammunition storage bases” in Russia. Kyiv’s military also said it struck an arsenal in Oktyabrsky village, in the Tver region, resulting in “fire and detonation”.

Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of the Krasnodar region, announced the evacuation of 1,200 people after a drone attack caused a fire that “spread to explosive objects” near Tikhoretsk.

Mr Kondratyev called it a “terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime” and said an unnamed village near the fire had been evacuated, with most people staying with relatives but others placed in temporary accommodation in Tikhoretsk.

Video on social media later showed smoke rising into the air in the distance as sirens wailed around Tikhoretsk, a city of some 50,000 people, in the daylight.

AFP, the news agency that first reported the images of the explosion, said they could not immediately be verified.

Krasnodar is separated from occupied Ukraine by the Azov Sea and has been largely spared from the types of attacks inflicted on other Russian border regions.

Authorities in the western Tver region also announced a night-time drone attack near the city of Toropets, which lies in the western part of the region. Its governor, Igor Rudenya, said the “consequences of falling debris” from the attack were being “cleared”.

He said there was no evacuation in Toropets but announced the temporary closure of the federal M-9 highway, promising that it would reopen soon.

The attack also caused some disruption on passenger trains, with railway officials saying a train going from Moscow to the western city of Pskov was sent on an alternative route, while another train was delayed.

Earlier, Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had downed 101 Ukrainian drones, mostly over the border Bryansk region, bringing down 18 over Krasnodar. Russia has recently claimed it is shooting down Ukrainian drones almost daily.

A man whose image went viral when he was hit in the head and groin by bricks during the summer riots was arrested after being recognised by police at A&E, The Telegraph can reveal.

The man was injured during the disorder in Southport that followed the fatal knife attack on three girls attending a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in the Merseyside town on July 29.

A video uploaded to social media showed a man wearing a grey tracksuit approaching a line of riot police who were being pelted with missiles.

As he got close to the line of officers a brick hurled from the crowd hit him on the back of the head, causing him to stumble away. Holding his head, he began to walk back towards the crowd before a second brick hit him in the groin area. 

The man, clearly in pain, was helped away to safety with blood coming from a head wound.

It is understood he later attended an A&E unit where he was spotted by police officers who were being treated for injuries sustained in the riots.

A source told The Telegraph: “The officers who were at the A&E had seen the footage, which had already gone viral, and immediately recognised the man who was waiting to be treated. It definitely was not his lucky day because, after he was seen by doctors, he was then arrested on suspicion of being involved in the disorder.”

A spokesman for Merseyside Police said: “I can confirm that the male was arrested and is currently on bail.”

The investigation into the rioting that followed the Southport attack is continuing. More than 1,500 people have been arrested and a total of 960 charges have been brought for a range of offences.