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By Chris Price |
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| A cloud of anxiety and uncertainty has descended on the nation after Buckingham Palace said doctors are “concerned” for the Queen’s health. Her family have flown in to Balmoral to be with her. |
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Queen under ‘medical supervision’ as family gathers
All of the Queen’s children have arrived in Scotland as senior members of the Royal family gather at Balmoral, where Her Majesty is under medical supervision following doctors’ concerns. A flight carrying the Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of York and the Earl and Countess of Wessex landed at Aberdeen Airport just before 4pm. The Prince of Wales, who landed in a helicopter this morning, and the Princess Royal are already with the Queen, 96. The Duchess of Sussex is not travelling to Scotland with the Duke of Sussex, sources said. The concerns about the Queen’s health come days after she held audiences with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss at Balmoral to appoint the 15th prime minister of her reign. The location was a break with tradition, due to ongoing mobility problems. Our live blog has the latest as the eyes of the world focus on Balmoral. |
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Energy crisis: Truss plan to save households £1k a year
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| Households will save £1,000 a year on energy bills under a new price freeze, Liz Truss has announced, as she said she would end the crisis “once and for all”. In a major intervention just two days after taking office, the Prime Minister said she will freeze average household bills at £2,500 from October 1, cancelling next month’s planned rise to £3,549. As wholesale prices continue to increase, Ms Truss said the freeze would also take between four and five points off inflation, which is currently forecast to reach 13 per cent by the end of 2022. The cost of the “Energy Price Guarantee” will ultimately be borne by the taxpayer, because the Government will pay energy suppliers the difference between the normal price and the new frozen price. Here are the key points on Ms Truss’s plan to tackle the energy crisis and the political reaction.
As well as the help for households, the Bank of England will hand cash-starved energy companies up to £40bn of Covid-style loans as suppliers struggle to protect themselves from soaring prices. Ms Truss announced a joint scheme between the Bank and the Treasury to provide emergency short-term help in an intervention that ministers hope can slash energy costs. Surging prices mean energy providers are having to provide more capital when buying energy to effectively insure against price swings. The huge capital requirements are stretching balance sheets in the sector. Read how today’s plans will try to address that problem and here is a guide to the winners and losers from the announcements. |
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Fracking ban lifted
Under her plans to end the UK’s energy problems, Ms Truss has vowed to get shale gas flowing out of Britain by next spring after lifting the ban on fracking. Under plans to make Britain energy independent again by 2040, the Prime Minister pledged to strengthen supplies with more domestic oil and gas extraction alongside the development of nuclear and renewable power schemes. She said this would see the moratorium on fracking – in place since 2019 – scrapped with immediate effect, paving the way for developers to begin extraction in as little as six months in areas “where there is local support”. Fracking sites which could be targeted span the Tory seats across the red wall. This graphic shows some of the areas identified as having potential shale reserves. |
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Living on leftovers
Consumer rights campaigner Martin Lewis has called for energy firms to allow customers to leave fixed-rate deals without paying an exit penalty. The Money Saving Expert founder said allowing customers to escape expensive fixed rates with no penalty would be the “bare minimum” energy providers could do. Even with Ms Truss’s plan, the average household still faces paying 54pc more on their energy bills than last winter. In a bid to save money, Lucy Denyer tried living off unwanted produce salvaged from cafes, shops and other households using various food-sharing apps. Read how her week living on leftovers went. |
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By Christopher ‘Chopper’ Hope,
ASSOCIATE EDITOR (POLITICS)
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| Afternoon,
Liz Truss is showing the first rule of governing is never to waste a crisis as she unveiled this lunchtime what is known in Whitehall as a “bazooka” of Government spending to deal with the energy crisis.
The Prime Minister might be the most Right-wing Conservative leader for decades, but the billions of pounds of our public money she is hosing at energy bills would make even Gordon Brown blush.
In a major intervention 36 hours after entering Downing St, the Prime Minister said her new “Energy Price Guarantee” will ensure the typical household will pay no more than £2,500 a year on their energy bill for the next two years, starting from October 1.
The scale of the public money used to ensure this is hard to comprehend. Internal government documents show that ministers expect the spending to bring down inflation by five per cent.
And there is more: the moratorium on fracking will end “where there is support for it”, Truss told MPs.
Those last six words will be crucial. Ministers will have to offer bungs to communities affected, probably in the shape of lower energy bills.
This is nothing less than a reset of UK energy policy, which Truss said had been failed by “decades of short-term thinking” (note the plural, to avoid admitting it was a Tory mistake).
The idea now is that the UK will become a net energy exporter by 2040, while the net zero emissions target by 2050 is now under review. That sounds ominous.
Truss said: “This is the moment to be bold. We are facing a global energy crisis and there are no ‘cost-free’ options. There will be a cost to this intervention.”
That is an understatement, with some forecasts suggesting it could cost the UK nearly £200billion.
The spending appears to lack a ceiling – our interconnectors to the Continent mean we are paying the price for Germany’s reliance on Russian gas.
How long will it be before some Tory MPs on the Right starts to call for the interconnectors to be switched off?
If nothing else, Truss’s spending has bought her a political honeymoon of sorts, with tens of billions of pounds piled on our national debt.
I expect Labour’s lead in the polls to be single digits by the weekend once the news sinks in. The Tories may even be on a par with Labour once tax cuts are announced by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng within a fortnight.
The Treasury’s eyes will be on the financial markets. The weakness of the pound against the dollar is worrying.
The markets want to see Truss cutting public spending too, alongside today’s energy bailout, so they know the UK is a good investment.
That is where it gets difficult.
As Truss’s former rival Rishi Sunak found when he tackled the Covid crisis in early 2020: spending public money is easy; turning off the taps is something else entirely.
Cheerio!
Chopper
Chopper’s Westminster Whispers
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| Alicia Kearns takes on the Tory big beats for plum committee chairman job
The battle for the plum £15,235 a year job of chairman of the Foreign Affairs select committee – paid on top of their MPs’ salary – is hotting up.
Veteran Tories Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Liam Fox now face a challenge to replace Tom Tugendhat from 2019 newcomer Alicia Kearns, who may have an advantage over her male rivals as being an ex-Foreign Office official.
She tells me: “I’m seriously considering and I’m grateful people are reaching out to me, but I’m most certainly the outside candidate.” Her friends admit that if she wins it would “cause a bit of an upset”.
Senior Tories think she has a chance, pointing out that IDS and Fox might cancel each other out, allowing Kearns to hover up the support of moderate Tories and Labour. The vote to fill the role which must go to a Tory will happen in a few weeks. Let battle commence!
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| Cost of Boris and Carrie Johnson’s wedding party revealed
Remember Boris and Carrie Johnson’s wedding party, originally planned to be held at Chequers and then moved to Lord Bamford’s pile in Oxfordshire when Johnson quit as PM?
Johnson has just declared the cost: £23,853 for “hire of marquee, portaloos, catering, waiting staff, flowers, ice cream van, smoke and braai” in the MPs’ register.
Fair enough. But has Johnson forgotten the rules of how to describe peers in The Telegraph style guide? He declares the sum was paid by “Lord Anthony and Lady Carole Bamford” when it should read simply “Lord and Lady Bamford”. They are not the younger sons and daughters of a Duke.
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| Liz Truss’s careless mistakes might come back to haunt her
Barely two days into the new regime and already Liz Truss’s team are making needless mistakes that may come back to haunt them.
Mistake 1: Number 10’s commitment to transparency is already under scrutiny after the PM’s official spokesman was unusually not allowed to attend the Cabinet, while the official “Cabinet read-out” was only sent to journalists at 4.58pm, seven hours late.
Mistake 2: More significantly, Truss sub-contracted the sacking of junior ministers like Matt Warman to chief whip Wendy Morton, carelessly making enemies on the back benches. Her team blamed diary commitments. But already some noses are being put out of joint before the really hard work starts.
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Liz Truss insists on strict No 10 dress code
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Dominic Cummings’ dress sense didn’t help dispel the perception of No 10 as a casual and louche establishment Credit: CREDIT: Eddie Mulholland
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| Liz Truss has ruled that “ties are back” at Number 10 as she prepares to turn her back on the casual Dominic Cummings era.
The Prime Minister has made it clear she wants to re-introduce a dress code, with officials told to wear shirts and ties as part of a new, more formal style of government.
It contrasts with the more light-hearted atmosphere in Downing Street under Boris Johnson and Mr Cummings, his controversial former Chief of Staff.
During his time in Number 10, Mr Cummings shunned a suit and tie, and became famous for his casual outfits.
Read the full story here.
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Comment of the day
“There is more hatred in our politics than at any time I have known. Partisanship causes many to scream about things they see in their enemies – and enemies is the right word – that they applaud on their own side. The more people preach about diversity, the more they want to shut down other beliefs.”
Nick Timothy |
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Five must-reads for today
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Dublin and Brussels are wary of Ms Truss, who led negotiations with the EU over the Protocol under Boris Johnson Credit: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament
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Truss’s mixed signals on NI keeps everyone guessing
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By James Crisp,
EUROPE EDITOR |
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| Liz Truss is having her Northern Ireland Protocol cake and eating it.
Will Ms Truss get down to the messy business of negotiation and compromise with Brussels now she is safely in post?
Or will she play hardball and press ahead with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which will let her ministers unilaterally tear up parts of the treaty?
There has been no real progress in talks over the Protocol since February, and not much change in the rhetoric from either side.
But the clock is ticking before new elections in Northern Ireland are triggered and before the Bill comes before the Lords, so matters must soon come to a head.
I predicted that Prime Minister Truss would soon be battling Brussels over Brexit in this piece after her leadership victory.
But since then, and after a phone call with Joe Biden, who has “serious” concerns over the Bill, the early smoke signals from Westminster have been mixed.
Yesterday in the Commons, the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland seemed to be flashing a bit of an ankle in Brussels’ direction.
Chris Heaton-Harris said there was a “fairly obvious landing zone” for the negotiations to “fix” the Protocol. He added that the Bill was there in case those talks failed.
For some, however, Mr Heaton-Harris’ appointment is a provocation. The staunch Brexiteer is a former chairman of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic MPs.
Ms Truss’s decision to also make Steve Baker, another ex-ERG chief, Minister of State for Northern Ireland has also thrilled the DUP but raised hackles elsewhere.
Claire Hanna, the nationalist SDLP’s MP for South Belfast, said it was “an obnoxious decision that will send a destructive message to the European Commission and to parties in Northern Ireland”.
Dublin and Brussels are wary of Ms Truss, who led negotiations with the EU over the Protocol under Boris Johnson.
They feel she betrayed them to burnish her leadership credentials and are suspicious of the architect of a Bill they say breaks international law.
Reports that the Prime Minister might trigger Article 16 of the Protocol have been denied by Team Truss after they probably bolstered her support among Brexiteers in the dying days of the campaign.
EU sources had told The Telegraph that one way Ms Truss could rebuild trust in her would be to take the threat of Article 16 off the table, which has now been done.
“My preference is for a negotiated solution but it does have to deliver all the things we set out in the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill,” the Prime Minister told the Commons.
She was offering the EU the olive branch of a deal while raising the bar impossibly high for Brussels to clear.
The European Commission will ignore that for now and try to focus on the olive branch, even though it continues to reject UK demands for a wholesale renegotiation of the Protocol.
Brussels wants to get the UK back in the negotiating room and talking, rather than trading threats outside it.
That first step towards a possible agreement now seems a realistic prospect.
But Ms Truss’s mixed signals are keeping everyone guessing as to how far, if at all, she is willing to compromise over the Irish Sea border to get a deal.
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Rescuers are working to retrieve more than 200 people stranded in the earthquake zone Credit: VCG/ Visual China Group
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Xi Jinping clings on to zero-Covid, even as rescuers pull bodies from the rubble
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By Simina Mistreanu, TAIPEI |
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| Rescue workers hung up by ropes painstakingly navigated their way across a treacherous mountain face destroyed by the earthquake and subsequent landslide in order to rescue some 1,000 trapped villagers.
There was also the small matter of finding the 35 missing.
Heavy rainfalls expected in the following days made the situation all the more urgent.
But still, the requirement for PCR tests remained.
Monday’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake killed at least 82 people, according to the latest official numbers.
Its epicentre was in China’s mountainous Luding County but tremors were felt across five provinces.
The fierce eruptions meant rescuers in the Sichuan province had their work cut out for them – while also adhering to president Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid strict policy.
Sichuan is the site of an active Covid outbreak. Rescue personnel are only permitted access to the quake zone with a permit issued based on a negative PCR test result, a green health code, and no travel history in cities with recent Covid outbreaks.
The workers have to be tested daily and volunteers wishing to join the rescue efforts are being turned away.
Even survivors of the natural disaster are tested daily and must show a green health code on an app to access certain public spaces. |
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A building in Luding County is damaged by the earthquake Credit: AFP
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| The situation in Sichuan – which in 2008 saw an earthquake kill hundreds of thousands of people and flattened entire villages – exposes another side to Mr Xi’s zero-Covid directive.
China’s president is holding on to zero-Covid not only in the face of economic hardship and global isolation but also to the detriment of the immediate welfare of his people.
In Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, which is about 260 kilometres northeast of Luding County, scenes of panic unfolded on Monday as residents felt the tremors and rushed to evacuate buildings.
As Chengdu is currently under a strict Covid lockdown, security guards and Covid workers were ordered to prevent residents from leaving the buildings.
“Did the building fall apart? Did it? Did it?” one security guard was filmed shouting from the other side of the apartment complex.
With scores of residents under lockdown inside, one can only imagine what would have happened if it had. |
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Today’s other essential headlines
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| Emmanuel Macron has hired a former adviser to Tony Blair and top spin doctor to Rupert Murdoch as a senior aide, tasking him with selling the French president’s vision to voters amid fears of rising discontent.
Frédéric Michel joins the Élysée as a special communication and strategy adviser to help communicate the French president’s “short, medium and long-term” plan as well as the link between domestic and international policies, according to Le Figaro. |
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Around the world: Ukraine breaks enemy lines
Ukrainian forces have broken through Russian lines with a “tank fist” as they advanced 12 miles on a lightning offensive in the Kharkiv region. The Ukrainian military continued to maintain an official silence about the progress of the battle south of Kharkiv, but multiple unofficial sources on both sides indicated that Ukrainian forces were trying to reach the strategic junction of Kupiansk. Turkish-made Bayraktar armed drones have helped them penetrate 50km into Russian-held territory and recapture more than 20 towns and villages in the counter-offensive. It comes as Ukraine’s foreign minister has said the body of a British aid worker who was reported to have died while being detained by Russian-backed separatists shows signs of “possible unspeakable torture”. |
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Joe Biden’s attempts to intervene in 
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Some View on the World 
2 thoughts on “The Telegraph 2022 September 05 – 11”