A woman who murdered her parents and lived alongside their bodies for four years buried her father in a “homemade mausoleum” constructed out of concrete blocks.

Virginia McCullough, 36, was sentenced to life in prison and ordered to serve a minimum term of 36 years for the murder of her mother and father.

She attacked her mother, Lois McCullough, 71, with a hammer and a knife after poisoning her father, John McCullough, 70, with a “cocktail of prescription drugs”.

After killing them, she wrapped her mother’s corpse in a sleeping bag, placed it inside a wardrobe in her bedroom and sealed it shut.

On the ground floor of the family home in Pump Hill, near Baddow, Chelmsford, she hid the body of her father inside a “makeshift concrete tomb” or “homemade mausoleum”.

The court was told the structure was in “the corner of the room” and was made of “masonry blocks stacked together and secured with white filler, forming a rectangular tomb with the end closest to the internal door composed of panels of wood”.

It was covered with “multiple blankets, and a number of pictures and paintings over the top”.

Inside the structure, there were also at least 11 layers of “plastic and other material” covering the body of Mr McCullough which was wrapped in a sleeping bag.

Sentencing her, Judge Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson said she had committed a “gross violation of the trust that should exist between parents and their children”.

He told her she had “robbed her parents of dignity” by concealing their bodies for so long.

Before she was arrested, Virginia McCullough was known to her neighbours as a slightly eccentric, but harmless, young woman who was taking care of her parents’ home after they moved to spend their retirement by the seaside.

She went out of her way to give local residents gifts of food and drink and stopped to chat with anyone and everyone.

Neighbours received postcards, apparently from her parents, filled with anecdotes about their new life in the coastal town of Clacton on Sea.

John and Lois McCullough were described by neighbours as being a “quiet couple who kept to themselves”.

The parents of five girls, they had lived in the quiet street for decades.

Mrs McCullough, who had a passion for history, was said to be shy, but polite and friendly.

She suffered from agoraphobia and obsessive-compulsive behaviour disorder. She had several pen pals and kept in regular contact with them.

Her husband, a published author, was a former lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University who met his friend for a drink every Friday at the nearby White Horse pub. His children said he had a passion for education and writing.

Their children described them as “loving parents” who were “old fashioned in their ways”.

Butcher Steve Thurl, whose shop Thurley Meats is in the Vineyards Shopping Centre, said that after the couple supposedly moved away in the autumn of 2019, an elderly friend called Pat, started receiving postcards from them from Clacton on Sea.

The youngest of the five daughters, Virginia McCullough, known as “Ginny”, was a familiar character in the Vineyards shopping centre, located close to the family home.

The slim-built, immaculately dressed McCullough would often buy drinks and cakes for staff in shops. They nicknamed her “sausage”.

Mr Thurley, the butcher, said that “she mainly came into the shop to buy fillet steak”.

“I wondered what she did for a living. I don’t think she had a proper job,” he added.

Paul Hastings, owner of The Vines Fruiterers in the same shopping centre, said: “I found her normal, but a bit eccentric”.

He also recounted a time, a few months before she was arrested, when she came into the shop with a “fake pregnancy bump” and “fake scans of a baby”.

Mr Thomson, who rented the TV to the McCullough’s said he also remembered Ginny claiming she was pregnant.

A neighbour Phil Sargeant, 68, said: “She was always around at the front of the house, going in and out, sometimes pretending to sweep up.

“I would be outside my house fiddling with something and she would come over to chat about inconsequential stuff.

“Looking back, it seems obvious now that she didn’t want to spend time in the house with the bodies.”

McCullough, who The Telegraph understands had a history of making nuisance calls, was contacted by Essex Police around two years ago and told to stop calling officers and she would be arrested if she did.

“It seems bizarre to me that she was calling the police repeatedly when she had two bodies in her house. I was aware there was something not quite right with her, and it could have been a cry for help,” Mr Sargeant added.

By the summer of 2019, unbeknown to the residents of Great Baddow, John and Lois were dead, their bodies lying hidden in the family home.

On June 17, McCullough poisoned her father with prescription medication, before attacking her mother with a knife and hammer shortly afterwards.

In court, McCullough cried in the dock as she listened to her own account of how she murdered her mother.

While in custody, McCullough explained to officers how she murdered her mother, who she described as a “happiness Hoover”.

She said she put on a pair of “Wilko’s garden gloves” and armed herself with a kitchen knife and a hammer.

She told police: “It was pretty much either do it or you’re gonna be arrested anyway for the murder of your father you’re gonna go to prison.”

She said she attacked her mother while she was lying in bed listening to the radio “looking so innocent”.

McCullough recounted to officers how she struck her mother over the head with a hammer who then cried out: “What are you doing, what are you doing.”

McCullough said she hit her again and again and when she was striking her it was “like someone badly playing the xylophone or something”.

She later told a psychiatrist that she had always wanted her parents’ deaths to be “non-violent” and that she only had the murder weapon as a “backup”.

She described her murder plot as being “ad hoc” and said it was “not planned to the last detail”.

In the years after the murders, alongside her other eccentricities, neighbours started to notice that McCullough appeared to be becoming increasingly paranoid, and erratic.

Mr Hastings also remembered McCullough’s growing paranoia, he said: “She had a fixation on some things. She believed her Ring doorbell was being hacked and replaced it three times.”

During this time, McCullough was busy constructing an extraordinary web of lies that included dozens of fake phones, calls to GPs and texts to friends.

On the day of the murder, McCullough went to the doctor with a cut on her finger that she claimed happened while chopping vegetables.

She then messaged one of her sisters from her mother’s phone, saying: “Your dad and I are at the seaside this week.”

She later sent another text saying: “Good night. Mum x”. She would continue to pretend to be her parents for the next four years.

Prosecutor Lisa Wilding said that in total, detectives found 145 phone numbers connected to McCullough.

The court heard how on one occasion she attempted to pass herself off as her mother Lois to one of her sisters in a phone call.

One of her sisters said she considered their relationship to be close and said they would speak weekly in the year before her arrest during which she would tell her what their parents were up to.

McCullough said their parents were “travelling and visiting people and places”.

Ms Wilding said McCullough “had been thinking about killing her parents since March 2019 and had been planning for it”.

She said that the motivation for the killing was money and that she had racked up around £60,000 of debt on her parents’ credit and debit cards, as well as her own.

She said that McCullough “had not been employed for many years”. She said that she “engaged in online gambling” and spent £21,193 between June 1, 2018 and September 14, 2023.

In total, she fraudulently gained almost £150,000 from her parents.

Ms Wilding said money appeared to have been “frittered away and the investigation has not revealed any expenditure on expensive, luxury or extravagant items”.

As well as lying to her family and friends, from 2019 to 2024 McCullough made 185 calls to the GP surgery “including calls where she pretended to be her mother”.

Eventually, one of the receptionists called the police after becoming concerned at the amount of appointments that were being made by McCullough for her parents and subsequently cancelled.

McCullough initially lied to officers when they first contacted her claiming her parents were travelling and would be returning in October.

On the morning of Sept 15 however, detectives from Essex Police raided her home.

When they broke down the door, they discovered McCullough inside and she immediately admitted killing her parents.

Nicole Rice, a specialist prosecutor for the CPS, said: “McCullough callously and viciously killed both of her parents before concealing their bodies in makeshift tombs within their home address.

“She spent the next four years manipulating and lying to family members, medical staff, financial institutions, and the police, spending her parent’s money and accruing large debts in their name.”

McCullough’s murders horrified “even the most experienced of murder detectives”, Essex Police has said.

Det Supt Rob Kirby said: “Throughout the course of our investigation, we have built a picture of the vast levels of deceit, betrayal and fraud she engaged in. It was on a shocking and monumental scale.

“McCullough lied about almost every aspect of her life, maintaining a charade to deceive everyone close to her and clearly taking advantage of her parents’ goodwill.

“She is an intelligent manipulator who chose to kill her parents callously, without a thought for them or those who continue to suffer as a result of their loss.

“The details of this case shock and horrify even the most experienced of murder detectives, let alone any right-thinking member of the public.”

In a victim impact statement, Richard Butcher, Mrs McCullough’s brother, said he feared that his niece would target other members of the family if she was ever released.

He said that while she is in prison she would have “a lot of time to plan something else”.

A woman who murdered her parents and then lived alongside their bodies for four years told police who arrested her: “Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy.” 

Virginia McCullough, 36, poisoned her father John McCullough, 70, with a “cocktail of prescription drugs” and fatally stabbed her mother Lois McCullough, 71, with a kitchen knife in the summer of 2019.

At a sentencing hearing on Friday, the court heard how McCullough had built a “makeshift tomb” for her father in a ground floor room of the family home, which had been his bedroom and study.

She is then said to have put her mother’s body in a sleeping bag in a bedroom wardrobe on the top floor of their home in Pump Hill in Great Baddow, Essex.

When Essex Police arrested her last year, she admitted everything to them and said “you’ve caught the bad guy”.

The court also heard how McCullough made 185 calls to a GP surgery including calls where she pretended to be her mother.

McCullough also spoke to a police officer over the phone and told them her parents were away but would be back for her mother’s birthday.

McCullough benefited from more than £135,000 after the murders from cashing in her parents’ pensions.

Prof Nigel Blackwood, a psychiatrist, who assessed McCullough, told the court her behaviour including her “lack of emotional empathy” was “more typically found in psychopathic personalities”.

Essex Police has now released footage of her arrest.

On Sept 15 2023 officers attended McCullough’s home address after her parents’ failure to attend GP appointments had raised concerns for their wellbeing.
Video footage shows five officers outside the suburban home as a policeman in riot gear breaks a glass plane in the back door.

An officer in forensic clothing then crawls through the door, and says, “No one here at the moment, hold on.” He shouts: “[This is] the police.”

Holding a yellow Taser, an officer walks through the property to the front door, where McCullough is standing wearing a pink top.

Appearing calm, McCullough is then told: “The time is 12.12pm and you are under arrest on suspicion of murder against John McCullough and Lois McCullough, okay?”

She replies: “Yes.”

While being handcuffed, one of the officers asks McCullough if there is “anything improper we should know about?”

She replied: “Yes, there is.”

The officer interjected: “Where?”

She went on: “Can I take you to it?”

He replied: “No, you can tell me.”

Four years earlier, on June 17 2019, McCullough had poisoned her father with prescription medicine before stabbing her mother and hitting her with a hammer the next day. Their bodies had never left the house.

As she continued to be questioned by police, McCullough told them her father’s body was in what prosecutors described as a “homemade mausoleum” in the back room of the house’s ground floor.

Asked where her mother’s body was, she said it was “a little bit more complicated”.

“So, upstairs, there are about five wardrobes,” she said. “It’s behind the bed at the back, next to the sink.”

Footage shows McCullough telling police how she killed her father by spiking his drinks.

“I’ve slipped a pile of those into his drink,” she said. “There were about two or three drinks that I brought downstairs.

“He didn’t drink all of them. He only drunk probably half of them. Six o’clock in the morning, I came in and he was gone. He was gone.”

As officers searched the house, McCullough continued to talk to the officers who arrested her.

“I did know that this would kind of come eventually,” she told them. “It’s proper that I serve my punishment.”

The court heard she had told persistent lies about her parents’ whereabouts, cancelling family arrangements and frequently told doctors and relatives her parents were unwell, on holiday or away on lengthy trips.

The murders were only uncovered after a GP at Lois and John’s practice raised a concern for their welfare, having not seen them for some time.

It later emerged that McCullough frequently cancelled appointments, using a range of excuses to explain her father’s absence.

McCullough initially lied to officers when they first contacted her claiming her parents were travelling and would be returning in October.

The footage of her arrest goes on to show McCullough signing the confession she had just made to police.

The officer asks her: “Are you happy to sign that to say it’s a true account?” She replied, “Yes, yeah”, before signing with a biro pen, apparently emotionless.

In a bizarre turn, McCullough then told the officer to “cheer up” because he had “caught the bad guy”.

“I know I don’t seem 100 per cent evil,” she added. 

The officer replied: “I’ve just woken up today and done my job.”

Detectives told the court that McCullough had “long manipulated and abused her parents’ goodwill for financial gain”.

She stole from them while they were alive to support her gambling habit and also after they died. Documents found at the property showed she had run up tens of thousands of pounds of debts on credit cards in her parents’ names.

As she continued to talk to the officers, McCullough told them that her eventual conviction “might give me a bit of peace”.

“I deserve to obviously get whatever is coming sentence-wise because that is the right thing to do and that might give me a bit of peace,” she said.

McCullough was sentenced to life in prison at Chelmsford Crown Court on Friday and ordered to serve a minimum term of 36 years.

Later footage filmed in the police station where McCullough was taken after her arrest shows her revealing the location of the knife used in the murder of her mother.

Handcuffed in a cell, she said: “So, um, murder weapon is upstairs… a kitchen knife.”

The court was told that her fatal attacks were, by her own admission, the culmination of months of thought and planning that began around March 2019.

She struck her mother over the head with a hammer as she pleaded with her, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”.

McCullough then stabbed her mother with a kitchen knife when she “realised that the hammer was not going to work”, she admitted to police. 

McCullough admitted to police that there would still be “blood traces” on the hammer she used to attack her mother.

“The next bit is very hard to talk about, that’s probably the most grisly detail,” she told officers from her cell.

“So on the ground floor, underneath the stairs, there’s a few, like, storage boxes and things.

“You will find that forensically it’s helpful. There’s a hammer. It will still have blood on it. It’s rusted but it will still have blood traces on it.”

In the final clip, McCullough was filmed candidly telling police why she admitted her crimes, saying she “should pay for what I’ve done”.

“So not co-operating is, it’s futile,” she said. “There’s no point not co-operating. There really isn’t.

“And plus apart from which, anyway, I should pay for what I’ve done. So that’s the other side of the coin, I think.”

Det Superintendent Rob Kirby, from Essex Police, said the case had shocked “even the most experienced of murder detectives”.

“This process, from the finding of John and Lois’ remains, to the unravelling of McCullough’s web of lies, has taken a huge toll on the wider family network,” he said.

“With this sentence and with all that we have uncovered throughout our investigation, we hope they can now start to find a way forward with their lives.”

New EU border rules which would force British tourists to submit fingerprints and facial biometrics have been postponed indefinitely.

The Entry/Exit system (EES) was due to come into force on Nov 10 but has now been delayed for a third time with no new deadline set.

Sir Keir Starmer is lobbying for Britain to be exempted from the rules when they finally come into force, prompting speculation he will agree to a youth mobility scheme with Brussels in exchange.

Relations with the EU suffered a setback on Friday when Spain warned Britain it faces a permanent hard border on Gibraltar on Friday after imposing surprise passport checks.

Both sides have turned a blind eye to post-Brexit travel restrictions including stamping passports and limiting visa-free travel to 90 days in every 180.

But on Friday morning huge queues formed after the Spanish authorities insisted on stamping passports. Gibraltar had “no choice but to reciprocate” with its own controls, Fabian Picardo, the chief minister, said as he described the Spanish decision to introduce them as hugely regrettable.

Brussels will now explore phasing the bloc-wide border rules gradually.

The decision to delay the scheme again just a month before its planned implementation date came after a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg on Thursday.

Germany, France and the Netherlands had said they were not ready to roll out the new electronic replacement for wet-stamping the passports of non-EU citizens entering the Schengen Zone.

Ylva Johansson, the Commissioner for Home Affairs, said there were “some concerns when it comes to the resilience of the system”.

The three countries are responsible for 40 per cent of all inward traffic to the EU and have faced IT difficulties.

Ms Johannsson said the EES could be introduced “with a little step-by-step going into the system, not a Big Bang of all border crossing points at the same time.”

The system was meant to be introduced last summer but was delayed amid French concerns over disruption to the Paris Olympics and Rugby World Cup.

It was rescheduled for Oct 6 before being delayed again to Nov 10.

It will apply to non-EU citizens, including Britons, entering the passport-free Schengen Zone for visits, holidays and business trips for a stay of up to 90 days within 180 days. All entries and exits will be recorded.

Once it is working, visitors will have to provide passports and have their faces photographed and fingerprints scanned electronically. The system is meant to help crack down on people overstaying short-term visas and identity fraudsters.

However, Downing Street has been privately lobbying EU countries to take a “more pragmatic approach” to the fingerprint tests when they are eventually introduced.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, the minister responsible for negotiating with the bloc, is understood to have raised the matter personally in talks with EU officials.

It raises the prospect that Brussels could demand concessions from Britain in return for any deal, such as the UK accepting a young mobility agreement. EU officials have ruled out that quid pro quo at this stage.

Before the election, Sir Keir said he would persuade the EU to look again at the introduction of fingerprint checks for millions of UK holidaymakers.

But one EU diplomat poured cold water on the idea of a speedy deal, saying that negotiating one would “not be a priority” for the bloc.

It came as Spain decided to impose surprise border checks with Gibraltar.

Madrid warned it would abide by the new EU electronic border rules which make it impossible to continue waiving passport checks and make the hard border permanent, unless a deal was done.

“Spain is ready for the Entry-Exit System to come into force on the date set by the European Commission, which is responsible for that decision and which the Spanish government and the interior ministry will abide by,” a spokesman for the interior minister told The Telegraph.

Madrid has piled pressure on Britain over Gibraltar since Sir Keir Starmer last week surrendered sovereignty of the Chagos Islands but the Prime Minister insists the Rock, ceded to Britain in 1715 after being captured from the French in 1704, will stay British.

An estimated 15,000 Spanish workers cross the border to the Rock every day, while many Gibraltarians have second properties in Spain or travel to the neighbouring region of La Linea to go shopping.

Spain warned Britain it faces a permanent hard border on Gibraltar on Friday after imposing surprise checks on the Rock’s frontier that resulted in “huge” queues.

Madrid has heaped pressure on Britain over Gibraltar since Sir Keir Starmer last week surrendered the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands but the Prime Minister insists the Rock, ceded to Britain in 1715 after being captured from the French in 1704, will stay British.

Gibraltar had “no choice but to reciprocate”, with its own controls, Fabian Picardo, the chief minister, said as he described the Spanish decision to insist on passport stamping as “hugely regrettable”.

An estimated 15,000 Spanish workers cross the border to the Rock every day, while many Gibraltarians have second properties in Spain or travel to the neighbouring region of La Linea to go shopping.

Both sides have turned a blind eye to post-Brexit travel restrictions, which limit visa-free travel to 90 days in every 180 and insist on passport stamps.

The interim measures have spared Gibraltar residents and Spaniards from using up their 90 days and bought time for ongoing negotiations over a post-Brexit Common Travel Area between Spain and Gibraltar.

The Rock’s government said that by 7.30am “a huge queue” had formed at the border after Spanish guards insisted on stamping the passports of those with Gibraltar residency cards.

Gibraltar began their own checks before both sides stopped the checks at about 11 am.

One Gibraltarian woman told the Gibraltar Chronicle she asked why she was stopped as she tried to cross into La Linea to go shopping.

“I asked for my passport back and returned to Gibraltar,” she said after a guard said he had instructions to stamp passports.

The Brexit deal for Gibraltar aims to make the crossing between the two jurisdictions by land frictionless by moving the border to the Rock’s airport and making the British Overseas Territory part of the EU’s Schengen Zone.

However, talks have stalled on sovereignty grounds and whether Spanish border guards will have boots on Gibraltar ground to police entry to Schengen.

Madrid warned on Friday it would abide by new EU electronic border rules, which make it impossible to continue turning a blind eye to passport checks and the hard border permanent unless a deal was done.

“Spain is ready for the Entry-Exit System to come into force on the date set by the European Commission, which is responsible for that decision and which the Spanish government and the interior ministry will abide by,” a spokesman for the interior minister told The Telegraph.

Spain, which claims sovereignty over Gibraltar, has historically tightened controls at the border to exert leverage and score political points.

On Wednesday, a British Airways flight from Gibraltar to London was cancelled after Spanish border guards refused to follow established protocols allowing passengers to fly from Malaga airport when their flight is diverted.

The flight was diverted because of poor weather conditions on the Rock, but the airline cancelled the return leg after Spanish officers refused to allow non-EU passengers in Gibraltar to be ferried to Malaga.

Earlier this week, Spain’s foreign minister warned the UK to accept the “generous” Brexit demands before new EU electronic border rules came into force on Nov 10. Brussels has since delayed the deadline.

Former armed forces minister and Tory MP Mark Francois, said, “It’s absolutely no surprise that, following Labour’s abject surrender of the Chagos Islands, Spain is now also trying its luck, by exerting pressure on Gibraltar.

“This hapless Government simply doesn’t understand that appeasement hardly ever works and now the consequences are playing out. Hopeless!”

“This action by Spain occurred without any prior warning whatsoever,” Gibraltar’s government said in a statement.

“After further investigation, it became apparent the decision to suspend the interim measures had not been made by or notified to the Spanish ministers of the interior or the exterior.

“It appears that the instruction was given in writing by an officer of the Spanish Policia Nacional in La Linea, of the rank of Inspector, who was not authorised to give that instruction by his superior.”

Spanish media accused Gibraltar of being behind the delays, which Mr Picardo branded the “usual untruth”.

José Ignacio Landaluce, mayor of Algeciras and a senator for Spain’s conservative People’s Party, warned Gibraltar not to “use Spanish cross-border workers as hostages as part of a show of strength in the context of the current negotiations”.

“Interim arrangements were changed by Spanish police without notice, affecting Spanish and Gibraltarian workers and ordinary people alike,” Fabian Picardo, the chief minister, said.

“Sections of the regional Spanish media blaming Gibraltar is the usual untruth. A UK/EU Treaty will avoid these issues.  The absence of it will exacerbate them.”

He added, “Our balanced compromise proposals guarantee the security of Schengen and the integrity of the Single Market whilst being sovereignty neutral.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said, “We are committed to concluding a UK-EU treaty which protects sovereignty, UK military autonomy and secures future prosperity for Gibraltar and the region. All sides agree on the importance of finalising an agreement as soon as possible.”

“The application of EU law in this matter is the responsibility of Spain. The negotiations on an EU-UK agreement on Gibraltar are ongoing,” a European Commission spokesman said.

The Duchess of Sussex has told young girls she was “one of the most bullied people in the world”.

Meghan, 43, joined the group of “tweens” – or under 13s – to discuss a new US-based “digital wellness” programme co-funded by the Sussexes’ Archewell Foundation.

Larissa May, founder of campaign group #HalfTheStory, told Vanity Fair: “We did an activity where we talked through a bunch of scenarios, and Meghan talked about being one of the most bullied people in the world.

“We had girls wave these little emoji signs and talk about how each one of these scenarios would have impacted them emotionally.”

Archewell has joined forces with Pivotal, a philanthropic organisation founded by Melinda Gates and the Oprah Winfrey Charitable Foundation to fund the expansion of the programme, called Social Media U.

To highlight the initiative, the Duchess joined what was described as a “screen-free afternoon of games, friendship bracelets, colouring – and some frank talk about social media” in Santa Barbara, California, on October 2 to test out the curriculum.

May said: “Ultimately, we thought the best way to do that was to create a space of vulnerability… we talked about what it really means to grow up in this digital age.”

The Duchess has spoken previously about how the majority of the “bullying and abuse” she received on social media took place during her pregnancies with her children, Archie and Lilibet.

“You just think about that and really wrap your head around why people would be so hateful – it is not catty, it is cruel,” she told an event in Texas in March.

The Duke and Duchess have been campaigning for more rigorous controls of the digital sphere. In August, they launched the Parents’ Network, a resource for parents whose children have experienced harm on social media.

Last month, Prince Harry gave a passionate speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York in which he took his phone from his jacket pocket and said: “My lock screen is a picture of my kids. What’s yours?”

Images of young people on mobile phone lock screens appeared on the large screen behind him as he went on: “These children and thousands more meant the world to their families. Their beautiful faces you see before you, their smiles, their dreams, all lost, all too soon, and all because of social media.”

The Duchess was the subject of a bullying complaint herself in 2018 when the Sussexes’ then-press secretary wrote to their private secretary outlining his concern “that the Duchess was able to bully two PAs out of the household”.

The findings of an official investigation into the way the palace handled the allegations were kept secret.

Clive Myrie has been filmed condemning a “f—— idiot” protester, as the BBC journalist comes under pressure from pro-Palestine students.

The presenter was named chancellor of the University of the Arts London in June, but his appointment has been opposed by some students, who have branded him a “Zionist”.

Some activists claimed that the news anchor spread “Israeli propaganda” in his broadcasts.

Footage has emerged showing the presenter angered and defending the principles of public debate after a UAL student shouted at him and then stormed off. The student activist was making a point about the Hamas-Israel conflict.

Footage from a university Q&A event shows Myrie moments after the stunt condemning the “lunatic who just walked out and didn’t have the courtesy to hear my response”.

He adds: “I have a f—— idiot shout at me in public and then leave. He doesn’t want to hear the other side.”

The footage was filmed at a Meet the Chancellor event held on Sept 25.

Myrie, 60, later apologised for his choice of language but stood by his defence of open debate.

Footage shows Myrie engaging in real exchanges with other students in the auditorium and offering his thoughts on free speech.

He said: “He’s made his point and he’s left. Stands up and he’s left. He’s not stayed to listen to my argument, notice. Stands up, shouts, you (the audience) applaud. But he doesn’t stay to hear what I’ve got to say. That’s pathetic.”

Later on in the exchange, he is asked whether he will listen to student concerns.

He responds that he will, but adds: “I’m not having anyone walk out on me. I’m not having it. I am not going to be abused by students.”

He adds that he is happy to discuss his journalism with regard to the Hamas-Israel conflict, but is not happy to be “slagged off”.

Myrie also criticised a student for “hijacking the whole meeting” and reminded them that they do not represent the entire student community.

The heated exchanges came after outcry among some pro-Palestine students that Myrie was named as chancellor in June.

One group called UAL Students for Justice in Palestine alleged that Myrie’s work is “dehumanising” to Muslim communities.

Myrie has been filmed using forceful language in the past. In 2015, while presenting The Papers, the news review show, he was heard criticising Tyson Fury’s inclusion on the Sport Personality of the Year shortlist.

He said: “It’s after the watershed. You cannot be a d—head and win Sports Personality of the Year.”

A UAL spokesman told The Telegraph: “On Wednesday 25 Sept, Clive Myrie held a Q&A session with students to mark the start of the term.

“During the event, some students expressed their views on the ongoing war in Israel-Palestine. At the start of the session, Clive used language he regrets. His apology was sent to attendees shortly after the event ended.

“Clive stands by his sentiment that dialogue should be rooted in mutual respect. At UAL, we will continue to uphold freedom of expression and encourage constructive conversations about all topics in our community.”

Myrie has been contacted for comment.

Labour’s push for growth has been dealt an embarrassing blow by the owner of P&O Ferries, which shelved a £1bn port expansion after the Transport Secretary branded it a “rogue operator”.

Dubai’s DP World had planned to announce an investment in London Gateway port at a flagship summit designed to show Britain is open for business.

However, comments by Louise Haigh about the ferry company’s employment practices have thrown the summit into chaos, adding to a series of blunders that have marked Labour’s first 100 days in power.

Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the DP World boss, will no longer attend the investment summit on Monday after Ms Haigh and Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, singled out the company for censure this week.

DP World’s withdrawal came just hours after it emerged Qatar is selling a £306m stake in Sainsbury’s a week after the supermarket’s chief executive warned that Budget uncertainty was hitting sales.

No 10 appeared to blame Ms Haigh personally for DP World’s decision to withdraw, suggesting that a TV interview this week in which she encouraged people to boycott P&O had angered the company.

Speaking to ITV News, the Transport Secretary referred to the ferry company as a “rogue operator” that needed “cracking down on”.

A Downing Street source distanced No 10 from her remarks, saying that they were “her own personal view and don’t represent the view of the Government”.

“We continue to work closely with DP World, which has already delivered significant investment in the London Gateway and Southampton ports, to help deliver for the UK economy,” they added.

The source also attempted to deflect blame from a Government press release issued by Ms Haigh and Ms Rayner that singled out P&O as it referred to “unscrupulous” and “exploitative” employers.

In 2022, the company fired 800 staff and replaced them with cheaper foreign agency workers in a practice known as “fire and rehire”.

Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, has made attracting foreign investment a priority as she seeks to upgrade Britain’s infrastructure and boost economic growth.

However, business leaders have accused Ms Reeves of talking down the economy, while widespread speculation that she will change Britain’s debt rules to borrow more have helped to drive an increase in UK borrowing costs and mortgage rates.

Fears are also growing over a capital gains tax (CGT) raid, despite warnings that increasing the rate by too much would backfire and lose the Treasury vital revenue.

Analysts said that a bounceback for the economy in August risked being short-lived as fears of tax rises in the Budget hit confidence.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Friday the economy grew by 0.2pc in August, after flatlining for two months.

Ms Reeves described the boost to the economy as “welcome news” and insisted she was “not wasting any time on delivering on the promise of change”.

But analysts said the rest of the year looked more uncertain, with Sir Keir Starmer’s warnings of a “painful” Budget blamed for plunging consumer and business confidence in September.

Ben Jones, at the Confederation of British Industry, said: “Our surveys suggest that businesses may have tapped the brakes again in September amid speculation over potential Budget announcements. Anecdotally it’s clear that some firms have paused hiring and investment decisions pending more clarity over the direction of the new Government’s economic policies.”

Investment summit ‘body blow’

The summit in the City of London is due to be attended by hundreds of business chiefs, including representatives of private equity and sovereign wealth funds, and aims to raise billions of pounds.

Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow business secretary, said DP World’s reversal was a damning indictment of the Government’s performance so far.

He said: “On the eve of this much-vaunted inward investment event, this is a body blow for the Government and shows that Labour cabinet ministers have never been in business, don’t understand business and don’t know how to talk to business. They just haven’t got a clue.”

Business leaders also expressed dismay. One energy industry source said: “There’s unease all over. The handling of this investment summit – not giving out precise times and locations for ‘security reasons’ – is the last straw for some.

“It is British bureaucrats at their worst. After not sorting out Thames Water on day one, they’ve weakened investor confidence in a number of ways.

“And you have to ask: why would you re-raise P&O now? This was clearly naivety by two bright green ministers. They need to realise the rules of behaviour are different in government – you can’t just open your mouth because you fancy it.”

Foreign investors have been called on to bankroll some of Britain’s biggest infrastructure schemes in recent years.

German insurance giant Allianz was among the lead financial backers of the £5bn Thames Tideway scheme, while French state energy giant EDF is the primary funder of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station being built in Somerset.

Meanwhile, the Treasury is seeking to line up investment from overseas wealth funds – including the Emirates – in the £20bn Sizewell C nuclear power plant, with private investment also mooted as a potential source of funds for the £9bn Lower Thames Crossing.

Relations with UAE have also been strained by the decision to block the attempted acquisition of The Telegraph by an Abu Dhabi-backed fund.

On Friday, No 10 played down suggestions that Ms Haigh could be sacked over the gaffe.

But its remarks have left the Transport Secretary badly damaged ahead of a potential reshuffle next year, putting her long-term future in doubt.

She had already clashed with Downing Street after apparently blindsiding Sir Keir when she agreed to a bumper 15pc pay rise for train drivers.

Just 48 hours later Aslef announced further strikes, prompting the furious Prime Minister to reportedly haul her into No 10 for a “proper b—-cking”.

A spokesman for DP World declined to comment.

One of the new winners of the Nobel Peace Prize used his acceptance speech to warn against Israel using nuclear weapons in Gaza.

Toshiyuki Mimaki, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, picked up the award on behalf of his organisation, Nihon Hidankyo, which has been campaigning to eradicate nuclear weapons ever since.

During his speech on Friday he warned “nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists”.

“For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things,” he added.

The Norwegian Nobel committee said it awarded the 2024 Prize to Nihon Hidankyo for its “efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons”.

At the press conference, Mr Mimaki went on to compare the plight of Gazan children to Japanese children at the end of the Second World War. “In Gaza, children in blood are being held. It’s like in Japan 80 years ago,” he said.

Vladimir Putin has frequently threatened nuclear attacks on Ukraine, while in November 2023 Israel suspended Amihai Eliyahu, a government minister, for saying that a nuclear strike on Gaza was a “possibility”.

Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, although it has never explicitly confirmed this, and it has never carried out public nuclear tests.

Survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the only two occasions in history where nuclear weapons have been used in anger, are known in Japan as “hibakusha”.

“Hibakusha are receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” the committee said in a statement.

“The Hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.”

Mr Mimaki said he hoped that the decision to give his group the Nobel Peace Prize would further efforts to abolish nuclear weapons and raise awareness of the horrors of nuclear war.

“It will be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons and everlasting peace can be achieved. Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished,” he said.

‘The end of humanity’

In a statement to Reuters, Joergen Watne Frydnes, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee, said nuclear war was a concern but declined to name any specific countries.

“In a world ridden with conflicts, where nuclear weapons are definitely part of it, we wanted to highlight the importance of strengthening the nuclear taboo, the international norm, against the use of nuclear weapons,” he said.

Mr Frydnes: “We see it as very alarming that the nuclear taboo … is being reduced by threatening, but also the situation in the world where the nuclear powers are modernising and upgrading their arsenals. These weapons should never be used again anywhere in the world. Nuclear war could mean the end of humanity, [the] end of our civilisation.”

It follows internet speculation that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was a contender to win the prize, after it was identified as a potential front-runner by a panel of experts.

The speculation caused offence to the relatives of the victims of the Hamas massacre, who pointed to UNRWA having dismissed some of its staff due to concerns they had taken part in the attack.

After the war, Hibakusha for many decades faced discrimination in Japan as they were assumed by others to be carrying contagious or hereditary radiation sickness.

The Telegraph in 2017 interviewed a Hiroshima survivor who revealed that she avoided death in the explosion as her father woke up with a bad feeling that morning and told her to stay at home.

Keiko Ogura, who was eight years old when the US dropped the “Little Boy” nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, said: “My father had a kind of inspiration. He suspected something major was about to happen because there had been so many air-raid warnings.”

Extraordinarily, her father also survived the bombing. “He was behind a pine tree and because of that he survived,” said Ms Ogura, who went on to become the director of the Hiroshima Interpreters for Peace group.

Vladimir Putin said growing ties with Iran were a “priority” as he met the country’s president to discuss Middle East tensions in a surprise summit.

The two leaders talked up their “very close” relations in their first meeting, which came as Iran is facing a major threat of retaliation from Israel.

The meeting in Ashgabat, the capital of the secretive state of Turkmenistan, between the two leaders of the West’s most dangerous enemies appeared friendly.

Cameras showed Putin and Mr Pezeshkian shaking hands and smiling as they listened to each other through interpreters.

“Relations with Iran are a priority for us, they are developing very successfully. Our views of events in the world are often very close,” said Putin.

The alliance between Russia and Iran has grown stronger since the start of the war in Ukraine, with Iran sending drones and missiles to Russia, in return for oil and technical know-how.

Iran is now facing its own crisis in the Middle East, prompting further questions over the transactional relationship between the two allies of the so-called “axis of evil”.

Putin had turned up to the meeting at Turkmenistan’s palatial Chamber of Commerce in his bulletproof black Russia-made limousine even though it is only legal to drive a silver or white car in Turkmenistan.

Responding to Putin, Mr Pezeshkian, who only became Iran’s president in July, agreed that Iran and Russia’s worldviews overlap.

“Economically and culturally, our communications are being strengthened day by day and becoming more robust,” he said.
The two men are due to meet again at an economics summit in Russia on Oct 22-24.

In the build-up to the meeting, the Kremlin said that Putin and Mr Pezeshkian would focus on “escalating violence in the Middle East” and also suggested a bilateral agreement to intensify Iran-Russia cooperation would be signed, but neither materialised.

Even so, Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top aide, said the meeting had been of “great importance”.

Kirill Semenov, a Middle East expert at the Russian International Affairs Council think tank, cautioned that Iran wanted more support from Russia but the Kremlin was hesitating.

“Nevertheless, the general approaches remain. Iran does not want to go deeper into this escalation and Russia agrees with this,” he said of growing violence in the region. “And now, in general, the main question is how Iran should act further.”

The meeting between Putin and Mr Pezeshkian was held on the fringes of an obscure conference honouring a Turkmen poet. Putin is not a regular visitor to former Soviet Turkmenistan and he was not scheduled to attend the conference until a few days ago.

Turkmenistan lies on the southern edge of Central Asia next to Iran. It is one of the most repressive countries in the world, with a dictatorship that has no free media or open political process.

It is ruled over by Serdar Berdymukhamedov, who inherited the presidency from his father, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, in 2022.

In its 2024 report on Turkmenistan, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said all basic rights were repressed and torture in prison was rife.

“Recent political reforms have only deepened authoritarian rule,” it said.

Mr Berdymukhamedov Snr has been president of Turkmenistan since 2007. Before him, the country was led by a dentist who had built a golden statue of himself that rotated to face the sun throughout the day.

Known for both his eccentricity and his diverse pastimes, Mr Berdymukhamedov Snr’s hobbies included producing rap videos with his grandson, performing doughnuts in a rally car and leading his government cabinet through gym workouts – all filmed for mainstream Turkmen TV channels.

In 2018, Mr Berdymukhamedov Snr banned all cars except for white and silver ones because he thought black cars were unlucky and decided that they ruined his vision of his white-marbled city gleaming in the sun.

A Bolivian court has issued an arrest warrant for Evo Morales, the country’s former president, after he failed to attend a pretrial hearing for allegedly having sex with a minor.

He has been charged with “aggravated rape with human trafficking” for allegedly having a baby girl with an unnamed 15-year-old while in office in 2016, when he was 57.

The girl’s parents are said to have agreed to the relationship in return for “political favours”.

The former president, who is refusing to leave The Chapare, one of Bolivia’s two coca-producing regions, where he remains wildly popular as a one-time rabble rousing coca-growers’ union leader, has responded to the charges by calling on the government not to interfere with his “family”.

“This is more proof that this is a right-wing government that does everything to comply with the orders of the White House,” Mr Morales added about the accusations, which first came to light under the 2019-2020 conservative government of the interim president Jeanine Añez.

As the most senior senator, she had replaced Morales as president after he was forced to resign amid a vote-rigging controversy. Amid deep political polarisation, the charges were eventually shelved for lack of evidence, before being reopened this year.

Bolivia’s courts are notoriously politicised, according to independent experts, including Human Rights Watch, and it has become routine for presidents of all political stripes to weaponise prosecutions against opponents.

Ms Añez, who notoriously presided over the massacres of anti-government protesters, is serving a 10-year sentence for supposedly overthrowing Mr Morales. Her conviction has been questioned by the United Nations’ special rapporteur on judicial independence.

The reopening of the case against Mr Morales, who was president from 2006 to 2019, comes amid a bitter dispute between him and president Luis Arce, who previously served as Mr Morales’ finance minister.

Both are vying to represent the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) in next year’s presidential elections, even though the constitution bans Mr Morales from running again.

MAS remains the most popular political party in the impoverished Andean nation. But although many voters have tired of the drama and scandal that has often enveloped Mr Morales, an economic crisis has seen Mr Arce’s personal approval also plummet.

A conference in Turkmenistan celebrating a local poet’s 300th birthday is not an obvious spot for the first meeting between Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president.

But these are urgent times for the West’s most dangerous enemies.

Analysts said that the meeting in Ashgabat on Friday, which will focus on “a sharply aggravated situation in the Middle East”, appears to have been arranged at the last minute.

“It is a very strange forum to hold their first meeting,” said Nicole Grajewski, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Until Monday, when Russian media announced the Putin-Pezeshkian meeting, not even Turkmen media had been reporting on the forum dedicated to Magtymguly Pyragy, a Turkmen philosopher born in 1724.

A handful of central Asian leaders have since confirmed their attendance at the forum, possibly to add credibility.

Now, though, Pyragy will be linked not just with 18th-century Turkmen nationalism and traditional poetry tinged with Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, but also with Iran-Russia diplomacy as the Middle East edges towards all-out conflict, and the war in Ukraine rages on.

Since the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Iran and Russia have become close allies, building on a partnership forged in the civil war in Syria almost 10 years ago.

Tehran has sent thousands of drones and short-range missiles to Moscow. In return, Russia has been sending oil to Iran and giving it much-needed technical know-how.

On the face of it, Russia appears to be moving towards backing Iran further as there are unconfirmed reports that it has sent fighter jets and missile defence systems to Iran. But there is a feeling in Tehran that the Kremlin still owes Iran.

“Our relationship with Putin resembles that of being friends with someone who never pays their share when you go out,” a professor at a university near Tehran said on condition of anonymity.

But the professor said that Western sanctions had so badly crippled Iran’s economy that it was only able to act as a weak partner to Russia.

“Pezeshkian just needs to keep Putin satisfied, perhaps by promising to send more drones to Russia for use in the Ukraine war,” he said.

Although the Kremlin has hosted Hamas, Iran’s Gaza-based proxies, in the past 12 months and has both blamed the West for escalating conflict in the Middle East and applauded Iran for its restraint, this frustration towards Russia is reflected in Iranian state media.

Tehran’s Ettelaat newspaper has blamed Putin for “abandoning” Iran in Gaza, and for “maintaining his distance from the crisis”. The Hamshahri newspaper said that it was about time that the Kremlin delivered on its promise to send sophisticated S-400 missile defence systems to Iran.

“Access to the S-400 system can position Iran better in diplomatic and military negotiations with other countries,” the newspaper said.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War also said that it expected Putin and Pezeshkian to discuss how to respond to a “potential Israeli retaliation” for Tehran’s missile attack last week, but other analysts said the Kremlin would prefer to take an indirect role in the conflict.

“I think that would be too much in terms of antagonising America and Israel. Russia is also still desperately trying to keep Israel away from funding Ukraine,” said Stephen Hall, an assistant professor of Russian politics at the University of Bath.

Yuri Ushakov, a top Kremlin aide, said that at the meeting, Putin and Pezeshkian would also sign off on a bilateral agreement, expected to intensify cooperation, that has been the focus of intense diplomacy.

Last month, Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s security council, and Mikhail Mishustin, the Russian prime minister, both separately visited Tehran for talks on the deal with Pezeshkian. Pezeshkian only became Iran’s president at the end of July.

For Turkmenistan, wedged on former Soviet Central Asia’s southern border with Iran, the high-stakes Putin-Pezeshkian meeting is a rare opportunity to grab international attention.

Turkmenistan is one of the most repressive countries in the world, where Serdar Berdymukhamedov, the dour president, inherited power in 2022 from his cheerful father, a fast car enthusiast and an amateur DJ.

It is a reclusive place, hosting an obscure forum, disguising a high-stakes Russia-Iran summit.

A German neo-Nazi has tripped and fallen to his death during a hiking accident on Adolf Hitler’s favourite mountain in Bavaria.

Andreas Münzhuber, 37, from Freising, died during a tour of the Untersberg mountain as part of a 30-person group on September 29.

The view of Untersberg, a 1,972 metre-tall mountain, was so beloved by Hitler that he decided to have his infamous Eagle’s Nest retreat constructed in the same area.

According to T-Online, a German news outlet, Münzhuber was a “senior board member” of the neo-Nazi group Der III Weg [The Third Way], which has a regional faction in Bavaria.

Third Way was founded in 2013 by former members of the neo-Nazi NPD movement and is believed to have around 600 members in Germany.

Münzhuber was also identified as the “treasurer” of the Bavaria faction of Third Way in a 2023 German government report on the organisation.

German police said Münzhuber tripped on an exposed root during the hike and suffered a fall of 60 metres, which apparently killed him instantly. Two helicopters were involved in efforts to recover his body.

German news reports named him only as “Andreas M” under media privacy laws, but he was fully identified in an online appeal for funeral donations as Andreas Münzhuber.

The donations page and memorial stated: “Münzi, as everyone called him, was only 37 years old and still had many plans in life. His death hits us all hard.”

It continued: “But the biggest gap has emerged at the dinner table at home. His wife now has to raise their daughter alone. She is not yet four months old and was the sunshine of Münzi’s life. She is the spitting image of Münzi. He will live on in her and in our hearts.”

As of Friday afternoon, some €12,000 (£10,000) have been pledged by various online donors to help cover the costs of the funeral.

Sue Gray’s new role as Sir Keir Starmer’s “regions and nations” envoy appears to be in doubt after he told Scotland’s First Minister they would deal with each other directly.

Speaking following a meeting with Sir Keir in Edinburgh, John Swinney said he had received assurances he would have direct access to the Prime Minister with no intermediary.

Mr Swinney said Ms Gray’s role had not been explained to him by Sir Keir during their bilateral discussions and he did not know what it involved.

The Prime Minister repeatedly dodged questions about why Ms Gray was not present at the inaugural meeting of his Council of Nations and Regions in the Scottish capital.

But the Tories claimed he had attempted to “buy her off with this non-job” in an attempt to “save face”, following her controversial departure as his chief of staff.

A Cabinet minister also suggested Ms Gray would be entitled to severance pay, despite Sir Keir finding her the new part-time envoy role.

Ms Gray resigned this week after acknowledging commentary around her No 10 position “risked becoming a distraction”.

She was subject to negative briefings during her tenure, including a leak of her salary, which was £3,000 more than that of the Prime Minister. It is understood she is taking a short break, which will last for a couple of weeks.

That meant she did not travel with the Prime Minister to Edinburgh for the inaugural council meeting, which was also attended by the Welsh and Northern Irish first ministers and the regional mayors from England.

Sir Keir held bilateral talks with Mr Swinney, who said afterwards that he expected council meetings to be held every six months.

But, asked what his understanding of Ms Gray’s role was, Mr Swinney said: “I don’t know what the nature of that role is, and it’s not been explained to me.

“What I expect is that I will have a direct relationship with the Prime Minister, and that’s what I will pursue.”

Pressed if it was “strange” that her envoy role had not been explained to him, he said: “What has been promised to me by the Prime Minister is a direct relationship between me and him, and that is being fulfilled.

“The Prime Minister made it clear to me again today that if there are issues about which I am concerned, I am to approach him directly, and I have been doing so and I will do so.”

Andrew Bowie, the Scottish Conservative MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, said: “It’s looking increasingly like Starmer came up with this back-of-a-fag-packet role for Sue Gray purely to save face.

“His disastrous first few months as Prime Minister have been riven by infighting in his team – and it seems that, after deciding to ditch Gray as his chief of staff, he’s tried to buy her off with this non-job.”

Rhun ap Iorwerth, the leader of Plaid Cymru, said: “Liz Truss may have been outlasted by a lettuce, but even she pales in comparison to Sue Gray who appears to have quit her job before even starting it properly.

“And what is an envoy to the nations and regions anyway? Not-so-clear Starmer handing out a P45 before even writing the job description.”

Asked whether he was embarrassed she had not been at the Edinburgh gathering, the Prime Minister listed those who were present.

He said: “We’ve had a really constructive discussion about economic growth, about jobs, about investment, and even today, we’ve had a further announcement of £24 billion investment in the United Kingdom.”

Pressed why Ms Gray was not there, he said: “For everybody listening and watching this, who’s concerned to know, is there going to be investment in my region?

“Are there going to be jobs where I live? The answer is, today, we’ve got a long way down the road of collaborating to that end.”

Asked whether he would approve Ms Gray’s severance pay, the Prime Minister repeated that “we’ve had a really important meeting today”.

Speaking earlier, Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, declined to comment on Ms Gray’s individual situation but added that he was “sure” she would be eligible for a payout.

He said: “Whatever contractually is there, I’m sure she would be but, you know, I can’t comment on anybody’s individual circumstances.”

A police force in Wales has quit Elon Musk’s social media network X, claiming the site is “no longer consistent” with its values.

British police forces have been scaling back or reviewing their presence on the social network, previously known as Twitter, which is routinely used by emergency services to engage with the public.

Of Britain’s 45 territorial police forces, 10 said they were actively reviewing their presence on X, while six said they had reduced the number of accounts they use on the site.

One force, North Wales Police, said it had stopped using X entirely in August, Reuters reported.

Amanda Blakeman, the chief constable of North Wales Police, said: “It is important to us that we are able to communicate timely, factual and relevant information out to our communities in both Cymraeg and English.

“This was becoming increasingly difficult to achieve on X as a platform. Alongside this, we also felt that the platform was no longer consistent with our values, and therefore we have withdrawn our use of it.

“We will continue to monitor and review alternative platforms and their suitability for police communications and engagement.”

It comes after Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, bought X for $44bn (£34bn) in October 2022 and pledged to unblock thousands of accounts that had previously been suspended. 

He went on to reverse lifetime bans on the accounts of the far-Right activist Tommy Robinson and the commentator Katie Hopkins, the latter of which had been removed by X’s previous owners over “hateful content”.

Mr Musk said at the time: “Free speech is allowed, provided laws are not broken.”

UK policing has also come under attack by Mr Musk in the wake of the Southport riots this summer. 

Mr Musk, who is worth $247bn, according to Forbes, in August described the prison sentences given to two people over the riots as “messed up” just days after calling the Prime Minister “two-tier Keir” in an attack over Britain’s policing. 

The billionaire also shared a fake Telegraph headline which falsely claimed Sir Keir Starmer was planning to imprison rioters on the Falkland Islands. 

None of the police forces said its decision to review its use of X was directly as a result of this summer’s violence, according to Reuters. 

X was accused of failing to halt the spread of viral disinformation during the violence. Fake claims circulated on social media that the three young girls killed in the Southport attack were stabbed by a Muslim asylum seeker. The 17-year-old charged with murdering the three children, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, was born in Cardiff to Christian Rwandan parents.

However, false claims about the attack were repeated by accounts with so-called blue ticks on X, boosting their visibility, as well as on other social media apps such as Telegram.

Heidi Alexander, the justice minister, said in August that Mr Musk’s claim that civil war in the UK was “inevitable” was “in no way acceptable”, adding: “We are seeing police officers being seriously injured, buildings set alight, and so I really do think that everyone who has a platform should be exercising their power responsibly.”

X has been grappling with an exodus of advertisers and plunging ad revenues since Mr Musk’s takeover in November 2022. The billionaire’s light-touch approach to moderation and decision to reverse bans on thousands of accounts blocked for hate speech has prompted brands to cut spending on the social network.

Analytics company SimilarWeb estimates that the number of mobile users of X has fallen in Britain by 17.7pc to 10.4m, compared with 15m two years ago.

Michael Van Erp has waged war on London’s dangerous drivers. Armed with a GoPro and an e-bike, he has filmed and reported over 2,000 motorists to the police since he started keeping track of their misdeeds in 2019. 

Van Erp routinely catches on camera drivers using their mobile phones, pulling out in front of him, cutting up or close-passing cyclists and once, memorably, inhaling nitrous oxide at a red light. He submits the footage to the Met Police and, after police action has been taken, he uploads it to his YouTube channel, CyclingMikey. Offline, he keeps track of the incidents on a mammoth spreadsheet. As a rough estimate, he tells me, 2,500 penalty points and £150,000 worth of fines have been doled out as a result of his efforts so far. 

But he is far from alone. In fact, the 52 year old is one of the growing ranks of do-it-yourself cycling crimestoppers fighting back against motorists in a road safety crusade. Like Van Erp, they film drivers and submit the footage to the police on a website set up for citizen reporting – and their interventions lead to tens of thousands of sanctions a year. 

This makes Van Erp, in some circles, deeply unpopular. He has been assaulted by drivers for filming through their car windows and is subject to a daily torrent of online abuse.

Kitted out with an action camera mounted on a black baseball cap (he doesn’t wear a helmet, and insists he has done the research to prove there is no safety benefit to doing so), Van Erp patrols the streets of the capital while on his regular commute.

His major coup to date was catching the film director Guy Ritchie – whom he did not recognise until he received a call from the Evening Standard newspaper – texting while driving near Hyde Park in late 2019. 

Ritchie pleaded guilty and was disqualified from driving for six months as he already had nine points on his licence for speeding offences. A string of other stars have also been caught out, including ex-England footballer Frank Lampard in 2021 and the former boxing champ Chris Eubank the year before. (Lampard was charged with using his phone at the wheel but the case was dropped after he hired the solicitor Nick Freeman, also known as “Mr Loophole”, who successfully argued that Van Erp’s footage did not prove the mobile phone was turned on or being used to communicate.)

Similar to Van Erp, Jeremy Vine records his own London cycle commute on a helmet camera and posts the footage on X/Twitter. He has described Van Erp as an “inspiration”. Van Erp has even made friends with some fellow law-enforcing cyclists online and says they occasionally meet up and go to Nandos.

Recording his commute on an e-bike from west London to his workplace in north London (where he is a carer), Van Erp racks up hundreds of hours of footage a year – and inspires an army of fellow camera cyclists to do the same. “Every journey is gigabytes worth,” he says, “so I do have a very large storage system at home – about 150 terabytes worth. Most of it is just backups, because I have to keep the footage for court cases and whatnot.”

A typical video posted on social media sees him spot a driver in or around Hyde Park glancing down at their phone, usually in gridlocked traffic along West Carriage Drive. He parks up his bike and approaches them on foot, filming them through the window (in a manner that some may find sinister) and getting a shot of their number plate. Most are polite when they spot him hovering at their shoulder with a GoPro. Some plead with him – he only very occasionally relents. Others are apoplectic.

Occasionally, he pitches up at a spot in Regents Park, which he calls Gandalf Corner, with the express purpose of catching impatient drivers who think they can get away with making an illegal right turn. This seems to irk drivers the most. The most popular of these clips, which has accrued 5.1 million views and counting, shows one motorist so angry at being stopped by Van Erp that he repeatedly butts him with his Mercedes. Van Erp says the incident resulted in a £50 ticket for the driver for disobeying the rules of the road and a further £90 fine for ramming him with his car.

How many drivers does he catch per day? “If I were to go out looking for it, I could catch 20 or 30, but I couldn’t possibly hope to report that many. Just on my commute, I’m averaging one a day at the moment,” he says, but adds that road safety in the city is “definitely improving”. Perhaps that is because, as a result of his reporting and that of others like him, more and more drivers are feeling the full force of the law. 

Some will get warning letters, some fixed penalties, and some go to court. A small percentage of those plead not guilty or do not accept Van Erp’s written statement, in which case he has to attend court in person. “I’ve been to court between five and 10 times this year, which is not too bad,” he says. “It’s less than one per cent of the cases I report, thank goodness.”

The purpose of posting on social media is to show other cyclists they can do the same, he explains. “I think on my own I’m probably doing very little… but through social media I think that is having an effect, because it is making drivers worry about being caught, and it’s encouraging other people to report,” he says.

In turn, police forces say this is having a tangible impact on convictions for dangerous driving. Take the figures from just one police force: in 2017, West Midlands police had 208 submissions from people filming dangerous drivers. Last year, that number had risen to 7,145. In the past 12 months it has risen again, to over 11,000. Nationwide, police forces in England and Wales receive 150,000 such clips from the public per year, with an estimated 90 per cent leading to driver sanctions. 

West Midlands has set up a dedicated portal for members of the public to submit their videos, called “Operation Snap” or Op Snap. A list of the kind of offences to look out for includes dangerous driving, using a mobile phone, not wearing a seatbelt or failing to stop at a red traffic light. The force has published a 25 page document of sanctions from April 2024 alone. The reports within it are not all from cyclists – many are based on dashcam footage from fellow drivers.

“Around 90 per cent of the submissions we get end in positive action. That can be everything from a warning letter up to prosecution and a day in court,” says Sergeant Steve Evans, who leads the ‘Op Snap’ team for West Midlands police. “It doesn’t take long to do, and people who do take the time to send us their clips are making a real difference to road safety. Every one of the people who’ve been filmed like this and have had to pay the price should now be thinking again about the way they drive.” 

For Van Erp, success in bolstering road safety comes at a price. He is frequently called a “cyclist vigilante” – a term he despises – and much worse. “I don’t feel like I’m a vigilante, because I’m not bringing any punishment to the drivers. The only thing that’s slightly close to vigilantism is when I stop drivers at Gandalf corner,” he says. “But even then, I’m not doing it to punish them. I’m doing it to stop the immediate danger they pose of going round that corner on the wrong side of the road.” 

In a newspaper column, Jeremy Clarkson called Van Erp “the most dreadful man in Britain today”. “The abuse is insane,” Van Erp says. “There was an [online] poll where they voted me worse than Hitler. It used to bother me a lot because I wasn’t hardened, and I took it more personally. Now I don’t even look at it.” 

Yet it has also won him fans. When we meet outside The Telegraph’s office, Van Erp has not even had a chance to lock his bike up before being approached by a young man who watches his videos on YouTube. “Keep up the good work,” he says. 

The husband of a Labour MP has been accused of exaggerating his military service in the Royal Marines.

Greg Brackenridge, a local councillor and former mayor of Wolverhampton, has told voters he served as a commando but in fact never finished training, according to reports.

Cllr Brackenridge, 53 who is also the Chair of the West Midlands Fire and Rescue Authority, was previously pictured wearing a badge for veterans of the Iraq War from 1990 to 1991 and a Royal Marines Corps tie.

But he allegedly failed to complete the 32-week training in 1988 and left at the rank of recruit without earning his green beret, the Sun newspaper reported.

“Until you pass out, you’re still a recruit, you’re not really a Royal Marine,” a source told the newspaper.

His wife, Sureena Brackenridge, won the seat Wolverhampton North East for Labour in July, and her son Ciaran also sits as a councillor.

When unveiling the statue of a Sikh soldier in Wolverhampton in September 2021, he told a journalist: “I served as a Royal Marine myself when I left school and I worked with members of the Sikh community in the Armed Forces and people from all around the world, the Nepalese, the Gurkhas.”

The Gurkhas are soldiers from Nepal who are recruited into the British Army.

In an interview with news website BirminghamLive this week he admitted to never serving “in battle or the front line” and that his career was prematurely cut short for “personal family reasons”.

He has also claimed his own personal military record held by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had been illegally accessed.

“I am formally requesting the MoD investigate these matters, and I’m in discussions with lawyers about the next steps,” he said.

A biography on the Wolverhampton Labour Group, which has since been deleted, reportedly repeated his claim of serving with the Royal Marines.

“It has been my honour to serve the people of Wednesfield over many years as your councillor and in my previous professional careers firstly with the Royal Marines and as a local firefighter with the West Midlands Service,” it is alleged to have read.

Cllr Brackenridge and Mrs Brackenridge have both been approached for comment.

A roundabout with 36 traffic lights has been described as “obscene” by Cambridge residents, who say it has made traffic worse.

The “signalised” roundabout, introduced on Oct 8 to the junction between Milton Road and Elizabeth Way, is part of the Milton Road Improvement Scheme, which the Great Cambridge Partnership (GCP) said cost £31.9 million.

Sebastian Barker, 56, who lives nearby the roundabout, told The Telegraph: “I think it is a bit bonkers. Roundabouts were made so you don’t need traffic lights. Some people say it will be better for cyclists. I have vans and I think it will increase my travel time which is not great for the environment.”

Mr Barker said the development was a costly step backwards for efficiency and safety. 

“Immediately there were traffic jams. Normally you would just go around the roundabout. I have already seen someone jump the red lights. I think 36 traffic lights seems obscene,” he said.

Albey Barham, 66, who runs a carpet and flooring business near the roundabout, said the traffic light system was unnecessary.

He said: “I don’t think it is a very good use of funds. For many years it had been working fine. It’s a 30 to 40-second wait, which is causing traffic. To us, it is the Magic Roundabout – we think it was Dylan who designed it.”

Mr Barham said the traffic lights and floating bus stop had made deliveries much harder and created congestion in front of the shops.

“A lot of us in the shops, we are independent businesses, it is hard enough as it is at the moment,” he said, adding: “Our own council sometimes don’t seem to take much notice. The cyclists have got more road than the cars. If you are in a delivery van, you have got to wait for all the traffic to pass first.”

The roundabout includes the crossings leading off it at the Milton Road junction, at Elizabeth Way and another one at Highworth Avenue and also has a rare sparrow crossing, which keeps pedestrians and cyclists separate as they cross the road.

It appeared to have 31 sets of signals while it was under construction, according to sources who spoke to The Telegraph earlier this year to express their concerns.

The Greater Cambridge Partnership, which runs the city’s roads, previously told The Telegraph that the traffic lights around the junction were part of a wider scheme aimed at keeping cyclists safe from pedestrians and cars.

A Greater Cambridgeshire Partnership spokesman, representing the county’s local councils, confirmed that the new junction has 36 sets of traffic signals and said: “The development of the signalised roundabout at Elizabeth Way as part of the Milton Road project was to further improve safety on this busy route into Cambridge.

“The new layout features dedicated crossing facilities for those walking and cycling, so people can safely cross the road, even during the busiest times. 

“These features will mean parents, children and commuters can have the confidence to walk and cycle along Milton Road, whether they are heading to the shops, school or work.

“We’d like to thank everyone for their patience as the signals at the roundabout are commissioned, we are monitoring the flows of traffic and will continue to adjust the lights as more data comes in to ensure this route is as effective as possible for everyone travelling in the area.”

A Jewish presenter who was reprimanded after challenging a pro-Palestinian author had previously been censured for showing bias towards Israel, insiders have claimed.

CBS has been thrown into crisis by accusations of anti-Israel prejudice after it said that Tony Dokoupil, one of its star news anchors, had fallen short of its editorial standards when he challenged Ta-Nehisi Coates over Israel’s right to exist.

In the interview, Mr Dokoupil told the academic that a section of his new book, The Message, which compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Jim Crow laws of the American South, “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist”.

The situation has now descended into farce, after a CBS Morning source revealed to The Telegraph that the spat is the latest in a series of incidents in which Mr Dokoupil has been accused of editorialising his coverage and expressing pro-Israel views.

Other senior CBS journalists have voiced support for Mr Dokoupil and insiders said some colleagues were frustrated by negative coverage following the interview.

The internal scrap at one of America’s biggest broadcasters comes amid a public war of words with Donald Trump, after the former president called for CBS to have its licence taken away over its editing of a Kamala Harris interview which aired on Monday.

The CBS show 60 Minutes previewed a clip of Ms Harris answering a question on the subject of Israel that had been edited in the final cut to be more concise, raising questions over impartiality. 

Trump and his supporters jumped on the issue, accusing the network of showing bias by swapping what Republicans dubbed a “word salad” response from Ms Harris for a more coherent answer in the version that eventually aired.

It comes as The Telegraph revealed on Thursday that the chief executive of CBS News previously donated more than $6,000 to the Democrats.

Wendy McMahon donated to Mr Biden’s campaign and Democratic fundraising platforms on nine separate occasions in 2020, giving away a total of $6,100.

Filings to the Federal Election Commission show that Ms McMahon, who was working for rival network ABC at the time, gave two donations of $2,500 to the Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, an affiliated joint fundraising committee, and three donations to ActBlue, a fundraising platform for Democrats.

Dokoupil apologised to colleagues

On Monday, top network executives reprimanded Mr Dokoupil on a newsroom-wide call for his “tone of voice, phrasing and body language” towards Mr Coates after receiving complaints from CBS News employees.

During the call, Ms McMahon and Adrienne Roark, the president of content development, allegedly accused Mr Dokoupil of bringing his “bias” to the interview.

“After a review of our coverage, including the interview, it’s clear that there are times we have not met our editorial standards,” Ms Roark reportedly said.

Executives urged CBS staff members to keep their remarks confidential, yet details of Mr Dokoupil’s reprimand were quickly leaked to the press.

The following day, the news anchor apologised to his colleagues in a staff-only meeting, telling them he regretted putting them in a difficult position.

Further row

In a further sign of discord at the heart of the network, Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS parent Paramount Global, on Wednesday backed Mr Dokoupil’s robust line of questioning, saying that executives had “made a mistake” in reprimanding him.

“I think we all agree that this was not handled correctly,” Ms Redstone said during an appearance in Midtown Manhattan.

Jan Crawford, CBS’s chief legal correspondent, also defended the news presenter, telling the company-wide call on Monday that she did not understand why Mr Dokoupil’s questions had not met editorial standards.

“When someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account,” Ms Crawford said. “To me, that is what Tony did.”

The unfolding scandal has sparked a further row after Mr Coates revealed that Mr Dokoupil’s co-presenter had briefed him on her interview questions beforehand.

Speaking to Trevor Noah’s podcast, the author said that Gayle King approached him before the interview and told him the questions she wanted to ask, raising questions about the quality of CBS’s reporting.

A spokesman for Ms King dismissed the accusation, claiming the briefing was an attempt to “establish rapport”. “Discussing a guest’s work ahead of time is a common approach to establish rapport,” they told The Daily Beast.

“Gayle King is one of the most respected journalists in America. She is known for her thorough preparation and note-taking,” the spokesman continued. “She reads the books, consumes the content that will be discussed and extensively prepares for each interview on CBS Mornings.”

Guidance ‘taken out of context’

Amid mounting internal pressure over the network’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, an internal email has emerged instructing staffers not to refer to Jerusalem as being part of Israel.

In August, Mark Memmott, the network’s senior director of standards, sent an email to all employees with a list of terms to “be careful with” when “we talk or write about the news” regarding the war in Gaza, according to a report in the Free Press.

A CBS source told The Telegraph that the standards guidance has been “taken out of context” by media outlets.

“Our guidance on the status of Jerusalem recognizes that there are competing claims to the city that have not been resolved over thousands of years,” they said.

“Both sides claim Jerusalem as their capital. To report flatly that one side’s claim has been resolved would ignore the other side’s position.”

An ally of Mr Dokoupil hit back at his detractors, telling The Telegraph that critics have made assumptions about the presenter’s views on Israel without actually knowing them.

R Kelly’s daughter has accused the singer of sexually abusing her as a child.

Buku Abi claimed that Kelly, currently serving a 31-year prison sentence on charges which include child pornography and sex trafficking, began abusing her when she was around eight or nine years old.

“I just remember waking up to him touching me,” she told the documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey.

“And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”

Ms Abi said she was initially too scared to tell her mother about the alleged abuse, and only worked up the courage to do so when she was 10 years old.

Her mother is then said to have filed a police complaint against the singer, in which Ms Abi was listed as “Jane Doe”.

However, she claimed that her delay in acknowledging the alleged abuse meant they could not take further action.

“They couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long. So at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing,” Ms Abi said.

She continued: “He was my everything. For a long time, I didn’t even want to believe that it happened. I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person that he would do something to me.”

Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer acting for Kelly, said he “vehemently denies” the allegations.

“His ex-wife made the same allegation years ago, and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and was unfounded,” she said in a statement to People magazine.

“And the ‘filmmakers’, whoever they are, did not reach out to Mr Kelly or his team to even allow him to deny these hurtful claims.”

Ms Bonjean has separately been approached for comment by The Telegraph.

Kelly, 57, was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking charges and sentenced to 30 years in prison in New York in 2021.

The following year, he was convicted in Chicago of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex, and was sentenced to 20 years.

The judge ruled that Kelly’s two sentences would be served concurrently, meaning he will be eligible for parole by around the age of 80.

In 1994, Kelly married his first wife, Aaliyah, a 15-year-old singer. The New York court heard that the marriage certificate had been faked to record her age as 18.

American elections have often pivoted on what is known as the October surprise – unforeseen events which upend carefully planned campaigns.

In 2016 it was the controversy of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Donald Trump’s egregious “grab them by the p—y” comments.

But this year, it is Mother Nature which has thrown a wrench into the battle for the White House.

Democrats’ electoral strategy hinges on getting as many of its voters registered as possible, and massive disruption of the party’s drive to get supporters on the electoral roll could be bad news for Kamala Harris.

Historical evidence shows that turnout in the past has slumped in hurricane-battered areas.

In October 2018 turnout in the mid-term elections fell by nearly seven per cent in the Florida panhandle after it was ravaged by Hurricane Michael.

But the hurricanes are not necessarily good news for the Trump campaign either, as the former president admitted.

“Republican areas got hit very hard.” He told Fox News, adding: “I believe they’re going to go out and vote if they have to crawl to a voting booth,” Trump said.

Not only have rural Republican-leaning areas been devastated, but it is likely to take longer to restore power and rebuild the infrastructure than in urban, Democrat-supporting places.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton have destroyed vast swathes of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Georgia and North Carolina are two of the pivotal swing states on which the election could flip, and the Democrats believe Florida, won comfortably by Trump in 2020, could be in play.

Even as the battered states embark on the Herculean task of restoring infrastructure and helping the stricken population, lawyers have gone to court pressing for changes to voting arrangements.

In Georgia, an Obama-appointed judge has sided with the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp in refusing to extend the registration deadline in a case brought by the NAACP, Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda and the New Georgia Project.

The civil rights groups said they had to suspend registering voters because of the hurricane and claimed many people would be disenfranchised as a result.

Mr Kemp and State Brad Raffensperger said extending the deadline would place a “significant administrative burden” on its officials.

Georgia was the state which defied Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by just under 12,000 votes and there is little love lost between the former president and Mr Kemp.

However, underpinning the case is a raft of logistical problems in a state where 16 Electoral College votes are at stake.

Power cuts and internet outages made it impossible to register online, at least 37 election offices were shut and postal services were also suspended.

Experts believe that the hurricanes will have a major impact on the election in the states which have been pummelled by the storms.

“It’s just going to make it a lot harder to conduct the election in places like North Carolina and Florida,” Christopher Galdieri, professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, told The Telegraph.

“If your polling station is in a church basement or a school in a low-lying area, there will be issues in getting the power back on for voting machines.

“There will be a lot of voters who are displaced from their homes. Will they be able to have an absentee ballot?

“You could certainly have officials looking at this and asking what helps my party more. Will extending registration help us or folks who vote for the other party?

“People will be looking at how they gain from the system and asking if it will add more votes to my pile or reduce the other guy’s.

“In North Carolina, you have the city of Ashville, which is Democrat and the rural parts which are very Republican.

“It is easier to get things working in a city than in a small town,” he added.

“Some folks will be less interested in voting than whether they get their electricity.”

Early voting rules eased in North Carolina

North Carolina has made significant changes with bipartisan agreement on a raft of measures to make it easier for hurricane victims to cast their vote in 13 badly hit counties.

Early voting rules have been eased as have those governing absentee ballots.

“This disaster is not just affecting how we conduct elections; it’s affecting day-to-day life, and many of these communities will be without power, without water, without internet, without cell service, potentially for weeks,” Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the state’s board of elections told a press conference.

“Our job is to figure out, as long as there are citizens in those communities, how do we provide them with voting opportunities so that they can exercise their right to vote?”

As things stand, Ms Harris and Trump are tied in North Carolina, according to the latest opinion polls.

In Florida, the voting registration deadline was on Oct 7, two days after Hurricane Helene and a week before Hurricane Milton.

With 30 Electoral College votes at stake, voting rights groups went to court to try to force the Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump ally, to extend the registration deadline by 10 days.

But the plea was rejected, to the disappointment of Cecile Scoon and Debbie Chandler, the co-presidents of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

“The League believes that mandatory evacuations for both Hurricanes Helene and Milton left many citizens more focused on survival than on registering to vote,” they said.

“Florida residents should not have to juggle fleeing for their lives and protecting their property with fulfilling their civic duties.

“Numerous League voter registration events were cancelled due to the hurricanes, further limiting opportunities for Floridians to register and learn about the importance of voting.”

Joe Morgan, election supervisor at Wakulla County – which was not damaged by either of the hurricanes – had little sympathy with those who had failed to register on time.

“What I say to folks that did not get registered prior to is, ‘I am sorry, but we have something on the front wall out here that every county office has, and that is a thing called ‘Voter Responsibilities’.

“And at some point, the voter has to take responsibility for whether they’re registered to vote or not,” he added.

The impact of the hurricanes is not just limited to the logistics of voting and turnout.

There is also voters’ perception of how Washington has responded to the disasters.

George W Bush was heavily criticised for how his administration handled Katrina in August 2005.  The image of him staring out of the window of an aircraft gave the impression that he was disinterested.

Katrina claimed 1,392 lives and the slow response by the administration – in particular the Federal Emergency Management Agency – saw his personal ratings plummet.

Even though he was not standing for re-election in 2008, the reputation of the Republicans was damaged badly.

Barack Obama, however, won plaudits for his response to Hurricane Sandy, a week before the 2012 election.

Praise even came from Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, and the two men toured the worst-hit areas together.

Karl Rove, a Republican strategist, said it cemented Mr Obama’s status as “comforter in chief” and boosted his image among voters.

‘Superb’ federal response

The Biden administration has been lauded by Republican governors Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Bill Lee of Tennessee.

Mr Biden spoke to all the governors hit by the hurricanes, apart from Mr DeSantis, who was on a plane surveying the damage.

The federal response was described as “superb” by Mr McMaster and Mr Youngkin was unstinting in his gratitude for the help for his state from Washington.

Trump, rather unwisely, claimed the administration had been given “poor grades” on social media – which flew in the face of what Republican governors were saying.

He also claimed that Mr Biden had not even contacted Brian Kemp, only to have the Georgia governor make it quite clear that he had spoken to the president.

“I just spoke — the president just called me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and called him right back. And he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, we got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process.”

Whether the shine of the administration’s response helps Ms Harris or Trump benefits from a lower turnout, will become clear in November.

The King has vowed not to stand in the way if Australia wants to become a republic, it has emerged.

He told anti-monarchist campaigners that “whether Australia becomes a republic is… a matter for the Australian public to decide”.

The remarks were made in a letter sent to the Australian Republic Movement (ARM) by his assistant private secretary ahead of the King’s historic six-day official visit to the country next week.

He will become the first British King to ever visit the country when he and the Queen arrive for their landmark tour on Oct 18. It will be the royal couple’s first trip to Australia since 2018 when they opened the Commonwealth Games on the Queensland Gold Coast.

The visit will also be a key test of the King’s popularity as monarch, after the death of his mother Elizabeth II was widely believed to have increased Australians’ mood for constitutional change to a republic.

The Daily Mail reports that the ARM had written to Buckingham Palace requesting a meeting with the King when he lands in Australia.

‘Equal footing with other nations’

The group insisted that support to ditch the Crown was growing among the Australian public, adding that it was time for the country to stand “on an equal footing with other nations”.

In response, Dr Nathan Ross, an aide to the King, emphasised the monarch’s “deep love and affection” for the country.

He added: “Please be assured that your views on this matter have been noted very carefully.

“His Majesty, as a constitutional monarch, acts on the advice of his ministers and whether Australia becomes a republic is, therefore, a matter for the Australian public to decide.”

Nathan Hansford, co-chairman of ARM, revealed its invitation to discuss the issue with the King was “politely declined”.

“The concept of having a monarch of Australia does not fit well with most Australians in 2024,” he told the newspaper. “We are such a wonderfully diverse nation that most people feel is not represented by a monarch.”

Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, was earlier this year forced to shelve plans for a referendum on replacing the King as head of state after announcing the royal visit.

To pass a referendum in Australia, two hurdles must be jumped. The first is that more than 50 per cent of Australians must vote yes, and the second that it must win support in a majority of states. If three states supported a referendum and three states opposed it the referendum would fail, even if more than 50 per cent voted in favour.

A woman attempted to smuggle 29 turtles across a Vermont lake into Canada by kayak.

Wan Yee Ng, 41, was arrested on the morning of June 28 at an Airbnb in Canaan as she was about to get into an inflatable kayak with a duffle bag on Lake Wallace, according to a Border Patrol agent’s affidavit filed in federal court.

Agents had been notified by Royal Canadian Mounted Police that two other people, including a man who was believed to be her husband, had started to paddle an inflatable watercraft from the Canadian side of the lake toward the United States, according to court documents.

The agents searched her duffle bag and found 29 live eastern box turtles individually wrapped in socks, the affidavit stated.

Eastern box turtles are known to be sold on the Chinese black market for $1,000 each, the affidavit stated.

Her cell phone was seized, and a search by law enforcement found communications showing that she tried to smuggle the turtles into Canada so that they could eventually be sold for a profit in Hong Kong, according to the plea agreement.

Ng, from Hong Kong, was living in Canada.

She pleaded guilty on Friday to one count of unlawfully attempting to export and send 29 eastern box turtles out of the US, contrary to law. VTDigger first reported on the plea deal.

She is scheduled to be sentenced in December and faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Terminally ill patients with 12 months to live may be able to use an assisted dying law under plans being considered by the MP writing the Bill.

Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP for Spen Valley, will table a private members’ Bill to legalise the practice next Wednesday, with a free vote for MPs due on Nov 29, their first since 2015.

The legislation is expected to include a definition of terminal illness that will specify the timeframe within which someone is reasonably expected to die, with prognoses of between six and 12 months being considered.

The Telegraph understands Ms Leadbeater is expected to rule out assisted dying for people who are suffering intolerably but not terminally ill.

She is also consulting with the judiciary on whether every application for assisted dying can be signed off by a High Court judge.

It is understood that Ms Leadbeater will only include this requirement if she is confident that the Family Court would be able to handle the additional work. The current feedback from judges is that the extra caseload would not be too burdensome.

It is understood that the legislation will require two doctors to approve each application.

The Bill is understood to include a conscientious objection clause for doctors who have ethical or religious objections to assisted dying which would exempt them from being involved in such cases.

Ms Leadbeater is believed to be consulting with the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), on the issue.

The Bill will only be applicable to those deemed mentally competent at the point they decide to opt for assisted suicide

The Telegraph understands that the legislation is likely to include a requirement for a Mental Capacity Assessment if capacity is in doubt.

However, critics of assisted dying said that such a provision is not a fail-safe as capacity can “fluctuate” and doctors are not always well-trained in assessing a patient’s ability to consent.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, a crossbench peer and professor of palliative medicine, said: “You can have the capacity for decisions in daily living, but the bigger the decision, the greater the capacity that you need to have.

“Doctors are very, very poor at assessing mental capacity, and you can’t do it on a one-off assessment. Doctors are meant to be trained in assessing capacity, but really it was not done well generally. Medication that people are on, and fears that people might have, both alter their mental state and decision making.”

Ms Leadbeater is consulting widely with the medical profession, legal profession, and campaign groups in favour of the policy such as Dignity in Dying.

This process is ongoing, and the exact wording of the legislation will only be made public next on Oct 13 when the bill has its First Reading in Parliament.

When Ms Leadbeater announced her Choice at the End of Life Bill on Oct 3, she said it would cater for terminally ill, mentally competent adults.

While she was lobbied by as many as 38 Labour MPs to expand this to include non-terminal patients, she is not expected to cave and expand the criteria.

Sarah Wootton, chief executive at Dignity in Dying, told The Telegraph that the law change they were advocating for was for “shortening death, rather than ending life”. 

Ms Wootton said that terminally ill supporters of the bill wanted it “more as an insurance policy against a bad death”.

MPs will be able to make their opinions known in the Commons on the controversial subject when they debate and vote on the Bill on Nov 29.

The Department of Homeland Security is to spend almost half a million on a diversity hiring blitz.

It has advertised three diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) roles each with six-figure annual salaries, totalling $486,252.

Republicans have long argued that Homeland Security officials should spend less on “woke” projects and instead concentrate on the migration crisis on the southern border.

Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2021 that forced government agencies to assess the state of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility within their workforces.

“This order establishes that it is the policy of my administration to cultivate a workforce that draws from the full diversity of the nation,” Mr Biden said at the time.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the country’s borders, has since attempted to bolster the number of officials working on diversity challenges, in an apparent response to the order.

Listings were placed on the US government’s official job for an agency-wide DEIA program manager, as well as a supervisory program manager and supervisory equal opportunity specialist for its Civil Rights and DEIA Office.

The job description says the DEIA manager will oversee the development of “content for leadership talking points”, podcasts and workshops.

Organising “listening sessions, panels, engagements” is another key part of the role, according to the listing.

Far above average wage

A successful candidate could earn an annual salary of up to $163,252 — almost two-and-a-half times the average wage for an American, according to the Social Security Administration.

An advert for a $160,000-a-year equal opportunity specialist describes it as part of an effort to reduce barriers for disabled job-seekers.

The third $160,000-a-year role will help deliver “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility goals” in the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The jobs are listed at a time when agencies belonging to the Department of Homeland Security are thought to be cash-strapped.

Fema, the disaster management agency, recently spent half of its disaster budget in just eight days supporting communities ravaged by hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Earlier this year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement was facing a $500 million blackhole before a congressional deal for more funding was reached.