The Telegraph for the weekend of 2022 November 19-20

Dear reader, Catch up on the stories that matter to you with our carefully selected articles, below.

Good morning. The British Prime Minister has disclosed that his wife and daughters are his ’emotional motivation’ for a tough stance on crime – as further details emerge of the UK’s rising tax burden.

Headlines: Saturday’s essential news Law and order | Rishi Sunak has revealed his concerns about the safety of women on the streets of Britain. Discussing his approach to crime for the first time since he entered No 10, the Prime Minister told reporters he was influenced by “emotional” motivations such as the safety of his wife and two young daughters. It came as it emerged a sexual predator murdered an aspiring lawyer as she walked home hours after police tried to arrest him for breaching the terms of his prison release.

Raid | Council tax bills set to double for second home owners Councils in tourist hotspots are preparing to double the tax paid by second home owners as they attempt to plug holes in their budgets. Triple lock | Retirees to pay income tax on state pension by 2030 Every retired person claiming the full new state pension is at risk of paying income tax for the first time as the triple lock drives up payments in line with surging inflation.The pension will rise to £12,544 a year in 2028, according to analysis of figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) by Canada Life – just £26 below the threshold for paying the basic rate of income tax. ‘Missing’ migrant | Accused rapist found in hotel housing children An asylum seeker accused of raping a teenager has been found by police in a migrant hotel where children were staying after a major blunder.Thames Valley Police identified the asylum seeker on Thursday using police files after he had gone “missing” earlier in the week following his transfer from another migrant hotel 80 miles away in east London, where he allegedly raped a teenage boy. Hospitals crisis | Call for true seven-day NHS as wards lie idle Only two in 10 hospital appointments take place between Friday and Sunday, data reveal, amid calls for the NHS to become a full seven-day service.Analysis of outpatient appointments, which include seeing a cancer specialist after a GP referral, post-surgery follow-ups and physiotherapy, show 80 per cent took place Monday to Thursday.Just 37,634 booked appointments took place on an average Sunday in 2021-22, compared to 489,479 on a Tuesday. It comes after experts warned NHS hospitals were like the “Marie Celeste” on Fridays with the car park empty by the afternoon. Weather | Flood warning amid fears for woman missing in river Dangerous conditions forced police to call off a search for a woman who went missing in Scotland while trying to rescue a dog during flooding in Aberdeenshire.A deluge continued across the east of Scotland on Friday night, with authorities issuing an ‘amber alert’ and warnings floodwaters would pose a ”danger to life” after weeks worth of  rain fell in one day.Warnings of ”severe” flooding remained in place for parts of Aberdeenshire, Dundee and Angus just before 6am Saturday morning. The rainfall was predicted to ease throughout Saturday morning.

Around the world: Top stories

China | Alarm bells ring as Sunak ‘cosying up’ to President Xi Asked, while flying to Bali for the G20 summit if he intended to label Beijing a “systemic threat”, as the ultra-hawkish Liz Truss had planned to, the Prime Minister responded: “My view on China is straightforward. I think that China unequivocally poses a systemic threat – well, a systemic challenge – to our values, and our interests, and is undoubtedly the biggest state-based threat to our economic security, let me put it that way. That’s how I think about China.”That response – using the term threat, taking it back, before using it again – left China hawks in the Conservative Party, already despondent at Mr Sunak’s apparent change in direction, bemused. US | Republicans vow to investigate Joe Biden and his family Senior US Republicans have said that launching an investigation into the business dealings of Joe Biden and his son is a “top priority”.Having taken control of the House of Representatives following the midterm elections, the party is gearing up to subpoena Mr Biden’s son, Hunter, over his business activities, which could see him forced to testify under oath.”This committee will evaluate the status of Joe Biden’s relationship with his family’s foreign partners and whether he is a president who is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars and influence,” said Representative James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, who is expected to become chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Ukraine war | Hunting Russian collaborators in Kherson One plucky resident is risking life and limb to track the troops setting up a puppet government in his region – here is his story Theranos | Founder jailed for more than 11 years for fraud Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors out of millions – closing a key chapter to one of the biggest scandals in Silicon Valley’s history.Ms Holmes was found guilty on four counts of fraud and conspiracy in January this year. The US Probation Office said that investor losses totalled to more than $550m, the prosecution however was seeking for $804m. Twitter | Risk of meltdown as Elon Musk locks the doors Twitter was at growing risk of a meltdown on Friday night, experts warned, as as many as 1,000 staff quit and Elon Musk locked the doors to the company’s office. The exodus is thought to have included some of Twitter’s most important engineers and coincided with a sharp rise in reported problems with its website, leading to questions about whether the service would stop working entirely. Mr Musk announced on Friday that the company’s headquarters in San Francisco would be locked until Monday morning, without an explanation.

News focus | Bed-blocking is a deadly crisis for patients and the NHS – so what’s the cure? While thousands are stuck on waiting lists desperate to go to hospital, increasing numbers suffer the opposite fate… they can’t get out Read more

Comment and analysis

Charles Moore | Putin’s only hope now is to terrify the West It is bizarre that calls for peace talks pick up every time Kyiv shows its ability to take back territory from the Russians + Jeremy Hunt briefly explained. Inflation had begun largely as a response to Covid-19, he said. Then it had been “worsened by a ‘Made in Russia’ energy crisis”. Because of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, wholesale gas and electricity prices have risen “to eight times their historic average”. Juliet Samuel | Failed model condemns workers to penury in the face of ageing pressures and rising borrowing costs, Mr Hunt doubled down on Britain’s failed model. He put more money into pensions, benefits and old-age care, cut investment and quietly told the forecasters that the Government would be importing more workers from abroad to pay for it all through their taxes. The “triple lock”, which guarantees that the state pension will rise by inflation even as the rest of the country is squeezed by rising prices, was kept firmly in place. Camilla Tominey | This isn’t sound money. It’s socialismThere is nothing conservative about balancing the books on the backs of strivers, or labelling dividends ‘unearned’There is a new word doing the rounds to describe the Tories after Jeremy Hunt’s £55 billion tax-and-spend Autumn Statement and it doesn’t make for very comfortable reading. “Consocialists” was a term first coined by Reform leader Richard Tice to sum up the once-Thatcherite party’s lurch to the Left, but after Thursday’s unprecedented tax grab, it has now entered the general Westminster lexicon. Telegraph View | The Tories must grasp the nettle of reform ‘Middle England is set for a shock.” So runs the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ bleak assessment of the Autumn Statement. The bare facts are dismal. Borrowing is high, debt is high, tax is high yet public services are creaking. Forecasts suggest that servicing the national debt will soon cost £100 billion a year, more than twice the defence budget. Meanwhile, over time the tax burden will rise by a massive 4 per cent of GDP. Those on middle incomes will feel the pain most sharply, as they are dragged into higher tax bands. Living standards are set to crash, with wages lagging inflation and household disposable income falling by 7 per cent in the next two years. Letters | Beneficiaries of Hunt’s plan know it penalises aspiration

Take 5: Saturday features

Host the perfect Christmas | By the man who saved Fortnum Beauty | The dark truth about what is really inside your make-up The way we live now | Do ready-made porridge oats get your goat? The Last Unicorn | The battle to save, fantasy’s forgotten classic UK’s rarest cars | 1970 Wolseley, the sole survivor on British roads

On Sunday

Nadhim Zahawi has said the Conservatives still want to cut taxes before the next election as anger continues to grow from party members over the Autumn Statement. The Tory chairman has been tasked with winning the next general election and admits there have been “real problems with discipline” in his party.

Sunday’s essential news Politics | Nadhim Zahawi has spoken out after Conservative MPs attacked Jeremy Hunt‘s Autumn Statement, dubbing it the “economics of a madhouse” that has made the party “more Labour than Labour”. Asked whether he hoped the Conservatives would look to reduce taxes again before the next election, Mr Zahawi said Mr Hunt would prioritise easing the tax burden once inflation fell. The Tory chairman has got one of the hardest jobs in politics, as he stares down the barrel of a 24-point Labour poll lead.

Nadhim Zahawi | We need to show humility to win back voters Staring down the barrel of a 24-point Labour poll lead and surrounded by gloomy colleagues on the Tory benches, the Iraqi-born Tory chairman who shot to fame as Britain’s Covid vaccine minister has been put in charge of winning the next general election.“It can be recovered. I’m confident it can be recovered,” he told The Telegraph in his office at the heart of Conservative HQ in Westminster this week.The scale of the challenge is unprecedented. The Tories face a wipeout in heartland constituencies in the south of England, where Labour and the Liberal Democrats are campaigning hard, and in the northern “Red Wall” where they won for the first time under Boris Johnson in 2019. Migrant crisis | Man housed at Manston detention centre dies A migrant housed in the Home Office’s controversial Manston detention centre has died for the first time. Royal ‘racism’ | Harry and Meghan to receive human rights award The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will be honoured with a prestigious human rights award after taking a stand against “structural racism” within the monarchy, it has emerged. Poll | Britain was founded on racism, say almost half of young people Almost half of young people believe Britain was founded on racism and continues to be “structurally racist” today, research has found.The revelation has prompted concerns that children are being taught contested ideas as fact in the classroom, with six in 10 school leavers saying they had been taught concepts associated with “critical race theory”.The research was carried out by Eric Kaufmann, an academic at Birkbeck, University of London, for the Policy Exchange think-tank. Jewellery plea | Don’t wear ‘colonial’ diamond, Queen Consort urged One of South Africa’s best known trade unionists says it would be a ‘most unfortunate’ reminder of the colonial era’s past It is the largest rough-cut diamond ever found, mined in South Africa in 1905 before being presented to King Edward VII as a gesture of friendship and loyalty.However, the Queen Consort has been urged not to wear the Cullinan diamond during next week’s state visit by Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African president, amid calls for it to be returned to the nation.

Around the world: Top stories

Twitter | Musk restores Trump’s account after online poll US | Trump versus DeSantis ding-dong risks tearing Republicans apart At the exact moment Donald Trump was announcing his 2024 run to a muted reception from family and friends at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Ron DeSantis was being greeted with a standing ovation from the Republican Party faithful.Fresh from a landslide re-election victory, the Florida governor was feted as the future of the GOP at its annual Governors’ Association winter confab just a short drive away in Orlando. North Korea | Kim Jong-un reveals daughter to the world North Korean leader Kim Jong-un revealed his daughter to the world for the first time on Saturday in striking photos showing the pair hand-in-hand before the launch of the nuclear-armed country’s largest ballistic missile on Friday. Ukraine | Sunak meets Zelensky for first time on surprise visit Rishi Sunak made a surprise visit to Ukraine on Saturday to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, as he announced a new £50 million air defence package to help counter Russian attacks. Controversy | France set for major row over school uniform proposal MPs in France’s ruling party are set to spark a major row by proposing the controversial introduction of uniforms in schools.Seven deputies of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party submitted a bill to party leaders on Friday aimed at promoting the “wearing of a common school uniform”, Le Figaro reported.The bill, which is due to be considered by parliamentary officials on Monday, aims to promote “equality” and protect against “school harassment”. While the word “uniform” was omitted from it in favour of “common dress” the bill looks set to reignite debate around a contentious issue in France.

Comment and analysis

Richard Kemp | We’re learning the wrong lessons from Putin’s defeats Patrick Minford | Hunt has taken a wrecking ball to the economy Janet Daley | Lockdown turned Britain into a nation of neurotics Telegraph View | The Autumn Statement was a tragic miscalculation Letters | This haphazard Government clobbers young professionals

Take 5: Sunday features

Books for Christmas | Our critics pick the ideal gift for every reader Shake it off | Why Taylor Swift fans are at war with Ticketmaster Twitter | What Elon Musk doesn’t understand about running firm Family | What I wish I’d known before I got divorced (twice) Dear Richard Madeley | ‘I hate my daughter’s soldier boyfriend’

What gripped our readers this week

Health advice | ‘I had a stroke when I was 64 – here’s what I wish I had known before’

Interview | Christina Strutt: ‘I threw a party to celebrate my own death’

Some unmissable stories

Here are 10 ways to beat the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement tax grab.

Forget the new Twitter chief’s all-or-nothing ultimatum for his staff, ‘not even Elon Musk could make lazy Brits commit to ‘hardcore’ working hours’ says Judith Woods.

Gallery: Royal family pictures of the week

In an image released for his 74th birthday, the King stands beside an ancient oak tree in Windsor Great Park to mark his appointment as Ranger of the Park. In other royal events this week, the Prince of Wales wished the England football team good luck – and the Countess of Wessex sat behind the wheel of a JCB. See our gallery of pictures.

Here is a selection of articles we think you’ll be interested in today.

Hunting Russian collaborators in Kherson with the soldier who knows all the secrets Two famous Brian Coxes struggle to check in to BBC hotel Multi-millionaire accused of endangering remote Scottish isle’s fragile water supply Zara Aleena: Career criminal Jordan McSweeney admits murdering newly trained lawyer Tourist hotspots set to double council tax for second home owners

MPs brand Hindu activist ‘divisive’ as tensions brew around Leicester protest Climate protester who confronted David Attenborough in Michelin-starred restaurant arrested Migrant housed at Manston detention centre dies Hospitals with worst records for hip operations revealed Oxford to ‘decolonise’ computing degree and emphasise slavery links