Daily Mail - 04.11.2026 — 2026-11-05

He hails Royal Navy's heroics after PM opened door to apology for slavery

THE King emphasised Britain's role in ending the slave trade amid a reparations row in the Caribbean yesterday.

In a punchier-than-expected

From Rebecca English

Royal Editor in Antigua

speech to Commonwealth leaders, Charles steered clear of offering an apology, insisting 'we cannot change the past'. Pointedly, he reminded them that the Royal Navy led the way in ending the transatlantic slave trade.

Charles, speaking as head of the Commonwealth, said the ‘complex’ history around the issue must include ‘the good’ done by those involved, ‘as well as the Turn to Page 6

Granny act: Kristin Scott Thomas in the advert

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Tory revival gathers pace as poll puts Kemi just two points behind

SIGNS of a Tory revival grew yesterday as new polling returned the Conservatives' best results since they were dumped from power.

Kemi Badenoch's party was on 24 per cent support in the latest YouGov research – up two points in a week.

That was only two points behind Labour, on 26 per cent, with no sign that the Budget delivered any bounce for Andy Burnham. Meanwhile, Reform UK was lagging behind on 21 per cent.

The finding will encourage Tory strategists who believe Mrs Badenoch's well-received performances and bold pledges on cutting tax and welfare are starting to turn the tide.

Her party is hoping that nudging ahead of rivals Reform can create a feedback loop and re-establish them as the main challengers to Labour.

Reform was up one point on the week – but only from the lowest support You-Gov had recorded for the party since

By James Tapsfield

2024. If repeated at a general election, the numbers would almost certainly produce a hung Parliament, with Labour potentially propped up in power by the Lib Dems.

Westminster has been in the grip of fevered snap election speculation, despite the Prime Minister flatly deny-

‘Bold pledges on tax and welfare’

ing there will be a ballot next year. The rumours have been given extra impetus by John Healey pushing back key decisions in the Budget last week.

A spending review due in the second half of next year will need to spell out a path for defence budgets hitting 3 per cent of GDP by 2030. The Chancellor has also acknowledged there will have to be difficult choices on departmental spending, with think-tanks flagging that current plans seem to entail huge real-terms cuts in the coming years.

Asked in an interview last week when the next election will be, Mr Burnham said: 'No election in 2027. I said that really, really plainly.

'I'll say it again to you and the reason I say that is because I am not coming into this job full of political calculation in terms of “what do I need to do for how it benefits me or the party?”. I come into the job genuinely feeling that the country needs a really clear change in terms of the way politics has been done because we're in a messy position.'

However, the remarks did appear to be a shift in Mr Burnham's position, as he previously stated that there would not be an election until 2029.

Comment - Page 16

Vacancies fall as the cost of hiring young workers 'skyrockets'

By John-Paul Ford Rojas

Deputy Business Editor

THE cost of employing young people has ‘sky-rocketed’ at three times the rate of inflation since Labour came to power causing a jobs slump, analysis shows.

Higher taxes and sharp increases in the minimum wage mean that taking on a worker aged 21 and over costs 20 per cent more. For 18 to 20-year-olds, the cost is up by 31 per cent. Over the same period, inflation adds up to just 10 per cent.

The analysis by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think-tank underlines how Labour's policies have battered hiring and contributed to a youth jobs crisis.

‘The Government argues that higher wages are good for employees,’ the CPS said.

‘But it is an obvious truth that making it more expensive to hire people, especially young people, means fewer will be hired – hence the recent falls in job vacancies and rise in unemployment.

'Grandpa wasn't expecting you to charge quite so much to clean the car'

Its analysis looked at the rise in employer costs between 2024 – when Labour came to power – and 2027, when minimum wage rates are set to rise again.

Over that period, the cost of employing a full-time worker on the national living wage – for those aged 21 and over – will have risen by £4,462, or 20 per cent.

That includes a higher wage rate as well as a sharp increase in employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) after a raid by former chancellor Rachel Reeves.

For 18 to 20-year-olds on the national minimum wage, the cost of employment will have risen by £4,859, or 31 per cent. Employees under 21 are not liable for employer NICs.

But their minimum wage rate has been going up much

'An incredibly difficult period'

more quickly than it has for older workers, as part of a controversial pledge to bring the two rates into line.

Critics say this makes it less likely that employers will take a chance on younger workers at a time when nearly a million are not in education, employment or training – known as Neets. Last week the Government

Last week, the Government said it would pause the move to bring the two rates into line, meaning that both pay rates will go up by 3.9 per cent from April next year.

It followed a recommendation from the Low Pay Commission stating that ‘demand for young workers has slowed and the risks associated with ambitious rises [in the minimum wage] have increased’.

Latest official figures show vacancies have slumped below 700,000 for the first time since 2014, excluding the pandemic. They are down by 162,000 since Labour came to power. Meanwhile, unemployment has risen by 276,000.

The CPS report said: 'The costs of employing young people entering the workforce have skyrocketed since Labour came to power.

‘One of the themes of the Labour Government is the increased costs it has put on business. One of the largest costs it has increased is the cost of minimum-wage labour. This year’s Budget carries on that trend.’

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Daniel Herring, the think-tank's head of fiscal and economic policy, said: '[Chancellor] John Healey deserves some credit for slowing the rise in the youth minimum wage... However, this Labour government has continued to increase pressure on businesses during an incredibly difficult period.'

Comment - Page 16

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Why Rivals beauty Bella got a no-nudity clause

Dancing to her own tune: Bella Maclean in Harper's Bazaar

Steamy: Bella and Alex Hassell in Rivals. Right, Emily Atack plays tennis nude

IT wouldn't be a Dame Jilly Cooper adaptation without some love triangles, Cotswolds debauchery and, ahem, a fair share of bare flesh.

But fans hoping to see a little more of Rivals actress Bella Maclean will be in for a disappointment as the show returns.

The 28-year-old, who plays the innocent Taggie O'Hara in the Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly's 1988 bonkbuster, has revealed she negotiated a no-nudity clause before taking on the role.

She told Harper's Bazaar magazine: 'It

‘Didn’t want to exploit her’

was important because of how pure Taggie's character was. I didn't want to sexually exploit her and I didn't want to do that to myself either.

‘That was really important to me, and I think it will stay important to me. There are some things I want to keep to myself.’

Ms Maclean added that she had no problem with her co-stars - such as Victoria Smurfit who plays Taggie's flamboyant mother Maud - stripping off for the show's many steamy scenes. 'I don't judge anyone who does it,' she continued. 'Sometimes it's so beautiful. If I had Victoria Smurfit's body, I'd probably be walking around naked!

By Olivia Kemp

Showbusiness Reporter

‘But in that sense, we’re all lucky because there are amazing intimacy co-ordinators on our job. I know that’s not the case for other people. We’re all good friends who can just say “No” to the directors and they’ll listen.’

Ms Maclean plays Taggie, the 20-year-old daughter of a TV journalist who falls for the older, womanising Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell).

The first series, released in 2024, opened with Campbell-Black having sex in a Concorde toilet before he and an MP's wife (played by Emily Atack) were caught playing naked tennis.

The first six episodes of the second series were released in May this year - seven months after Dame Jilly's death at the age of 88.

The second half of the series returns to Disney+ on November 11.

Tartan barmy! Musical about Scottish culture has a trigger warning about loud bagpipes

By Codie Bullen

Showbusiness Correspondent

SEX scenes, violence and offensive language are among the well-known themes that may ‘trigger’ delicate theatre-goers.

But viewers of a musical about Scottish culture have been warned about something arguably less traumatic – the sound of bagpipes.

Ceilidh The Musical, which is being performed at Shoreditch Town Hall in east London, follows a family trying to teach a traditional Scottish dance as they encourage audiences to join in. But an audience advisory notice on the show's website warns: ‘Ceilidh uses a fog machine, mild profanity and live music, including bagpipes, that can be loud.’

The musical, which runs in Shoreditch until November 13, premiered in the Highlands last month. It was written by Scottish duo Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie, and co-produced by US Traitors host Alan Cumming.

It is just the latest bizarre ‘trigger warning’ that has plagued TV shows, films and theatre productions in recent years. Last month, an upcoming play about Anne Boleyn warned audiences to expect ‘female oppression’ and ‘beheading’.

Anne Boleyn: The Musical, which follows the life and execution of Henry VIII's second wife, will run at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, south-east London, next spring.

However, ticket-booking websites warned: 'This open-air production features depictions of female oppression, false accusations, emotional distress and miscarriage, culminating in Anne's imprisonment and execution by beheading.'

In August, another south London theatre warned audiences that they would be exposed to toast, meatballs and avocado on stage during its production of How The Other Half Loves.

In the ‘content guidance’ of its website, the Old Vic warned that its adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1969 play involved ‘real food’.

Sudanese suspect arrested after trying to steal trawler ‘to collect family from France’

EXCLUSIVE

Early-morning visitor: The fishing trawler Carousel in Royal Harbour, Ramsgate. Inset: The vessel's skipper Olly Swift

By David Barrett and Isaac Crowson

A SUDANESE man has been arrested after trying to steal a fishing boat and take it to France to ‘collect his family’.

The 30-year-old man boarded the trawler in the early hours of yesterday morning while the crew were asleep in their bunks and tried to take it out to sea.

He started the engine and revved it so hard that the mooring ropes snapped. The man ‘insisted’ they take him to France to ‘collect his family’, the boat’s skipper said.

Police swooped on the incident at Royal Harbour in Ramsgate, Kent, just after 3am. The man's immigration status remains unclear.

He boarded the Carousel, a commercial trawler which fishes for whelks in the Channel. It is co-owned by Lynn Shellfish, based in King's Lynn, Norfolk.

Skipper Olly Swift wrote on Facebook: 'Just had the Carousel stolen by an immigrant with all the lads in their bunks.

‘He got on to the boat, started the engine and slapped the throttle down to the dash which snapped the mooring ropes and they’ve ended up out in the middle of the harbour. He was insisting to take him to France to collect his family!’

Mr Swift, 31, told the Daily Mail he feared the vessel could be a write-off. The father-of-two, who co-owns the boat, said: 'I got this call from the lads who were on it and I thought it might be a wind-up.

‘This bloke was yelling to get him to

France. He's caused so much damage. How on earth has this happened? He's put people's lives at risk. The crew could have died. He was like a man possessed. The lads were scared for their lives.'

Mr Swift, who lives locally, said potential damage to the engine and loss of earnings could cost him £100,000. He added: 'He could have written the whole thing off, I don't know yet. The boat is my pride and joy.' Steven Williamson, of Lynn Shellfish, said: 'It's the first time we've ever had anything like this happen. These people must be very desperate to resort to this type of thing.'

Kent Police said: 'A 30-year-old Sudanese man was arrested.'

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said he had spoken to Mr Swift, adding: 'Our country sinks deeper every day.' The incident came after 1,670 migrants reached Britain from the Continent between Thursday and Sunday, marking the busiest four-day period this year and taking the total number of arrivals since Andy Burnham became Prime Minister past the 10,000 mark, to 10,136. Since Labour came to power in July 2024, the total is 87,319.

EXCLUSIVE By Christian Calgie Senior Political Correspondent-at-Large

Taxpayers' £1bn for charities that called for Mahmood U-turn

CHARITIES that lobbied the Home Office to water down tougher immigration rules received more than £1 billion in taxpayer cash, it can be revealed.

The sector faces criticism for using public money to push an anti-borders agenda after Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's U-turn on those who can gain Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR).

I'll strip leave to remain from those who don't contribute to UK, says Kemi

Research has found that 38 of the charities that lobbied politicians and responded to the consultation received an eye-watering \$1 billion in terms of freedom.

£1billion in taxpayer-funded contracts and grants in their last financial year.

The biggest earner on the list was Mencap, a learning disabilities charity, which took more than £200million in contracts and grants in 2024-25, and told MPs that ministers should ‘retain the five-year [ILR] pathway in place for social care workers’.

Children's charity Barnardo's, which took £192million in con-

'It takes some brass neck'

tracts and grants in the same period, told peers it ‘does not support the principles of earned settlement... as a basis for determining whether children can live safely and securely in the UK’.

Migrant and refugee charity Praxis received nearly £1million in contracts and grants in the year ending March 2025, and argued it rejected the concept of earned settlement ‘entirely’.

It also provided a guide for the public, saying illegal arrivals should face no penalty when applying for settlement.

Alongside other charities, Praxis also brought more than

MIGRANTS granted permanent leave to live in Britain under Labour's botched reforms will face being stripped of the status by a future Tory government, Kemi Badenoch has revealed.

The Conservative leader said foreign workers who fail to make a ‘net contribution’ will lose the settled status, known as indefinite leave to remain.

Mrs Badenoch said Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, right, had ‘given up’ on a pledge to stop low-paid migrants securing ILR because Labour is ‘addicted to welfare’.

Ms Mahmood revealed on Monday that she is exempting almost 300,000 foreign

500 people to Parliament in March to lobby around 100 MPs against the proposals.

The Home Office's analysis of its consultation, published on Mon-day alongside Ms Mahmood's announcement, revealed that 66 per cent of the 560 ‘third sector’ – ie, charities – responses said illegal arrivals should face no penalty before settling for good in Britain.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp told the Daily Mail: 'It takes some brass neck to take millions care workers from a crackdown which would have seen them waiting years longer for ILR.

In a video posted on social media, Mrs Baden-och said: 'Indefinite leave to remain will no longer be a guaranteed ticket to benefits.

'If someone arrives in this country under those previous rules and they're granted ILR by the Labour Government, if they're not a net contributor we will review and stop their indefinite leave to remain.

'Conservative policy [is] now simple and clear: deportation of illegal migrants, a minimum of ten years before someone here legally can get ILR, and then another five years for British citizenship.'

from British taxpayers and then spend it campaigning against Britain controlling its borders.

‘These charities seem to think the public purse is there to bankroll their political agenda, whatever the public wants.’

John O'Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, added: 'While charities have an important role to play in community services, Britons don't expect their taxes to be funding organisations who are pushing political agendas.'

A Government spokesman said: 'The law is clear that charities must exist only to further their charitable purposes. When government provides grant funding to charities, there are strict rules preventing taxpayer money from being used on lobbying or political activity.'

A Barnardo's spokesman said part of its role 'is to speak out on behalf of the children we work with across the UK, sharing insight into their experiences, and always based on evidence from our hundreds of services across the country'.

Jon Sparkes, chief executive at Mencap, said amid a significant workforce crisis, ‘maintaining a route to settlement helps provide stability for both workers and employers, while protecting the continuity of care that people with a learning disability depend on’.

Praxis was approached for comment.

[CHAOS IN THE SKIES] 8 planes grounded in 24 hours – including 3 from UK – after flurry of bomb threats across Europe in ‘malicious hoax’

By Tom Cotterill and Imogen Garfinkel

TERROR has gripped the skies above Europe after a series of bomb threats forced at least eight passenger jets to make emergency landings in 24 hours.

A flurry of hoax calls caused chaos as planes were yesterday grounded in Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Poland.

Two services from the UK, flying out of London Heathrow and Manchester, were caught up in the mayhem – following a third from Luton Airport which was disrupted on Monday.

On the hunt: A sniffer dog inspects the aircraft

One of the planes affected yesterday, a LOT Polish Airlines flight from Heathrow to Warsaw Chopin Airport, was full of children from The Jews' Free School in north-west London, the Daily Mail understands.

The teens, aged 16 and 17, were among 181 people left stranded after the bomb scare diverted their trip to Warsaw Modlin airport.

‘In that moment I felt absolute panic

One mother, whose son had been on board, said she received a text from her boy saying his flight had been diverted.

'In that moment I felt absolute panic'

and ran away from my desk to try to get hold of him,' she added.

Airport officials at Modlin claimed the jet had been redirected shortly after 9.45am ‘due to information of an explosive device on board’.

Passengers were evacuated and security teams swept the airliner but no explosive device was identified.

An hour later, a Ryanair flight from Manchester was swarmed by police and bomb-disposal teams after landing at Murcia Airport in Spain.

One of the 114 holidaymakers on board said they had been kept in the dark about the alert until after it touched down.

'The plane stopped quite suddenly and then we were kept on the runway for around 30 minutes,' the woman, called Sarah, told BBC 5 Live.

‘Then the fire engines and bomb squad turned up and we were asked to evacuate... We were only later told that it was an actual threat, a bomb threat to the plane itself.’

A third aircraft, flying from

Evacuate: A jet stranded in Murcia, Spain

Copenhagen to Poland, landed at Chopin Airport after another warning at around the same time.

At Rome's Fiumicino airport, bomb-disposal experts searched two Ryanair flights – from Lisbon and Dublin – following anonymous scares. One aeroplane was escorted by Italian fighter jets until it landed but no explosives were found.

Further threats were made to two other passenger planes travelling to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. A Wizz Air jet carrying 176 passengers from Bergamo, Italy, landed safely, as did the second – a Ryanair plane from Dublin carrying 185 passengers.

Counter-terrorism police did not locate any explosives, Bulgarian officials said.

It is not yet clear who is responsible for the scares or whether they are connected but British officials have dubbed them a ‘malicious hoax’.

‘The UK has one of the most robust aviation security systems in the world, with well-tested processes for dealing with malicious hoax threats like those we've seen today,' a government spokesman said. 'Our world-leading police and intelligence agencies work closely every day to keep us safe.'

The incidents came a day after a Wizz Air flight from London Luton to Bulgaria was threatened and had to be escorted by a Hungarian fighter jet.

Donald Tusk, the Polish prime

The flurry of bomb scares come as tensions between Europe and Russia continue to boil over.

minister, yesterday claimed his security forces had stopped an attempted overnight provocation on its border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

He warned the Kremlin is looking to intensify its hybrid war with the West and claimed he had received intelligence that Russia was planning ‘more serious provocations on the border or even sabotage acts orchestrated by hostile services’.

Russia has denied carrying out sabotage attacks against Europe.

Get me out of here! Claire pulls out of musical to do I’m a Celeb

By Alex Doyle

SHE said it was her ‘dream role’ when cast as Miss Hannigan in a production of Annie.

But Claire Sweeney, pictured, has now ditched the show to appear on I'm A Celebrity – just weeks before opening night.

The former Brookside and Coronation Street star, 55, pulled out of eight performances in Woking this month. Ms Sweeney only told producers last week that she would instead be flying to the Australian jungle. A source said: 'It's not a good look. She committed to the musical long before [I'm a Celebrity] talks. Parents who splashed out for tickets will rightfully be furious.'

She quit playing Cassie Plummer on Corrie in January for the Annie role she had ‘always wanted to play’. The Mail contacted the actress for comment.

Snap, crackle and shock as Rice Krispies lose rice grains

Daily Mail Reporter

KELLOGG'S has removed rice grains from Rice Krispies and Coco Pops.

The firm blamed ‘changing weather conditions’ for affecting the quality and availability of the ingredient.

Kellogg's sources its rice from US states Arkansas, California and Louisiana, which have suffered floods, storms and droughts in recent years.

Rice Krispies, famous for their ‘snap, crackle and pop’ slogan, have been reformulated to use rice flour instead of rice, while Coco Pops now contain a blend of rice flour and corn flour in place of rice.

The cereals now also contain wheat gluten, meaning they are no longer suitable for consumers with a wheat allergy or coeliac disease.

A Kellogg's spokesman said: ‘This change helps us maintain consistent quality at a time when changing weather conditions are affecting the quality and availability of some of the rice and grains used in our cereals.’

Wheat must now be declared as an allergen on the pack.

'The shameful chapter that fills my heart with horror'

Continued from Page One

wrongs'. The King has been caught in the crossfire between Prime Minister Andy Burnham – who caused a storm by saying he was open to discussions over an apology but not reparations – and Caribbean campaigners who say the time has come for the UK to pay up.

Buckingham Palace had promised Charles's speech would be ‘unflinching’ in its ‘honesty, sincere sorrow and respect’.

He acknowledged the episode ‘still casts a shadow’, saying the ‘shameful chapter of history is one that fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow’.

His reference to the Royal Navy will be seen as a significant defence of Britain's legacy – for both good and ill – in the region. It is an issue that was only touched upon by Mr Burnham in his initial talk of a formal apology at the weekend that began the most recent row. And it has been

‘We can learn from the past’

ignored by many others who have since jumped on the bandwagon.

Following the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, Britain's naval forces played a central operational role in suppressing the trade worldwide.

Delivering the opening speech at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), Charles said: 'None of us, of course, would be here today were it not for our history, which has shaped us in myriad ways. History is not ours.'

myriad ways. History is not ours to choose or to change. It is bequeathed to us in complex synthesis by forebears we can never know. Our inheritance includes both their achievements and their failures – the good they did as well as the wrongs.'

He continued: 'History can be hard to compass, viewed as it is through the prism of time, which can be both clarifying and distorting, and yet its consequences resonate with contemporary force.

Sandy toes: Royal couple looking relaxed

Our history inspires us, can appal us, yet it can always teach us. We cannot change the actions of those who came before us. We can, however, learn from the past.' His remarks come amid an increasingly toxic row over whether Britain should offer a formal apology and pay reparations for its part in the transportation of slaves from Africa to the plantations of the Caribbean.

Buckingham Palace has made clear that it will follow government advice on the matter which, until only days ago, had been a clear 'no apology, no compensation'. But Mr Burnham's intervention at the weekend, in which he said the Government was willing to start a constructive dialogue on the issue of an apology, has lit a touchpaper under the issue.

While he has insisted reparations remain off the table, many Caribbean nations have sensed

Camilla goes footloose on trip to beach

QUEEN Camilla kicked off her shoes on the beach as she and the King learnt about Antigua's green projects.

Displaying pink painted toes, Her Majesty said she couldn't resist slipping off her shoes on the sandy shores of picturesque Fort James beach.

The King was ‘shocked’ to hear that 71 bags of rubbish were picked from the beach two hours before they arrived.

Greeted by a lively band, the couple heard how local grassroots movement Adopt a Coastline cares for the environment with beach clean-ups, indigenous tree planting and education.

The Queen, elegant in sapphire blue, was given a bright blue bracelet made from discarded kite surf materials and said: 'Thank you, it matches my dress!'

Their Majesties were each handed a litter picker and raised them like swords, laughing. The King told volunteers: 'You've done a very good job with all those bags before we got here.'

blood in the water and are insisting the time has come for a significant payout.

In a two-minute video posted to X on Monday, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said an apology for slavery would help the UK ‘build stronger relationships’ with Commonwealth countries.

The King added yesterday: 'The transatlantic trade in enslaved persons still casts a shadow over these islands and other members of our Commonwealth. As I have said before, that shameful chapter of history is one that fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow.'

But he continued with his reference to Britain's leading role in ending the global slave trade, which went down less well with his audience, who offered muted applause at the end of his speech.

Speaking to a packed audience of 1,200 delegates in Antigua and Barbuda, the 77-year-old King was on his feet for 15 minutes and sounded slightly tired after a gru-elling week-long Caribbean tour.

Speaking at a reception later, Canadian PM Mark Carney told

A King's speech that stretched the royal diplomatic tightrope

ANALYSIS By Rebecca English

ROYAL EDITOR IN ANTIGUA

HIS voice was slightly huskier than normal, the upshot of a gruelling eight-day Caribbean tour which will have seen him undertake 34 engagements by the time he returns to the UK later today.

The King, we should not forget, while a man of prodigious energy and enthusiasm is also 77 years old – soon to turn 78 – and still undergoing cancer treatment.

As he took to his feet to deliver his opening speech at the Commonwealth Heads of

Government Meeting, His Majesty, it is fair to say, also knew he was facing one of the biggest tests of his reign on the world stage. CHOGM summits can be spicy at the best of times, particularly when it comes to issues of empire.

But with Prime Minister Andy Burnham lighting the touchpaper under the already fiery issue of the transatlantic slave trade

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on the eve of His Majesty's trip... well, that left Charles walking right in to the mouth of the beast.

His warm-up act, Gaston Browne, the outspoken prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda who even with the head of state a guest on his home soil has spoken openly of his desire to ditch the monarchy, set the tone by using the moment to ram home demands for reparations. And it was notable that the applause when he sat down was marginally more enthusiastic than even that received by the head of the Commonwealth himself.

For despite all the talk beforehand by Buckingham Palace of the King speaking with ‘unflinching honesty, sincere sorrow and respect’, few predicted that he would seize his brief as much as he did, emphasising not only his regret for slavery but, to many in the audience’s surprise, the importance of not beating ourselves up as a country for what happened many hundreds of years ago.

While Britain bears huge responsibility for some of the most unspeakable acts in the history of the region, this country has also much to be proud of, he appeared to be saying, leading the way in forcing an end to those atrocities and making amends.

I understand that his reference to the work of the Royal Navy, as a former mariner himself, was far from a casual mention.

The King is aware that this is a hotly contested political space and that he must be above the fray at all times.

But this was a punchier speech than many predicted and shows that Charles is a monarch and leader who is prepared to stretch that famous old royal diplomatic tightrope at times.

Centre stage: King Charles addresses Commonwealth leaders yesterday

From the slavery row to the EU, our Mr Bean of a Foreign Secretary is a national liability

THROUGH the internet a couple of days ago, like a signal from another galaxy, there crackled a social-media message from the guiding force of our new government. The fuzziness eventually cleared to show a big-fringed, oblong head with wonky mouth, rings under its eyes and a spittle-fluffed voice. Earthlings of Britain, behold your overlord, Ed Miliband.

Foreign Secretary Miliband had taken to X to say we should grovel for forgiveness for transatlantic slavery. The fact that the Royal Navy heroically prevented that wicked trade in the 19th century went unmentioned by Red Ed. For him, slavery was ‘a horrific chapter in our history’ and we should have ‘a formal structured dialogue’ with people in the Caribbean and the United Kingdom who are allegedly still affected by slavery.

He added: 'We are self-confident enough to have this conversation.' Well, he certainly is. Wild-eyed certitude geyers out of almost every orifice. Look at the egomaniacal video he shot at the World Bank meeting in Thailand last week. Lecturing viewers about the importance of 'multilateralism' (i.e. the surrender of yet more national sovereignty), he waggled his hips, stuck a hand in his pocket and threw an umbrella about the place as if he was Gene Kelly in Singin' In The Rain. This prize noodle Miliband is on a deranged power kick, and it's causing havoc with the government.

At the Commonwealth meeting in Antigua and Barbuda, our nominal head of government, Andy Burnham, was muckin' about in cricket whites, slipping on a wet wicket and being run out for a duck. The King was also at the Commonwealth summit, his royal dignity drenched by a cloudburst and tarnished by a slavery-reparations squabble his ministers had made worse. Shortly before flying to the summit, Mr Burnham wrote an article in the Guardian newspaper which said he was 'open to' calls for a formal slavery apol-

Prize noodle on deranged power kick

and after his first year in office. Sir Keir, who became an MP only in 2015, fatally hesitated. It is said Mr Milib-and was the person who persuaded lawyer Sir Keir to stand for parliament. Even when he became PM, Sir Keir seemed awed by the man who led Labour to election defeat nearly a decade earlier.

In the Commons one day last year, I saw them by the Speaker's chair. Mr Miliband had his palm on Sir Keir's shoulder. The body language was unmistakable: I Own You. Is something similar now happening to anything-for-a-quiet-life Burnham? The theory that foreign affairs would keep Mr Miliband out of mischief looks misplaced. One of his first moves as Foreign Secretary was to impose sanctions on the West Bank

\- a decision that, from his highly personal speech in parliament when it was announced, was very much Mr Miliband's. The move may have helped Labour to lure floating voters from the Greens and Gaza independents – and just in time for last month's Holborn and St Pancras by-election – but it has wrecked diplomatic relations between London and Jerusalem. The Israeli government retaliated by supporting Argentina's claims to the Falkland Islands.

The White House, already suspicious of Mr Miliband for pressuring Sir Keir to deny the US Air Force use of its British bases for attacks on Iran, was also appalled.

Geopolitics was being put second to by-election pressures and student-union-style posturing. Mr Miliband has also resuscitated the heinously unpopular Chagos Isles giveaway.

Another area where his genius touch can be detected is on Europe. Mr Burnham, who in June promised voters in Makerfield that he would not reopen the Brexit wounds, has got himself into a muddle. One day his government signals a desire to rejoin the EU and talks of reverting to freedom of movement that would allow millions to come here; the next, Eyelashes realises the Foreign Office (prop: E. Miliband) has galloped ahead of Labour's working-class voters, so he tries to claim nothing has yet been decided.

Who benefits from this disarray? Certainly not Burnham. It makes him look a PM who is not in control of policy detail (which he plainly is not). But Ed Miliband, who does and always has understood small-print, even if he reaches crazy conclusions, can assume the mantle of casual seniority. He can, in a sense, place a reassuring hand on another prime minister's shoulder and take ownership of him. This is great for Ed Miliband's ego, and terrible for the country.

On Europe and slavery (the latter being an issue that almost no one mentioned until Western handwringers, including that fool Theresa May, started chewing on it some 15 years ago) there is a common thread: lack of belief in Britain. The EU Rejoiners are convinced our country can not succeed unless it hurries back to an undemocratic, economically stagnant, socially combustible bloc. The slavery lobbyists believe Britain was uniquely responsible for the transatlantic slave trade. The true villains included African rulers, some of whose descendants now have the damn cheek to demand hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation from us – even though we stopped their trade.

What sort of anti-patriot falls for such demands? What sort of Britain-basher thinks we should crawl back to Brussels when we had a referendum decision in 2016 to leave the EU? What sort of woodworm gnaws at his own culture's proud naval history

PM flat on his backside

and Christian values – which so informed Britain's opposition to slavery – and thinks they are trumped by the demands of a few on-the-make Caribbean politicians?

And even while they are mistreating our beloved King, making him stand in a tropical deluge without a brolly, and peck-peck-pecking him for more of our shrivelling British pounds, what sort of Foreign Secretary tosses them another £40million, ostensibly to help their eco-projects but more obviously to satisfy his own climate-change obsessions?

All while the supposed Prime Minister is flat on his backside on a cricket pitch, cackling with laughter at his maladroitness.

People who fly too close to Ed Miliband don't fare well. His older brother David has never been the same man since Ed defeated him for the Labour leadership in 2010. In 2015, Ed landed his party with the disaster of Jeremy Corbyn. When a too-trusting Sir Keir Starmer needed his support this summer, supposed ally Ed turned feral and did him in.

Andy Burnham may not be the brightest, but surely even he can see that this Mr Bean of a Foreign Secretary is, in addition to being a prize noodle, a national liability.

[Labour's EU food sellout] Deal cuts red tape on exports like sausages... BUT it'll cost UK millions and force us to follow Brussels rules

By Jason Groves

Political Editor

BRITAIN will have to follow EU rules and pay Brussels millions of pounds a year in return for a new deal to cut post-Brexit red tape on food exports.

A draft agreement on Labour's Brexit reset was struck yesterday ahead of a summit on November 20.

The deal will slash red tape on food exports to the EU including lifting an effective ban on the sale of British sausages, burgers and shellfish.

Andy Burnham last night claimed the deal could eventually add 0.4 per cent of the UK's GDP – equal to £12billion.

The PM said he now wanted to lead a conversation about getting ‘properly close to Europe again’.

And last night, Mr Burnham told reporters in the Caribbean, where he was attending a meeting of Commonwealth leaders, that the British public would expect him to take up a new EU deal ‘with both hands’ to secure extra economic growth.

Downing Street declined to comment on the concessions the PM has made. But diplomatic sources said it would involve the UK accepting 'dynamic alignment' with EU rules on food and farming. In practice, this means signing up to accept new EU regulations in which the UK will have little or no say.

Ministers are also ready to sign off annual payments running into the millions to help fund infrastructure projects in poorer EU states. Brussels is also pushing for the UK to slash

'Doing it without a referendum'

university tuition fees for EU students studying in the UK, potentially costing the taxpayer £450million.

Mr Burnham said the potential economic benefits of the deal were too big to ignore. He told the Economist magazine new Treasury analysis suggested, 'at the high end', that easing food and farming exports to the EU 'could add up to 0.4 per cent of GDP'.

He added: 'Now, that is a number that you cannot ignore... if something can be done to add 0.4 per cent to British GDP, that should be pursued very vigorously, and that's what I'm doing.'

But former Tory business secretary Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg warned that the PM's Brexit reset would come at a

‘very high cost’ to the country. He said: ‘Andy is leading us back into the EU with this reset – we will have to follow their rules and we will have to pay them money as we did before we left.

'And he is doing it all without a referendum or even a vote in Parliament. This deal is being presented as cost-free, but the truth is it will be very high cost.'

The bulk of the food and farming deal was negotiated by Sir Keir

Starmer last year. But the two sides have spent months finalising exactly how it should be implemented. The deal is expected to end the so-called ‘sausage war’ that has effectively ended the export of processed meat products to the EU since Brexit.

The EU is expected to ditch bureaucratic rules that require food exports to undergo exhaustive inspections. Business leaders gave the proposals a cautious welcome. William Bain, of the British Chambers of Commerce, said that following EU rules was a ‘price worth paying’ for ‘lower costs, reduced delays and increased market access’.

Other elements of the proposed deal include a new ‘youth experience scheme’ which could allow up to 100,000 young adults from the EU to spend up to 12 months

UK 'may ban sachets of ketchup'

KETCHUP and mayonnaise sachets could be banned under Andy Burnham's push to cosy up to the EU.

Brussels is barring the sale of single-serving plastic packets or containers of condiments to be more green.

The ban is also being implemented in Northern Ireland because post-Brexit rules mean it must follow some EU regulations.

Now cafes and restaurants across the UK could be forced to follow suit, with Environment minister Emma Hardy revealing a consultation on alignment is being planned.

However, a Government source said it was not part of current EU ‘reset’ talks.

working in Britain. A similar arrangement would let British youngsters work in the EU.

Mr Burnham also plans to use the summit to launch a ‘conversation’ on Britain’s future with the EU, which could lead to the UK rejoining after the next election.

Yesterday he said the public mood on Brexit had changed, with voters now open to a ‘more pragmatic discussion’.

Mahmood warns of free movement ‘issues’ in chaos over Brexit reversal

CABINET unease at Andy Burnham's push to reverse Brexit seemed to deepen yesterday as the Home Secretary warned of ‘significant issues’ with free movement.

Shabana Mahmood hinted at concerns about a return to open border rules – despite the Prime Minister ordering ministers to keep their views under wraps.

Meanwhile, Mr Burnham risked sparking more chaos by insisting he was not yet ‘proposing’ free movement. Instead, he claimed to want an ‘honest discussion’ about how leaving the EU had meant more ‘long-term settlement’. After unveiling watered-down immigration reforms, Ms Mahmood was pressed on Mr Burnham’s decision to start a debate on rejoin-

By James Tapsfield

ing the bloc and accepting free movement. She told Sky News: 'The PM has recognised that there were significant issues with the free movement of people, and that should be part of the debate we're going to have as a country.'

Asked whether she agreed with his assessment that the UK would have more control over migration if it rejoined the EU, she said losing access to databases after Brexit had a 'significant impact on our ability to manage' it.

Mr Burnham told ITV: 'I have not proposed freedom of movement coming back. I do believe that we should have an honest discussion about how immigration has changed since Brexit because the shorter-term migration of people coming from Europe and then going back has been replaced with long-term settlement in bigger numbers.'

■ PLANS to deport thousands of European criminals could be dropped as part of the PM's Brexit reset. Brussels is demanding the UK abandons plans to return foreign offenders handed more than a year in prison as soon as they are sentenced.

Old rules meant they had to serve a third of their term here. Leaked documents suggest EU negotiators are pushing for the plan to be dropped in exchange for greater cooperation on tackling illegal immigration.

Comment - Page 16

Denial: George Madgwick

12 charges of rape for Reform UK councillor

Daily Mail Reporter

A REFORM UK councillor has been charged with 35 offences including 12 counts of rape.

George Madgwick, who leads the party on Hampshire County Council, faces charges of sexual assault, controlling or coercive behaviour and making indecent images of children.

The alleged offences are said to have taken place over 13 years between 2008 and 2021 in Portsmouth and Wales.

They relate to four complainants, who were aged between 16 and 17 at the time.

Hampshire Police launched an investigation into Madgwick, who also sits on Portsmouth City Council, after receiving a complaint in July last year.

The 37-year-old has also been charged with eight offences of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. He also faces one charge each of causing or inciting sexual exploitation of a child, stalking, making threats to kill, false imprisonment, theft and criminal damage.

Reform UK said Madgwick had been suspended ‘with immediate effect’. Last night, he ‘unequivocally’ denied the claims.

He is due to appear at Portsmouth Magistrates' Court on November 25.

Adult autism diagnoses jump ten-fold

THE number of adult Britons diagnosed with autism has increased ten-fold since 2010, says a large-scale study.

Researchers said the trend was largely driven by people aged 16 to 20 as well as women and those with anxiety or ADHD. Cases also ‘increased rapidly’ after 2020’s Covid lockdowns.

Experts said the figures ‘hint at cultural changes in the meaning and use of the autism label rather than biological changes’.

The study, published in the BMJ Mental Health journal, looked at the health records of more than 33 million adults in the UK and Sweden between 2010 and 2023.

Of those, more than 24.5 million were from the UK. Researchers found the rate of autism diagnoses rose from fewer than one in every 10,000 adults to more than six in every 10,000.

True-blue: Demi Moore in New York

Denim Moore! Actress wears a gown by Gap at style awards

AFTER decades of cinched, couture and downright uncomfortable looks on the red carpet, who can blame Demi Moore for wanting to keep things casual?

The US actress, 63, may not have been able to get away with jeans and a nice top at the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards on Monday.

Instead she picked a floor-length denim dress, designed by Zac Posen for GapStudio: the high-end division of jeans brand Gap.

Joining Ms Moore for the ceremony at the American

By Olivia Kemp

Showbusiness Reporter

Museum of Natural History in New York was Ewan McGregor's daughter Esther.

The actress and model, 25, wore a bizarre balloon-shaped dress by American designer Thom Browne with platform wedges.

However, the golden girl of the night was US actress Zoe Kravitz. The 37-year-old, who is engaged to musician Harry Styles, shimmered in a golden leaf-gilded gown from Yves Saint Laurent with matching earrings.

Cutting shapes: Esther McGregor and Zoe Kravitz in gold

Celebrity accused of sexual abuse loses his bid to gag the media

A CELEBRITY has lost a High Court bid to block reporting of his name and sex abuse claims.

The star made the ‘unprecedented’ argument he would kill himself if allegations went public.

It is stated the man, named only as PPT, ‘abused his status’ to conduct ‘inappropriate and exploitative sexual activities’ with ‘a large number’ of women and girls over a number of years.

He applied for an injunction against ITN and The Guardian newspaper, who said they had interviewed 100-plus people with knowledge of the alleged misconduct.

Mr Justice Nicklin ‘refused the injunction’ but ordered that the celebrity should remain anonymous until a later date. He said: ‘[The

By Chris Pollard

celebrity] has repeatedly said that he intends to take his own life if publication occurs.

‘Those statements must be taken seriously, particularly because of his previous behaviour. They do not, however, establish that suicide is inevitable or that treatment cannot reduce the risk.

‘This injunction would have been an exceptionally serious restriction upon freedom of expression. It would prevent [media outlets] from publishing results of investigations and prevent sources from communicating accounts.

‘The restriction might also have continued for an uncertain and potentially indefinite amount of time.’

Mr Justice Nicklin said the risk of the celebrity killing himself was ‘genuine, grave and closely connected to the court's decision'. However, he said NHS psychiatric services are enough to fulfil the state's obligation to protect the celebrity's life and did not extend to silencing media reports.

The judge added: 'The court is not legally required and has no basis to restrain the [media outlets'] publications.' He

'Used power to prey on women'

added his judgment did not 'determine whether the allegations were true'.

The celebrity's lawyer Sara Mansoori KC indicated he may appeal but said he has 'not been in a position to give us instructions'.

Mr Justice Nicklin, who gave until November 9 for an appeal to be lodged, said there were serious questions at stake about the courts' responsibilities to stop people from killing themselves under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Ms Mansoori had told the court her client had already tried to kill himself twice since learning of the allegations.

She accused the media outlets of being determined to publish ‘regardless of whether he dies or spends months in psychiatric detainment’.

Gavin Millar KC, for the media outlets, claimed the journalists' research suggested the celebrity had 'abused his power to prey on young women for sexual purposes over an extended period'.

He added: ‘Some of the allegations are sufficiently serious to justify a criminal investigation. Young women may remain at risk while this information remains unreported.’

A new world... billion times smaller than an atom

BRITISH scientists are on the verge of taking the first glimpse into the 'zeptoverse' - a mysterious world a billion times smaller than an atom.

After 42 years of searching, a breakthrough has raised hopes of discovering previously unknown particles which could help explain some of the biggest unanswered questions in physics, including how the universe began.

It came after researchers observed a one-in-10billion event at the Large

By Wiliam Hunter

Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. The Cambridge University-led team were using the particle accelerator to study ultra-rare beauty quarks - building blocks of matter produced when particles smash into each other.

They managed to capture the moment one of the quarks – which survive for only 1.5 trillions of a second – decayed to produce two even smaller particles called muons. This transformation could be the key to understanding the zep-toverse. It exists at the smallest scales ever explored by science, where objects are as tiny as a single zeptometre – or one trillionth of a billionth of a metre.

The LHC at the Cern laboratory near Geneva smashes particles together to break them and discover what they are made of. It can measure reality down to 100 zeptometres but scientists think there could be particles hiding at even smaller scales. These could help discover the composition of dark matter – which makes up 85 per cent of the cosmos but which has never been directly observed.

Dr Harry Cliff, who led the team at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, said: 'Physicists have been looking for this rare type of decay since 1984, which was before I was born.'

Particle physicist and broadcaster Professor Brian Cox called it ‘a beautiful example of how science advances’.

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'You have patiently destroyed me, day after day, for 30 years...' Bardot's bitter letter to husband cut out of her will

Sex symbol: Brigitte Bardot in the 1969 film Les Femmes, when she was 35

Dispute: Bardot with Bernard d'Ormale

By Neil Sears in London and Peter Allen in Paris

THE riddle of why screen legend Brigitte Bardot cut her husband out of her will has finally been solved.

Despite sharing 33 years with Bernard d'Ormale, 85, the French actress left him nothing when she died aged 91 last December, and he was even forced to leave their beloved St Tropez home.

Now a bitter letter appears to have revealed the reason why.

In it, Ms Bardot accused him of making her life a misery, writing: 'You have patiently destroyed me, day after day, for 30 years.'

Her devastating 2022 letter, leaked to Le Figaro newspaper, told Mr d'Ormale, now living in a council flat after his eviction by her charitable foundation: 'Bernard, it's a failure... I had a visceral need for a companion who would give me love and accompany me on my last path in life, who would be happy to sit and have a coffee with me.'

Film star-turned-animal rights campaigner Ms Bardot went on to write of her need for ‘someone who would take me for a drive, to help me clear

'I have reached the limit of my distress'

my head, who would be smiling – genuinely happy – with the life I offer him. SMILING!!!'

But, she went on: 'Today, I have reached the absolute limit of my distress. For 30 years, you have patiently destroyed me, day after day.

‘I am in desperate need of a shoulder to lean on, of support, of tenderness, of a presence – things you are simply incapable of giving me. Checkmate!’

The attack on Mr d'Ormale, who was Ms Bardot's fourth and longest-serving husband, has been uncovered amid an ongoing dispute over his treatment.

He spoke to the Daily Mail last month of his anger after many of her personal belongings were sold off at auction, with the proceeds going to her charity, the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, and her son, Nicolas Charrier, 66.

Mr d'Ormale had insisted he had never wanted an inheritance from his wife, saying: 'I didn't want people saying I took advantage of her.' With her estate left to her son and charity, he was turfed out of the villa he had shared with her, La Madrague, which she bought in 1958.

Mr d'Ormale's lawyer, Aurelie-Caroline Vieugue, said before the release of the letter: 'He was treated deplorably, worse than a criminal.

'You wonder why there's so much aggression towards a man who shared 33 years of his life with Madame Bardot. It really was a 33-year love story.'

The Brigitte Bardot Foundation has denied mistreating Mr d'Ormale, pointing out that the villa was donated to the charity in 1992.

It added that he rejected an offer to live in Ms Bardot's Paris flat, moving to a South of France council flat by choice.

Obesity is on the rise as one in ten four-year-olds now overweight

By Shaun Wooller and Zoe Hardy

OBESITY among children is on the rise, with one in ten pupils aged four and five now severely overweight.

The figures mark a record high outside of the Covid pandemic, when children were kept indoors.

In the 2020 school year the percentage of obese pupils shot up to 14.4 per cent compared to 9.9 per cent the year before.

It then fell back to 10.1 per cent the following year as restrictions were eased, and dropped to 9.2 per cent in 2022.

But the trend is now reversing, with the number of obese children back up to 9.6 per cent in 2023 and then 10.5 per cent in 2024.

For the 2025 school year the number of four to five-year-olds that are obese is at a record non-pandemic high of 10.7 per cent, according to figures from the

National Child Measurement Programme, which records the height and weight of 1.1 million state school children in England.

Among children in Year Six, aged 10-11, obesity levels rose to 22.8 per cent from 22.2 per cent in 2024/25. The data showed that girls in primary school were more likely to be a healthy weight and boys were more likely to be obese.

Obesity in England's most deprived regions was also more than double the most affluent areas, with experts saying this ‘deprivation gap’ had increased.

Katharine Jenner, of the Obesity Health Alliance, said: 'These concerning figures are the result of children and families being surrounded by unhealthy food that is heavily marketed, readily available and often cheaper than healthier alternatives.

‘We cannot keep expecting families to fight an uphill battle against a food environment that makes healthy choices so difficult.’

Health minister Dame Diana Johnson called the level of obesity among children in the most deprived areas ‘quite shocking’. Speaking to MPs on the Science and Technology Select Committee yesterday, Dame Diana said that children sitting and looking at screens is limiting exercise.

She added that young people are able to order fast food quickly via apps, and are being exposed to online influencers talking about the 'latest fast food craze' or reviewing chicken shops.

Earlier this year, Professor Simon Kenny, national clinical director for children and young people at NHS England, described childhood obesity as ‘one of the biggest public health challenges facing the country’.

The findings come after the World Health Organisation announced that obese children can be given weight-loss GLP-1 drugs such as Mounjaro and Wegovy – and undergo weight-loss surgery.

A government spokesman said: 'These figures highlight the scale of the childhood obesity crisis facing families across England.

‘From... extending free school meals to all children in households receiving Universal Credit, updating school food standards and restricting junk food advertising... this Government is taking every possible action to give every child the best start in life.' ■FOUR adverts by GLP-1 providers have been banned for promoting prescription-only weight-loss pills. The Advertising Standards Authority banned two adverts from Voy as well as adverts by Juniper and MedExpress.

It said the adverts appeared to promote prescription-only GLP-1 pills, which as are not allowed to be advertised, and did not make it clear they were promoting alternative food supplements.

Security chief claims vulnerable UK technology was ‘exploited’

BRITISH food firms were affected by the cyber-attack on supermarkets freezers across Europe, a security chief has said.

Dr Richard Horne, head of the National Cyber Security Centre, claimed certain systems in the UK had been ‘exploited’.

Security sources have reported only a small number of companies in the UK had been affected.

Dr Horne said: 'We don't know the full impact but we can see there are a couple of instances where vulnerable technology has been exploited, and we will be

By Tom Cotterill

working with those organisations to understand more.'

Langridge Organic, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler in west London, was targeted but stopped the attack from escalating due to quick-thinking staff.

Managing director Alex Pearce told the BBC that hackers had tried to set six units to defrost at 150C for more than four hours before staff intervened.

No produce was lost and he added: 'It must have been easy to get in [to the system] because the simple solution was to unplug ourselves from the internet.'

Tony Goodger, of the British group Association of Independent Meat Suppliers, claimed a few of his 300 members had ‘unexpectedly become collateral’ in the European hack with fridges heating up overnight.

But due to the way abattoirs are run, the units were empty.

Dr Horne added: 'In the coming months, we face a real prospect of an unprecedented rise in the number of cyber-incidents.'

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Spoiled: Frozen food is emptied into shopping trolleys to be thrown

FIRST there was melting ice-cream. Then the smell of rotting meat. And finally, the sight of desperate supermarket workers shovelling armfuls of spoiled food into black bin bags.

On Sunday October 11, French supermarkets were hit by an unprecedented cyber attack on refrigeration units across 700 stores. In the worst-affected shops, freezer temperatures reached 80C, equivalent to a typical sauna, and small fires broke out as plastic and cardboard packaging ignited.

Supermarket behemoth Cooperative U was among the worst hit, with about 5 per cent of its 2,000 stores affected. Other chains caught up in the attack included Carrefour, Intermarche, Monoprix and Netto. Food worth hundreds of millions of euros had to be discarded.

The attack made global headlines, but it was only the beginning.

For, just three weeks later, on Monday, a second cyber attack targeted refrigeration systems in about 100 stores across Europe, including in Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Chilled and frozen food worth tens of millions of euros was ruined: in some cases it had been stored as low as minus 27C before the units were heated to more than 50C.

EU agriculture and food commissioner Christophe Hansen described the second attack as a ‘deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply-chain’.

The attacks across Europe led to shortages in supermarkets and empty shelves. Thankfully, the attacks did not affect refrigeration at the larger processing or storage facilities used by supermarkets, meaning retail shelves can be fully restocked promptly.

However, the glaring shortages have done nothing to assuage concerns over supply chain readiness at the same time as European governments urge their citizens to stockpile for emergencies. Just last week Defence Secretary Wes Streeting told the British public to hoard enough supplies for 72 hours. Other countries have been even more draconian including Sweden whose authorities tell residents to be self-sufficient for up to a week.

But while supermarket shelves have for now returned to normal, it has since emerged that far from being a sophisticated hack along the lines of last week's multi-billion-pound cryptocurrency heist believed to have been orchestrated by North Korea, the recent attacks were made possible by 'basic security flaws' in computer software, according to the head of the French cyber security agency ANSSI, Vincent Strubel. Alarmingly, such flaws are thought to be widespread across Europe and Britain's ‘operational technology’: everyday items used by large businesses, including fridges and fire alarms, that are connected to the internet but are not prioritised for cyber-protection. AI has made exposing such security failings infinitely easier and quicker.

No group has claimed responsibility for the recent attacks and no ransom has been sought, which appears to rule out criminal gangs. That being so, could these hacks be anything other than an unprecedented act of state-sponsored ‘shadow warfare’?

In its annual ‘cyber security review’, published yesterday, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, warned: ‘By 2028, it is highly likely China, Russia and other nation states will routinely use AI cyber to achieve their geopolitical goals, with the UK facing an increase in scale and speed of sophisticated cyber attacks.’

This year alone, the NCSC has recorded at least 1,831 cyber-attacks on British companies, organisations or infrastructure, 80 of which were of ‘national significance’.

Yesterday it emerged that the UK's meat-processing industry is in the midst of one such attack and that teams from the NCSC had worked through the night to alert affected firms to the crisis.

But how much do we really know about the recent attacks? And, crucially, could this be the start of a prolonged cyber campaign against Western Europe, including Britain? Like so much modern technology, supermarket refrigeration units are connected to the internet so that they can be controlled and moni-

away at a store in Sweden after the units were heated to 50 degrees in a cyber attack

Supply-chain hit: Millions of euros' worth of food had to be dumped

So could Britain's food chain be hit by the cyber hackers targeting supermarket freezers all across Europe?

tored remotely, often by a single technician supervising multiple stores simultaneously.

Getting access may have been easy. Many of these systems are believed to have been secured under 'default credentials': preset passwords such as 'admin' or '1234' that are listed in instruction manuals that can be freely downloaded online.

‘It’s a preconfigured password,’ explains Daniel Des Santos, vice president of research at cyber security firm Forescout. ‘It’s not a matter of guessing: they’re publicly available.’

ONCE inside, the hackers were able put the units into 'defrost' mode, rapidly increasing the temperatures. The hackers appear to have locked the supermarkets out of their own systems, with the head of one affected store in southern Sweden revealing: 'We can't adjust the temperatures... Hot air is blowing into the freezers. Everything is ruined.'

Order was restored only once the refrigeration systems had been disconnected from the digital network and operated manually.

‘People traditionally think about laptops and smartphones being connected to the internet,’ Dos Santos explains. ‘But there are numerous other devices also connected, including refrigeration systems, door locks, fire alarms, security cameras – the list goes on. And ever since the war in Ukraine, we have noticed an increase in attacks against these sorts of devices.’

It's not difficult to see why refrigeration units were an appealing target. Empty supermarket shelves impact on the public directly and are a glaring sign of supply-chain vulnerability. But perhaps more importantly, these systems were low-hanging fruit: as explained, the security on the units was often exceptionally poor.

‘This attack was enabled by very poor security design, not high-end exploitation,’ James Lyne, CEO of leading cybersecurity organisation The SANS Institute told the

Daily Mail. 'It is frankly a little embarrassing.'

Why hadn't the passwords been changed? Likely, explains Dos Santos, because the systems were built decades ago, often without proper communication between the supermarket security team and the installer.

As well as entering a default password to gain access to some systems 'through the front door', the hackers are believed to have identified vulnerabilities in computer code to access other systems.

Until the start of this year, finding such vulnerabilities in software was ‘very manual work’, says Dos Santos. His team would spend ‘hours, days and weeks’ reading source code and finding flaws. Today, AI can do these tasks automatically.

As Britain's NCSC chief executive Richard Horne explained yesterday: 'Vulnerabilities that have been tolerated for far too long can now be discovered and exploited at a scale that was once unimaginable.' Britain's cyber chief concluded that Britain had done 'tech on the cheap' for too long and that the country is increasingly vulnerable to AI-enabled cyber warfare.

As for who precisely might have been responsible, this remains unknown – although there are several suspects.

Gerome Billois, of cybersecurity and tech company Wavestone, says the attacks appeared 'designed to convey the message to populations that they are not safe, to convey the impression that the government is falling apart, and ultimately to instil fear. Currently there are two international actors known for doing this sort of thing: Iran and Russia.'

But Ciaran Martin insists the mystery is only deepening: 'For the first time since I started heading up what became the NSCS 13 years ago, there's been a globally significant cybersecurity incident, and neither I nor anybody I know in the profession has a clue who's behind it.'

One theory Martin does raise is that the hack could be an experiment ahead of further planned attacks. And when it comes to broader tech infrastructure across the UK, he is particularly concerned about healthcare.

‘The area that worries me most and most deserves national prioritisation is healthcare. Cyber attacks won’t necessarily cause the power to fail in the middle of an operation, but if hospital administration can’t process data properly, then hospitals will be forced to turn away ambulances. You cancel operations. You cancel diagnostic appointments.’

Indeed, in the summer of 2024 Russian hackers attacked a number of British hospitals including London's King's College and Guy's and St Thomas' which led to the cancellation of operations and emergency patients being diverted to other healthcare centres.

ARTIN adds that the most dangerous threat to any country – including the UK

\- is not some sort of 'cyber spectacular', for example taking out the entire national grid, but what the former head of the US Cyber Defence Agency Jen Easterly called: 'everything, everywhere, all at once'.

Martin, who stepped down from NCSC in 2020, explains: 'Hundreds of low-level disruptive attacks that would seriously mess up the economy and society. Think what happened last year in the UK with Marks and Spencer and Jaguar Land Rover [JLR], and then multiply that by 100.'

The Russian hack on JLR in August last year was widely acknowledged to be the most financially damaging in British history, costing just under £2 billion and having a knock-on effect to 5,000 companies. The M&S hack in April last year led to empty shelves, a pause on online orders and the theft of customer data.

But the recent sabotage of European refrigeration systems was different – and in some ways more ominous. For unlike JLR and M&S, the refrigeration attacks were not for profit, but to sow chaos and disorder. The target was not public money, but the public itself.

Tomorrow it might not be the freezers but the train signals could fail, planes may lose direction in the sky, taps stop running, plug sockets lie dead, as a crisis happens everywhere, all at once.

U.S. MIDTERM ELECTIONS 2026

sional corruption investigations. Held in the middle of each four-year presidential administration, the midterms see all 435 seats in the House, and about a third of the 100 Senate seats up for grabs. This time it is 35 Senate seats. Three dozen governorships were also being decided.

Republicans held a majority of 218 to 214 in the House, with two vacancies and one independent. Democrats only need to flip three Republican seats to take control. They are considered less likely to secure control of the Senate.

Protest: Trump hotel in Las Vegas was targeted by lights

Jury retires to consider verdicts in Brand trial

By Rebecca Camber

Crime and Security Editor

RUSSELL BRAND showed no emotion yesterday as the jury at his rape and sexual assault trial was sent out to consider verdicts.

The 51-year-old comedian and actor stared straight ahead as he walked out of the court with his wife Laura after jurors in his month-long trial started deliberating seven charges.

He denies three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault. Mr Justice Bennathan told the jury of eight men and four women at Southwark Crown Court in London: 'I can only accept a verdict from all 12 of you that is a unanimous verdict.'

The actor's elderly father watched the proceedings from the public gallery.

Brand left court without commenting after jurors were sent home following just over an hour of deliberations.

The allegations include the rape of a woman in a hotel room after the 1999 Labour Party Conference.

The trial continues.

Insurance on Lloyds

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After five years, Alton Towers shuts the doors on David Walliams World

By Erin Deborah Waks

THE World of David Walliams at Alton Towers is to close its doors just five years after opening to huge fanfare.

The attraction, which opened in May 2021, is being permanently axed as part of Merlin Entertainments' annual review of its rides.

Inspired by Walliams' books for children, its flagship ride was Gangsta Granny, an £18million attraction, as well as two other rides based on his Gangsta Granny book: Flavio's Fabulous Fandango and Royal Carousel.

The news comes after the star, 55, was dropped by publisher Harper-Collins amid historical allegations of 'inappropriate behaviour towards women' – which he strongly denies.

Mr Walliams was dropped by

Why 1 in 10 teenagers WANT to be screen-free

Daily Mail Reporter

EVEN if your teenager's glued to their screen, taking it away from them may not be as harsh as it sounds.

For one in ten teenagers said they would feel relieved, relaxed and even calm without phones or tablets, according to a survey.

Almost two-thirds of 13 to 18-year-olds polled by YouGov for the Children's Society charity said they would feel bored without an electronic device. Around a fifth said they would feel anxious, lonely or stressed.

But 13 per cent of teenagers said they would feel calm, 11 per cent said they would be relaxed and 9 per cent said they would even feel relieved.

A separate survey asking adults how they thought teenagers would feel if they didn't have access to digital devices found a similar proportion agreed on boredom (60 per cent).

But more than half of adults felt young people would be stressed or anxious. Meanwhile, far fewer thought the impacts would be relief (5 per cent), calm (4 per cent) or feeling relaxed (3 per cent).

Children's Society chief executive Mark Russell said the findings 'really challenge some of our assumptions about teenage life'.

He also pointed to polling that found half of teenagers feel lonely or isolated.

Mr Russell called for the expansion of drop-in services where young people can spend time together and speak to trained professionals, adding: 'Too many teens are dealing with pressure and worries on their own.'

Woman who stabbed her 'stupid' sheepdog to death blames PTSD to avoid jail

By Andy Dolan

A WOMAN stabbed her ‘stupid’ dog to death after claiming it had triggered her post-traumatic stress and bipolar disorders.

Victoria Lodge said she could not cope with Celine, her Macedonian sheepdog, just three months after adopting her.

The 33-year-old then stabbed Celine in the abdomen with a carving knife before leaving her to lay suffering for hours.

But despite the ‘horrific act of violence’, Lodge, from Bournemouth, has avoided jail and was

'Appalling act of cruelty'

instead disqualified from keeping any animal indefinitely.

Bournemouth Crown Court heard there were ‘social media posts [where] she referred to the dog as “demon spawn”, “stupid” and ‘unmanageable’ and stated she hated Celine’.

The day before the attack, Lodge had contacted a charity helpline threatening to harm herself or the dog. She told emergency workers she suffered from PTSD and bipolar disorder which had been triggered by Celine's behaviour. Macedonian sheep-

Indefinite ban: Victoria Lodge and a Macedonian sheepdog

dogs, bred to protect flocks from bears and wolves in the Balkan mountains, are generally affectionate but are not considered good pets for inexperienced owners because they are independent and can be hard to train.

A paramedic offered to contact the RSPCA on her behalf, but when he called back on April 15 with an update, Lodge was 'hysterical and screaming', and told him she had stabbed Celine.

Paramedics attended Lodge's address along with the police and found the living room 'destroyed' with a trail of blood leading to her stricken dog, who was still breathing and had her eyes open.

Jade Philippou, prosecuting, told the court: 'The paramedics scooped up Celine and took her to the ambulance.

"They asked the defendant if she wished to join them to take the dog to the pet hospital. She said, "Get the f\*\*\* out of my house."

‘Despite the best efforts, Celine died. She was at the scene for some hours before she died, in severe distress... appropriate attempts were not made to seek assistance for the dog. [Lodge] spent time cleaning some of the blood from the property while the dog lay suffering.'

But Laura Deuxberry, defending, raised Lodge's mental health difficulties and said her social media posts were ‘clearly a cry for help’.

Lodge pleaded guilty to a charge of animal cruelty. In sentencing, Judge Jonathan Fuller said: 'In any other circumstances, without the explanation of your mental state at the time, this would be regarded as very cruel – even egregious – case of cruelty.'

As well as the ban, he handed Lodge a two-year community order with probation supervision.

But Elisa Allen, of animal charity Peta, said: 'Stabbing any living being is an appalling act of cruelty, and a lifetime ban is essential, but it cannot be the only response to such a horrific act of violence.'

The Brexit betrayal humiliation of PM

THE only thing less surprising than Andy Burnham's Brexit betrayal is the rush by the EU to poke its nose into our affairs.

As part of the price for the Prime Minister's ‘reset’ in relations, negotiators in Brussels are pressuring the Government to abandon plans for the increased deportation of European criminals.

Mr Burnham has already drawn up a string of humiliating concessions, including cheaper university fees and entry to the UK for up to 100,000 EU nationals per year under a ‘youth experience scheme’. Under a 200-page draft plan, it is also expected that British food exports will have to conform to standards set by Brussels.

No one needed a clairvoyant's services to see any of this coming. The Eurocrats were never going to allow Britain back into their precious club – even as an associate member – without inflicting some form of demeaning punishment for the Leave vote.

None of this seems to faze Mr Burnham, whose readiness to tug the forelock in Brussels' direction knows no bounds.

It speaks volumes about his arrogance that he is prepared to drag an unwilling nation back into Europe's clammy grasp, despite not even having a mandate to be in Downing Street.

His blueprint for Brussels shows utter contempt for the democratic will of the people who actually pay his wages. But the situation will get far worse if he succeeds in his ultimate goal of coercing Britain back into full membership of the EU.

The conditions being set down now by the Eurocrats are the thin end of the wedge. Their demands and diktats will get louder if this ludicrous charade continues.

And with a prime minister desperate to ingratiate himself with all-comers – and particularly anyone flashing an embossed business card from EU HQ – the end result could be disastrous.

Labour's jobs shame

EVEN Labour must realise that its ill-conceived policies are largely to blame for the youth unemployment figures.

New research shows that the cost of hiring 18 to 20-year-olds has increased at three times the rate of inflation since Labour returned to power less than two and a half years ago.

Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising that job vacancies have fallen below 700,000 for the first time since 2014 (excluding the Covid pandemic). Recent data shows there are around one million 16 to 24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training.

It is bad enough that the Government has allowed its blinkered socialist dogma to put so many businesses under unbearable pressure. But it is even more shameful that so many of the nation's young have been priced out of the jobs market through no fault of their own.

Minding the gap

THE credibility gap between the PM and Kemi Badenoch gets wider all the time.

Yesterday saw the Tory leader speaking persuasively about Britain's defence. Meanwhile, the Labour boss was effectively flagellating himself and offering tens of millions of pounds in taxpayers' money to foreign nations that could surely be put to better use at home.

Little wonder the gap in support for their respective parties is narrowing. Not only does the PM appear out of touch (and out of his depth), Mrs Badenoch increasingly looks like she should be the one running the country.

CAN this really be Oxford University? It's hard to believe when looking at the pictures of tutor Matt Rattley at the great institution.

Rattley gives lectures on biochemistry at St Hilda's college while sporting make-up, skimpy dresses and giant prosthetic breasts to rival the late, great Dolly Parton. Those who rock up expecting an Oxford don bedecked in an academic gown, or even just tweed, are in for something of a shock.

I've been raised to believe it is unkind to criticise anyone's appearance. But come on. Rattley is not so much inviting comment as insisting on it. If he identifies as a trans woman, he could easily wear more demure clothing and less obvious fake breasts. Instead he dresses like a pornographic pantomime dame, in a way guaranteed to make students feel deeply uncomfortable.

Indeed, three college graduates have written to the college with the concern that Rattley's behaviour ‘violates women's dignity’. They say it would be ‘reasonable for them to feel that it creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment’.

Received complaints: Matt Rattley teaches in fake breasts

Of course it does. In the right-on world we live in today, we are encouraged not to state the bleeding obvious for fear of hurting feelings. Never mind what your lecturer looks like just keep scribbling your notes and forget about it. Don't speak out lest you appear to be a bigot or Terf (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist).

The Oxford lecturer and why, though the progressive Left say they care about equality, women's rights come last by Clare Foges teenage girls being groomed in Rochdale and Rotherham because of sensitivities around race. Or those including British universities

But the elephant in the lecture hall is this: wearing exposed fake breasts is a fetish and fetishes have no place in public – let alone in a place of learning.

Galling

In 1989 Canadian-American sexologist Ray Blanchard coined the term ‘autogyne- philia’ for men who are aroused by presenting themselves as a sexualised woman. Is it a wild assumption to suggest that this may be driving Rattley’s behaviour?

One Oxford academic spoke about a session which took place during the summer heatwave. 'Rattley was sitting with his legs apart in a miniskirt, with his underwear visible.

‘It does feel like sexual harassment. You feel as though you’re being forced to participate in someone’s sexual fetish without being given a choice.’

The academic missed staff training sessions because she found being around Rattley distressing. 'The worst part was that other people were behaving as though he was dressed normally. It makes you doubt your sanity.'

Indeed. In the topsy-turvy world we live in, everything counts as legitimate self-expression. Be true to you. Express yourself!

What makes this all the more galling is that St Hilda's was founded as a refuge for female education. It was a women's-only college for more than a century, only becoming co-ed in 2008. What on earth would the founder – a suffragist, no less – have made of this affront to the dignity of female students?

The case is reminiscent of the Canadian trans woodwork teacher who taught high school pupils wearing size Z breasts, fake nipples prominently displayed. The parents quite rightly revolted and the teacher was suspended.

In contrast, Oxford University is refusing to act.

Instead of politely asking Rattley to cover up, and suspending him if he fails to comply, it has put out the usual mealy-mouthed statement. It is ‘committed to being an inclusive and welcoming place where all members of our community feel respected, valued and able to be themselves’.

Given Oxford's form for wokeness and weakness this is hardly surprising. In recent years its colleges have taken down a portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II ‘because of colonialism’; responded to Black Lives Matter with compulsory unconscious bias training; and published an

Inclusive Communication guide encouraging staff to avoid colloquial British phrases like ‘learn the ropes’ lest they exclude foreign students.

Ignored

The fact they are doing nothing about the patently absurd Rattley situation demonstrates something that has long been true of the so-called progressive left. They profess to care about equal rights for all, but somehow women's rights always seem to come last.

We see it in pro-Palestinian campaigners who have a blind spot about the sexual atrocities perpetrated on Israeli women on October 7. Or those who ignored young teenage girls being groomed in Rochdale and Rotherham because of sensitivities around race. Or those - including British universities - who happily allow gender-segregated dinners, marches, even fun runs in the name of religion. Yes, they'll shriek about sandwiches containing the patriarchal ingredient Gentleman's Relish, but not about women stuck eating their dinner behind a screen like something from medieval times.

And, of course, no one is marching for the truly oppressed women of Afghanistan either.

But it's the issue of trans rights which again and again exposes the hypocrisy in the left-wing progressive position. University campuses have been utterly craven in bowing to the trans mob, cancelling speakers and casting those who want to protect single-sex spaces as bigots. For

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SarahVine sarah.vine@dailymail.co.uk X @West

sarah.vine@dailymail.co.uk

@WestminsterWAG

Sorry, but the John Lewis festive ad is full of wokery and entitlement — though there is one thing I do like

WHAT on earth has happened to the once legendary advertising firm of Saatchi & Saatchi? Have they replaced their entire creative team with a subscription to ChatGPT?

That is surely the only possible explanation for the woke, nonsensical and frankly insulting drivel that is their latest ‘creation’, this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert.

Starring the BAFTA-winning actress Dame Kristin Scott Thomas and a wooden toy dog named Pickles (voiced by Paul Whitehouse, who for some inexplicable reason has decided to channel Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins) it tells the story of a middle-class grandmother's quest to find the perfect presents for her two grandchildren, Freddie and Maggie.

Set against the festive tagline ‘Don’t give up on giving,’ the story (according to the press release) ‘touches on a relatable modern truth: how the fear of not finding the perfect gift can overshadow the simple pleasure of giving something thoughtful this festive season’. ‘Fear’ is a strong word there, I can’t help feeling. After all, it’s only Christmas.

Anyway, instead of giving the grandkids cash, as she had initially intended (and which no doubt they would have much preferred), DKST (with the help of Pickles and John Lewis), turns her spare room into a ‘magical gran cave’, thus finally earning their undying affection as ‘the thoughtful surprise bridges the generational gap through a moment of pure joy’.

So far, so saccharine. But the devil is in the detail. There is something sour in this sachertorte, something fishy about this figgy pudding. It's laced with so much political correctness, entitlement and general wokery it's almost impossible to watch.

Where to start? Is it the spoilt, rude and overindulged children?

The useless, spineless, pathetic parents? The truly terrible mauling of one of the Rolling Stones' most iconic tracks by Sam Fender (I'm sure he's a perfectly nice lad, but if I were the Glimmer Twins, I would sue).

Is it the patronising portrayal of

THAT footage of the King and Queen in a Caribbean downpour made me laugh – especially his tantrum after his umbrella failed to materialise. Some people might have had a sense of humour failure but Camilla got the giggles. If being able to laugh at oneself and one another is the sign of a happy marriage, these two are as in love as they’ve ever been.

older people as over-privileged, out-of-touch ‘boomers’ who we are all supposed to roll our eyes at (until they get with the programme and do as they’re told, i.e. die and leave behind all their money)?

Patronising: Kristin Scott Thomas as the grandma with her grandchildren in the ad

ALL of the above and more. Not that DKST doesn't make a decent fist of it. It's not her fault the thing is so embarrassingly awful, that they've made her out to be such a cliche, with her extravagant gold jewellery and stylish

IN this week's podcast with my colleague Peter Hitchens (Alas Vine & Hitchens), we discussed the way the State and/or political zealots gain power by undermining the family.

Peter cited Pavlik Morozov, 13, who denounced his father to the Soviet state for hoarding grain in 1932 and was rewarded with a statue in Moscow. It should come as no surprise that our Government is engaged in a similar operation via the Conversion Practices Bill, knitwear and an enormous, well-appointed house that clearly Angela Rayner would tax to oblivion given half a chance.

I just hope they paid her enough so she can spend the next two months in the Bahamas, as far away from the ghastly thing as possible.

'Sorry, I think they need something to do,' says the children's mother, as DKST watches in horror while the children jump all over the furniture and tear up her living room with its stylish cushions and Christmas tree. What, did bad grandma fail to

which is at the Committee stage. Its effect would be that any parent or carer who tries to dissuade a ‘gender-questioning’ minor from, for example, taking hormone blockers, undergoing ‘gender affirming’ surgery or simply self-identifying as a different sex (or species) to their biological one, could face up to five years in jail.

In other words, weaponising vulnerable children against the people who love them. Straight out of the Communist Party playbook.

provide an iPad and an X-Box to keep them busy?

If that had been my mother and my children, she would almost certainly have smacked their thighs and suggested they go and play with some traffic, but that sort of thing is not really acceptable these days.

Instead, DKST dutifully goes off to find them something to entertain them, the aforementioned toy dog from her own childhood, which the little brats regard with ill-disguised contempt.

reception/A glass of wine in her hand,' warbles Fender breathily, for some reason pronouncing 'hand' as 'huaound' in a manner reminiscent of nails on a blackboard.

Meanwhile, the ghastly music builds. 'I saw her today at the

‘MOGGING’ is the word of the year, according to the Collins English Dictionary. Apparently it’s the act of outperforming or outshining someone, as in ‘Damian Hurley was mogging Brooklyn Beckham in that recent photo of them with Beckham’s wife Nicola Peltz’. I suppose that’s one way of putting it. The photo has since been deleted.

Perhaps ChatGPT forgot to mention to whichever moron thought ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ would be an appropriate festive ditty to accompany this drivel, that the track from the Rolling Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed is one of the band’s darkest songs.

It is all about disappointment and drugs and absolutely nothing to do with old ladies finding redemption in the eyes of their ungrateful grandchildren by spending too much money on shiny plastic gifts.

OTHER irritants: the 'magical' Tuk-Tuk ride that deposits DKST and the animated cod-cockney dog outside John Lewis, apparently in London.

Firstly, those things are a menace and a rip-off: poor Granny would have had to sell that nice house just to go half a mile.

Second, Sadiq Khan has now pedestrianised that bit of Oxford Street, so it's impractical anyway.

And third, if you're looking for iconic Christmas transport, why not either a big red London bus or a black cab, instead of some garish light-up tricycle? Or is that, you know, too British?

Speaking of which, some people have criticised the choice of a mixed-race family.

This I have no truck with whatsoever – not just because there is nothing even remotely offensive about the notion, but also because I very much hope that by next Christmas, we might have a very similar family – Kemi Badenoch's – in Downing Street itself.

Wishful thinking, perhaps – but then again, what is Christmas about if not miracles?

☐ IF terrorists can hack supermarket freezers and spoil millions of pounds of food, imagine what they could do if they managed to break into the AI-driven systems that now dominate our lives? Humanity managed for thousands of years without so-called smart tech. Have we become so dumb we can't see where this is heading?

Commodore Kemi stood on HMS Wellington and lined up her targets. Bridge to gunners: 'Commence fire!'

KEMI Badenoch held a windblown, slightly mad rally on the foredeck of HMS Wellington, a retired Grimsby class sloop moored on London's Embankment. The unusual venue was chosen, bellowed Commodore Kemi, because the 1934 ship was 'a reminder of when Britain took defence seriously'.

Standing in two-inch heels on a dais that undulated with the full-spate Thames, she fired a broadside at the Burnham government for its ‘complacent’ attitude to defence. She also lobbed some depth charges at the Left over its attitude to the teaching of history.

And then there was Labour's ocean-going wetness towards Caribbean demands for slavery reparations. Bridge to gunners: 'On target, commence, commence!'

The Conservative leader conceded that ‘you can look at me and tell my family hasn’t been here since the days of the Domesday Book – but we shouldn’t be ashamed of our history’. Too many schools were teaching that Britain had ‘a history of unique evil’. We were in fact ‘one of the better ones’ and we should be proud of our cultural inheritance. That included the Royal Navy’s historic role in abolishing slavery.

Nigel Farage's upper spars took a few Kemi cannonballs on account of his party's alleged fondness for the Kremlin. Mrs B thought it was time Mr Farage spoke up for Ukraine. Further volleys were shot at gender-identity politics and Angela Rayner's declaration that she would fill her emergency larder with sauvignon blanc.

‘So would I if I was in that party,’ quipped Mrs Badenoch.

Around her, like the crew from TV's Captain Pugwash, stood various supporters. Mark Francois MP was rooted to the deck as if by guy-ropes, his low centre of gravity helping him cope with the ship's movement. The assembled matelots nodded and hearheared, all swaying in time to the river's swell. The motion lent the scene a surreal quality. At any moment you expected them to break into a chorus from HMS Pinafore.

Ship-shape: Mrs Badenoch yesterday

Mrs Badenoch may not be the world's happiest sailor. After a while she had to ask for a glass of water. But she was full of violence. 'This Labour government is a student-union government. It is not serious.'

In a week when she will be denied PMQs (Mr Burnham being abroad), she was relishing the attention.

SHE whipped from her pocket a folded piece of paper which was printed with John Healey's letter when he quit as Defence Secretary – the one in which he demanded the sort of defence-spending levels on which he is now, as Chancellor, prevaricating. On the back of the paper was some neat handwriting which may have been Mrs Badenoch's shopping list.

The gallant Wellington can scarce have witnessed so much action since her days defending convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic, when she was armed with Hedgehog anti-submarine mortars. Nowadays she is used for wedding receptions and corporate dinners. Embarking, I had an elderly Tory gent ahead of me on the gangway. He had a trilby hat, covert coat and walking stick.

‘Mind your step, sir, it’s a moving platform,’ said a deckhand. Politics is a moving platform, too.

After biscuits and coffee on the quarter-deck we were shown to the foredeck where Tory activists were waving ‘Cut Welfare, Fund Defence’ placards. James Cartlidge, Shadow Defence Secretary, shouted ‘good morning, bow section!’ Some 80 hardy souls warbled back their greetings.

Mr Cartlidge added: 'She did sterling service before being decommissioned about 80 years ago.' It turned out that he was talking about the Wellington, not game Lady Goldie, 76, the former Scots Tory leader who was among the activists.

Some of Mrs Badenoch's words were lost to the chunter of a Chinook helicopter which came clattering overhead. A member of the great British public hurled incoherent abuse from the Embankment. Horatio Nelson never had to endure such distractions.

But Mrs Badenoch did not seem to mind and her friskiness suggested that she feels, at least for the time being, that the Conservative tide is rising.

Labour's conversion therapy bill branded unworkable

By Martin Beckford and Sophie Church

LABOUR'S bid to ban conversion therapy has been branded ‘unworkable’, while questions have been raised over why MPs supportive of the bill have been chosen to scrutinise it.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said the legislation – intended to protect gay and transgender people from attempts to change their sexuality or gender identity – would lead to parents being arrested for looking out for their children.

She said she had looked at the bill when she was Equalities Minister in the last Conservative government and said it was unnecessary, since laws are already in place to prevent abuse or discrimination against vulnerable people.

Her comments came after a major report co-written by Britain's former equalities watchdog Baroness Falkner found the new law could lead to children and parents being prosecuted, and would even make it illegal to tell

'Parents could be jailed'

someone who identifies as a cat that they are not, in fact, feline.

The Policy Exchange analysis said parents could be jailed for up to five years if they try to dissuade their children from transitioning.

Mrs Badenoch branded the legislation ‘a waste of time’, adding: ‘This is something that’s going to mean that parents start getting arrested for parenting their children. It is unworkable.’

Downing Street insisted the draft legislation ‘doesn’t touch regular parenting’.

Questions have been raised about the joint committee set up to ‘consider and report on’ the draft Conversion Practices Bill.

Its chairman is Labour MP Alex Barros-Curtis who, while Labour's executive director of legal affairs, was accused of overseeing investigations into party members who opposed gender ideology.

Another member is Olivia Bailey, who drafted the bill as a junior equalities minister and now chairs the Women and Equalities Committee. Former Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who said Mr Barros-Curtis spent a year investigating her over a single ‘like’ of a social media post, told the Daily Mail that Ms Bailey was ‘essentially marking her own homework’.

FROM PAGE 16

progressives, women are always at the bottom of the pile. And in case anyone should be tutting that this is nonsense, imagine this: a lecturer at an Oxford college turns up to work wearing blackface and a dreadlocked wig.

Can you imagine the outcry? Left-wing papers would be beside themselves. Students would be rioting. There would be letters to The Guardian signed by a hundred luvvies. But when the grotesque parody is not of a black person but of a woman, the lefties are curiously silent.

It's strange, because progressives normally have so much to say on appropriation. In recent years we have had celebrities pilloried for wearing Native American costumes with feathered head dresses, and complaints about straight actors getting a gay part in a film.

Unthinkable

Yet when a lecturer straps on a pair of plastic breasts, the young women in the lecture hall are meant to brush aside their discomfort and allow him to be himself. The double standards can be seen from space. Speaking of double standards, it would be unthinkable for a woman to wear such a grotesquely low cut top to work.

Why, then, is this to be celebrated as self-expression when the breasts are strapped to a lavishly bearded man?

No doubt Oxford academics are terrified of being accused of bigotry - or even sued for discrimination - if they ask Rattley to tone it down. But carrying on pretending this is normal or acceptable in the name of ‘inclusivity’ is not serving anybody, least of all the students to whom Oxford has a duty of care.

There is a clear difference between freedom of expression and abusing this right for your own gratification in public, and most right-thinking people can see what this is.

Jacko's daughter fights for £450m from his estate

MICHAEL Jackson's daughter has asked for \$600 million (£450 million) to be freed from his estate into a family trust.

In a court filing, Paris Jackson accused sole executor John Branca of having an ‘iron grip’, keeping her and her two brothers from their inheritance.

She argues there is no legitimate reason the money has not been transferred more than 17 years after their father, pictured below, died at 50.

The petition, filed last

The petition, filed last week in Los Angeles, claims the estate is worth at least \$1.5 billion thanks in part to the 2018 sale of its interest in EMI Music Publishing to Sony for \$287.5 million.

The trust states that Prince, 29,

By Joanna Crawley

Paris, 28, and Bigi, 24, receive a shares income from the age of 21. They then get portions of the money from the age of 30; more at 35, and the balance at 40.

The petition claims the siblings have received much smaller amounts.

‘This course of conduct and administration should not continue,’ it states.

The Michael Jackson Estate said a \$700 million tax dispute had to be settled first.

It added: 'The claim the executor has withheld payments is a fabrication.

'In fact, more than \$200 million has already been distributed for the benefit of Paris and the other beneficiaries.'

A hearing is on December 4.

Taking action: Paris Jackson

Jailed, the Lamborghini driver who killed her friend in 143mph crash

By Glen Keogh

Special Correspondent

A DRIVER who claimed she was asleep in the passenger seat when she killed her friend in a 143mph Lamborghini crash and then skipped sentencing has been jailed for ten years.

High speed: Batool and victim Shaan Hussain

Beautician Humaira Batool, 26, was behind the wheel of the rented supercar in the early hours of the morning when it crashed through a barrier in wet conditions.

The vehicle overturned and burst into flames with Mohammed Shaan Hussain, 20, trapped inside as motorists on the M62 near Ripponden, West Yorkshire, attempted to rescue him.

Judge Ray Singh said it was a ‘dreadful way for any human being to die’. Batool escaped the £220,000 Urus model with serious injuries when the blaze melted her seatbelt.

Batool, of Bradford, initially told investigators she had been asleep in the passenger seat when the Lamborghini crashed at about 4.20am on December 21, 2022.

But she changed her story when confronted with CCTV showing her getting into the driver's seat at traffic lights.

She then claimed the car had reached speeds of more than 140mph because Mr Hussain had been ‘reaching over’ and ‘tampering’ with the controls, causing it to ‘surge’ forward. However, a Lamborghini expert said this was impossible and the eye-watering speeds could only be reached with the driver’s ‘right foot’.

Batool was due to be sentenced at Leeds Crown Court on Monday but failed to turn up to the hearing, claiming a flare-up of endometriosis had prompted her to attend A&E. But prosecutor Christopher

Dunn said this was ‘clearly a ruse’ and she was trying to ‘avoid justice’. Judge Singh agreed and issued a warrant for her arrest. She was apprehended by police at Bradford Royal Infirmary and remanded in custody overnight.

Appearing at her rearranged sentencing hearing yesterday, Batool showed no emotion as she was jailed for ten years and disqualified from driving after her release for five years.

The judge said Batool, who was left with serious injuries including burns to around 10 per cent of her body and a shattered tibia, had repeatedly tried to pin the blame on Mr Hussain 'knowing he was unable to speak on his own behalf'.

Passing sentence, Judge Singh said: 'This was not a momentary lapse of concentration. It was a conscious decision to drive at extraordinary speed in conditions that made such driving especially dangerous.'

Ephraim

Hardcastle

REPORTS that Andrew might be invited to Christmas lunch at

Sandringham might be too much for William and Kate. And the possibility Harry and Meghan might also turn up won't exactly help their mood. The Fractured Four were persuaded by officials, desperate for a display of unity, to walk to church together on Christmas morning in 2018. It was an uncomfortable stunt which fooled no one. Will and Kate had to cancel plans with her family, ending the custom that they alternated spending the big day between the royals and the Middletons. Re-booting that tradition seems a good idea right now...

[ (○) ]

THE King, drenched by Sunday's heavy rain during Antigua's Independence Day parade, was distinctly unamused by his team's failure to pack umbrellas for the Caribbean hurricane season. A mole advises that there was a panicked search as the King got wetter and wetter – and grumpier and grumpier – before a spectator in the stands handed over a Tumella, a Dutch-made compact brolly designed to withstand the worst of storms. It won't happen again. A flunkey was dispatched to a local hardware store on Monday morning to purchase a supply of brollies.

【(○)】

FORMER BBC Radio 4 Today presenter Mishal Husain would have happily prolonged her 11 years at the BBC to present a multi-media revamp of From Our Own Correspondent. Mishal,

pictured, had already been beaten by Laura Kuenssberg to the Sunday morning BBC1 slot vacated by Andrew Marr. Inquiries were also made about Melvyn Bragg's retirement from In Our Time on Radio 4, but the octogenarian wasn't for budging. Melv subsequently retired but Mishal was by then happily berthed at Bloomberg. Isn't life grand!

[ (○) ]

PETER Sellers' co-star in A Shot In The Dark, Elke Sommer – who has died aged 85 – famously sued Zsa Zsa Gabor, winning £2million in 1993, for claiming that Sommer was on her uppers, living in 'the worst section of Los Angeles', and making ends meet by knitting and selling sweaters. The stars had fallen out years earlier when Sommer commented adversely on the size of Zsa Zsa's bottom and expressed sympathy for a horse she was mounting.

(○)

DESCRIBING his daily routine at 77, prog rock maestro Rick Wakeman says: 'We've got three rescue dogs. I get up at half-past five in the morning, two of them lie by the piano and I play a classical version of (How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window?. Every morning. They politely listen, then I let them out.' Any of Rick's neighbours spot three howling hounds in search of the RSPCA?

Andrew is first royal summoned as court witness since the 1800s

ANDREW Mountbatten-Windsor has been summoned to give evidence in a High Court fraud case against a Turkish businessman – the first royal to be called as such a witness since the 19th century.

Turkish millionaire Nebahat Isbilen, 81, claims that Selman Turk, her former adviser, misled her over a £750,000 payment made to the former prince in 2019.

Ahead of the trial, Mr Turk called for Mr Mountbatten-Windsor to be required to give evidence, and this week a summons was issued for him to appear at the High Court in mid December as a witness either in person or by video, the BBC reported.

He is, however, expected to be faced with a number of questions about his finances.

The last royal to be served a witness summons was the future King Edward VII in 1891 to give evidence on a slander accusation.

The judge previously said it was ‘unlikely

By Olivia Christie and Sam Greenhill

that a person in the position of Mr Mountbatten-Windsor would wish voluntarily' to provide evidence in the case.

According to claims in her long-running High Court case, Mrs Isbilen alleges Mr Turk stole millions from her.

The case involved Mr Turk arranging pay-

'Unlikely he would take part voluntarily'

ments of £350,000 to Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, £225,000 to Sarah Ferguson, £25,000 to Princess Eugenie and a £750,000 ‘gift’ for Princess Beatrice’s 2020 wedding.

There was no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the Yorks, and they reached an agreement with Mrs Isbilen in 2023 to repay her an undisclosed amount. Mrs Isbilen alleges that Mr Turk misled her over the payments made to the then-duke and his family in 2019 and the banker siphoned off her funds when she fled Turkey to live in the UK. Disclosures obtained by Mrs Isbilen's lawyers are alleged to show that substantial sums from her went to the former Duke of York's household.

Mr Turk denies the allegations. His lawyers believe Mr Mountbatten-Windsor can help verify his version of events, and applied to be allowed to call him – even if he would be reluctant to get involved.

In a judgment on October 23, Mr Justice Johnson gave Mr Turk permission to seek to call evidence from the former duke.

The judge said: 'Given the seriousness of the allegations, both on their own terms and in light of their wider impact, fairness requires that Mr Turk should be afforded an opportunity of putting forward his own case, using the evidence he considers relevant and material.'

He said this would give Mr Turk permission to seek evidence from Mr Mountbatten-Windsor.

Filipino police find child abuse images at flat where Thomas Markle lived

By Chris Pollard

CHILD abuse images have been found at Thomas Markle's apartment, Filipino police said last night.

Detectives said they had found ‘explicit content’ – including footage of ‘male and female minors’ – on digital devices which allegedly belonged to the Duchess of Sussex’s father.

Police were granted a warrant on Thursday to search material found in four storage boxes at the 82-year-old's flat in the city of Cebu.

Probe: Detectives trawl through the seized devices

Officers spent the weekend looking through the devices, which included nine mobile phones, three SD cards, five hard drives, a camera and another non-digital object.

Last night Major General Wilson Asueta, of the Philippine National Police, said: 'We were able to find that there are files consisting of CSEAM [Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material].

‘This will be subjected further to analysis. These are videos of a male and female minors, others who are not minors doing sexual activities and of course, explicit materials.

‘We are conducting ongoing digital forensics analysis and our field investigators are also doing their best conducting investigations... to validate the information that was provided to us. The investigation is going in the right direction.’

He said that none of the children in the videos appeared to be from the Philippines but said they looked ‘Asian [or] Caucasian’.

Police were handed the cache of potential evidence by Markle's son Thomas Jr, 60, who lives in the Philippines. Meghan's half-

'Subjected to analysis'

brother claimed he had found 'hundreds, if not thousands' of child abuse pictures and videos – including an image that appeared to show his father having sex with an underage girl.

Markle has denied any wrong-doing, admitting he paid for sex in the Philippines but insisting it was only with adult prostitutes.

He has described the allegations against him as ‘sick lies’ and suggested he was ‘set up’.

Markle moved from Mexico to the Philippines in January last year before relocating to the US in May following the amputation of his lower leg. On Friday, he was reportedly moved into a care home for dementia patients in Florida.

Experts believe it is unlikely that someone with advanced dementia could be extradited.

Meanwhile, Mexican authorities confirmed they had raided a storage unit previously rented by Markle in Rosarito after the Mail discovered a stash of indecent

Allegations: Meghan and her estranged father

images of children there. The FBI is also thought to be investigating after Scotland Yard finally shared a letter containing allegations his late ex-wife Roslyn Loveless sent about him in January 2019.

The force has referred itself to the independent police watchdog over its failure to act on the letter, despite sharing a copy with Meghan and Prince Harry.

The letter reportedly said that he had moved to Asia because '12-year-olds are legal there'.

Police have also reportedly advised Meghan not to speak publicly about the claims. She previously said she was ‘deeply distressed’ by the allegations.

A source told The Sun last night that Philippines police ‘are still poring over everything but serious images of child abuse have been found... so formal charges are very close.’

Co-pilot: Nathalia Filgueiras

Florida jet's tail found four miles from crash

By Natasha Anderson

THE tail of the Learjet that nosedived into a Florida street has been recovered miles from the crash site.

The business jet crashed at near-supersonic speed just six miles from President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, near West Palm Beach, killing all nine onboard.

It hit the ground with enough force to blow a crater into the tarmac and then burst into flames at 1pm local time on Sunday.

Investigators have now found three fragments of the tail scattered up to 3.8 miles from the crater, Tom Chapman of the National Transportation Safety Board said. As the parts were 'quite some distance' from the site, investigators determined they fell off before impact, either causing the crash or breaking off during the descent.

Tech tycoon Adam Robinson, 45, and his wife Helen Sharp, 40, were aboard the jet with their children, Emma, four, and Charlie, two, as well as a pair of friends and a nanny.

Flying the plane were Jeff Gregory and co-pilot Nathalia Filgueiras, whose terrified final words were immortalised in the plane's mayday call.

Now Ofcom calls for BBC cuts clarity

OFCOM has written to the BBC demanding more transparency about the £200million in cuts the corporation has made so far.

The BBC has pledged to save £500million by 2028, announcing a range of job cuts and channel closures as a result.

But the regulator yesterday accused BBC bosses of drip-feeding information and not painting a ‘clear picture’ about the measures’ impacts.

In an open letter, Ofcom officials wrote: 'We recognise the financial pressures facing the BBC and the need to make difficult choices. However, the measures have so far been communicated through a series of separate announcements.

'Taken individually, these do not provide a clear picture of the cumulative effect.'

Last month, the BBC announced it would close BBC Scotland, BBC Three and Radio 4 Extra and axe at least 100 jobs.

Daily Mail, Wednesday, November 4, 2026 Lord Moyne 1930-2026 Page 21 Guinness heir who had a secret family with an Oldham butcher's daughter and liked to greet his Mitford aunt with a Nazi salute

A S A small boy Jonathan Guinness liked to greet his aunt Jessica Mitford with a Hitler salute.

Since it was wartime and his stepfather was Britain's fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, this was a uniquely provocative thing to do to an aunt who was famous for being a Communist.

Decades later as a would-be Tory MP, who would also become the 3rd Lord Moyne, he was no less outrageous by suggesting razor blades should be left in the prison cells of convicted murderers to enable them to 'do the decent thing' and save the hangman his trouble. For years afterwards Guinness, who has died aged 96, would claim he was misquoted and that by 'decent' he merely meant prisoners should be encouraged to have a daily shave.

As an explanation it was far from convincing, not least because Guinness revelled in his reputation for robust Right-wing views on everything from immigration to calling for the return of the death penalty, offering to personally carry out executions himself 'if it was my duty to do so'.

Beheading, he declared, was his preferred method of capital punishment, though graciously he suggested death-row prisoners could be anaesthetised with pills first.

Flamboyance in his public life was matched by a loucheness in his private affairs and a raffish charm that made him fascinating to women. For years he divided his time years and remained just that until a newspaper revealed the existence of one of their children. But two more were still to be uncovered.

Guinness decided to make the revelation. 'A controlled explosion by myself was best,' he said of his decision to publish his lover's story, Shoe: An Odyssey Of A Sixties Survivor, in 1989.

The book was intended to head off tabloid headlines but only fuelled his notoriety as a crack-pot. It also made him seem a fool.

He had an earlier brush with literary criticism when he co-wrote, with his daughter Catherine, The House of Mitford, which detailed the lives of his mother and her sisters – Nancy, the acerbic novelist; Jessica, known as Decca, the aforementioned Communist; Hitler-loving Unity and Deborah, the duchess of Devonshire.

It had a mixed reception with reviewers accusing him of being too forgiving of Diana and Unity.

IS mother's detention in Holloway had enraged him so much

Family: Diana Mitford with her sons

Jonathan and Desmond. Right, Jonathan

Guinness with his daughter Daphne

between his second wife Suzanne and his long standing mistress Susan ‘Shoe’ Taylor, a former hippy, who settled in Cornwall. By his two wives and Taylor he had eight children, among them the eccentric fashion designer and socialite Daphne Guinness.

As a member of the Guinness brewing family, he had seemed assured of all the privileges birth into that fabulously wealthy dynasty guaranteed, yet he was plagued by bouts of misfortune and financial ruin that saw him declare bankruptcy in his 70s when he was forced to make ends meet by selling health bracelets.

No one would have predicted such an ignominious turn of events when he was born in 1930, the elder son of Bryan Guinness, a poet and writer, and the society beauty Diana Mitford, one of the six wildly spirited Mitford sisters.

The Guinresses' London home was at the heart of the Bright Young Things set and they entertained furiously. Evelyn Waugh, who dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to them and became Jonathan's godfather, was a frequent guest, as was John Betjeman, the future poet laureate and the aristocratic Sitwell siblings.

A second son, Desmond, was born in 1931, and the boys' childhood was spent at the family homes at Biddesden in Wiltshire and Knockmaroon, a vast mansion near Phoenix Park in Dublin.

But the parents' marriage fell apart when Diana became infatuated with Oswald Mosley, who was to become leader of the

by Richard Kay

SENIOR EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Blackshirts, the British Union of Fascists. Diana divorced Guinness and in 1936 married Mosley in the drawing room of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels's home in Berlin – with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour.

Four years later, when Jonathan was ten, his mother was interned along with other British fascists under emergency laws and sent to Holloway prison. She remained there until November 1943, her admiration for Hitler surviving the Second World War and the discovery of Nazi atrocities.

After his parents' divorce, Jonathan and his brother led a peripatetic existence shuttling between his father's home in Ireland and that of his mother and Mosley in Britain.

Guinness inherited his stepfather's ability to insult and offend. In 1977, while he was vice chairman of the Right-wing Monday Club, there was a deluge of indignation after he invited a former SS colonel to stay in his Kensington home shortly before the man was kicked out of the country by the Home Secretary.

Attempting to justify his invitation, Guinness thundered: 'The man is not a war criminal, nor was he ever accused of being one. He gave evidence at Nuremberg,' before adding: 'He joined the SS like people join the Guards, he wasn't even a Nazi.'

It subsequently emerged that Guinness's guest was Hitler's adjutant and close confidant during the war years.

he secretly hoped the Allies would lose the war. When they did not, he adjusted his views from being a fascist sympathiser to a believer in what he called ‘a Machiavellian form of Conservatism’.

Years later it was the memory of his mother's internment that was to trigger his polygamous liaison with Shoe Taylor. He met the striking blonde, an Oldham butcher's daughter, in 1978 when she turned up at a party at his house in Cadaques in Spain.

By then, Jonathan was on his second wife, Suzanne, having divorced Ingrid Wyndham after more than a decade of marriage and three children. She went on to marry his cousin, Tory politician Paul Channon. Their daughter Olivia died of a drugs overdose while a student at Oxford in 1986. Shoe, meanwhile, had worked at The Beatles' Apple offices before leaving Britian in the 1960s to see the world, inspired, it was said, by Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music. It had certainly been a voyage of discovery: she had ridden a hermaphrodite circus elephant in Lebanon, worked topless as 'the strongest woman in the world', spent time in prison for drugs offences and been gang-raped in Morocco, a trauma that caused her to become bulimic and lose all her teeth.

When they met, she was living in a stone hut in the foothills of the Pyrenees, eking out a living by selling lavender, performing as an acrobat and offering her services as a masseuse. Holloway prison, where she had served time for possession of cannabis, was the unlikely connection. 'How interesting,' Guinness told her, 'my mother was a political prisoner there during the war.'

Taylor had never heard of Mosley and Guinness liked her lack of interest in politics. They began a correspondence. Guinness, once a fierce critic of the permissive society, and the oddball Shoe soon began an affair. She bore him three children and taught him yoga. Eventually she moved to Cornwall as his mistress and he paid for her upkeep and that of their children, while remaining married to Suzanne.

The arrangement seemed acceptable to both women. 'I love them both,' he explained. 'My wife and Shoe are mature people and they accept the situation.'

Although it was reported at the time that Mrs Guinness, with whom he had two children, ‘tolerated’ the situation ‘despite her opposition to it’.

Shoe's affair with the Guinness heir was a society rumour for

After Eton and Oxford, Guinness worked for the Reuters news agency before training as a merchant banker. He was a director of Arthur Guinness from 1961 to 1988.

Politics, though, was his real passion, serving as a county councillor before twice standing unsuccessfully for parliament.

At the Lincoln by-election in 1973, where he made his remark about razors, he finished third. And in 1976, despite having Mrs Thatcher canvassing, he lost the Coventry North West by-election to Geoffrey Robinson, later paymaster general under Tony Blair.

In later years he became entangled in a succession of business scandals. He was the first to call for the dismissal of the family firm's chief, Ernest Saunders, later jailed over the takeover battle for Scottish whisky company Distillers, but also called for leniency in his sentence.

Guinness's name was linked to a murky deal involving a Swedish investment company and he was put on trial after £47 million disappeared from the firm's bank accounts. Guinness protested his innocence and was cleared of embezzlement charges in 2001.

Now bankrupt and banned from serving as a company director, he and Shoe sold magnetised wrist-bands for arthritis sufferers.

Guinness is survived by seven of his eight children after his son Jasper died of cancer in 2011. His eldest son Valentine, 67, succeeds as the 4th Lord Moyne.

A S OCCUPATIONAL hazards go, the worst most of us will experience is accidentally spilling coffee on a keyboard or a colleague nicking our sandwich from the office fridge.

Not so John Woodward, the brains, brawn and bravado behind controversial all-male strip act the UK Pleasure Boys.

John, 52, is retired from full-time stripping but before he hung up his Velcro trousers and packed away his policeman's truncheon, he had been taking his clothes off in front of raucous women for nearly 30 years.

'The majority just want to have fun, unwind and enjoy a drink with their mates,' he tells me when we meet for a chat. Sometimes, though, things get out of hand.

'I've come off stage with claw marks all over me,' he says. 'I've been bitten too, my nipples and... other areas.'

John, who has always done a full strip, will make many an eye water when he reveals: 'I had to go to get a tetanus injection once. This lady bit me down there because she thought it was a prosthetic and then it wouldn't stop bleeding.

“That wasn’t even the worst pain, though – that was when I was poked sharply in the belly button by a long fingernail. That really winded me.

'I've had nails jabbed in other places too, places they had no business being, but it's part of the job. You've got to try to create an exciting show and do it without getting injured or letting the audience go too far.'

It's accusations of ‘going too far’ that led to the UK Pleasure Boys hitting the headlines last month.

They had been booked to perform their Wet 'n' Wild show in the genteel market town of Banbury, Oxfordshire.

The gig happened at Banbury FC's clubhouse when, according to reports, things quickly went from 'Wet 'n' Wild' to 'Bacchanalian Bedlam'. Mobile phone footage began to circulate on social media with one horrified eyewitness describing the scenes as 'the closest thing to an orgy I've ever seen'.

Non-league Banbury FC (ironically nicknamed The Puritans) released a statement saying ‘part of the performance towards the end went beyond what we find acceptable at our venue. We apologise to anyone in attendance who was offended’.

OHN, in his role as director of the UK Pleasure Boys, was there on the night. Shortly after the event,

What the wild women of Banbury really did with my Pleasure Boys

By the man who's the brains and brawn behind the act which caused uproar in the genteel market town. So what do his wife and five daughters think?

Yes and no.

he announced that he was conduc own inquiry. Has that inquiry concluded? Does he agree that things did get out of hand?

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

‘I think the video clips I’ve seen have been edited to take things out of context completely,’ he says.

As part of the cowboy-themed act – a ticket for which costs in the region of £15 – the men leave the stage (naked) and go into the crowd.

John reveals that one particularly predatory woman had been chasing the boys around the room throughout the performance, seemingly determined to grab them in some way. There are no rules and touching is permitted, although he says 'we don't encourage lower-region touching during the show'.

However, at Banbury he says the prowling woman ‘reached up... and did something that was not acceptable while he was dancing on the table. Then there’s another bit of the show where one of our guys is hovering over somebody lying on the floor. It looks like they’re doing something they shouldn’t be, but if you check the footage closely you can see it’s not as bad as reported.’

That's not all. John goes on to describe something captured on camera that may have appalled some but is actually a regular occurrence, he says. Essentially, a woman uses a dancer's appendage as a 'microphone' and sings along to the song they're dancing to. 'Some people might read this and think "that's disgusting", but it's harmless fun.'

He is adamant about one thing, though: 'It wasn't an orgy – the rest of the crowd was just normal. It was all pretty standard stuff, you know.'

It seems that going to see a UK Pleasure Boys show is a truly interactive experience. Not only do they do the ‘Full Monty’ in that everything comes off, they also engage in risque behaviour with the audience. They do lap dances,

by Claudia Connell

lift women up and sit astride them while performing signature moves such as 'the helicopter'. (I'll leave it to you to work that one out.)

They also do naked meet-and-greets afterwards where the woman is allowed to have a picture taken and grab hold of anything that catches their eye.

‘Look, if you go to a circus you might want a picture with a clown where you’re honking his red nose,’ says John. ‘If you go to the zoo, you might get a picture with a parrot on your shoulder. In our case it’s not a red nose or a parrot. That’s OK as long as everyone is reasonable.’

Suffice to say, the men are not shrinking violets and neither are their fans, some of whom follow them around the country.

Described on their website as 'an all-out fantasy brought to life', let's be honest, the UK Pleasure Boys are not selling a refined and genteel night out.

John does not hold the stripper at the centre of the Banbury incident responsible but he has, for now, removed him from the act and placed him on non-stripping duty.

Reports circulated that the Banbury show was responsible for ending a relationship when a partner learned that his wife or girlfriend had been in the audience. John has no idea if it's true but does say: 'I've had messages from people asking us not to put out any video footage on social media because they don't want it known they were there.

'Look, guys can go off-script sometimes when the adrenaline is pumping and it's up to them to try to control the situation, but this is an 18+ show. It's called Wet 'n' Wild! If you buy a ticket, you know what you're going to get and I don't see why the club felt a need to issue an apology.'

The majority of the UK Pleasure Boys are single and John has no issue with them meeting up with audience members after the show if they want, 'as long as it's off the premises. They're free agents, their dad.'

I'm not

As for him, after every show he rushes home to Rubery, Birmingham, to Lisa, his NHS nurse wife of 30 years. She has never had any issue with John's job and is even happy to offer advice on dance routines and costumes. 'It was Lisa who pushed me towards stripping. We had a young family and needed the money, and she trusts me completely.'

It was while working as a crane driver on a scrapyard that the potential of stripping first caught John's eye. 'I was working 50 hours a week and never had any money. As well as doing the crane driving, I was on the door of a nightclub. This guy called Rebel Red used to appear. He was one of the original male strippers in the 1990s and I'd watch him perform for 350 women.

‘Back then, I was making around £120 a week as a

Photography: LEZLI + ROSE. Hair & make-up: COLLETTE RUDDY.

Styling: LIZ HEMMINGS

UK PLEASURE BOYS

WART 'N' WARED

Pictures: UK PLEASURE BOYS

Revealing: John Woodward, the boss of the UK Pleasure Boys. Above, the troupe in Banbury and, left, their flyer

we've got two guys with us now that are circus acrobats.

‘They don’t actually do the full strip, they just go down to their boxers.’

And if any older chaps reading this imagine they've left it too late for a career change, think again.

COMING TO A CITY

crane driver, but I realised I could earn the same in a single night as a stripper if I was good enough.'

Under the tutelage of another stripper called Scorpion, John learned the ropes. He started out solo performing under the name Adrenaline, doing a 007-inspired routine.

He can recall his first ever show at the Cadbury Club in Birmingham in 1998.

'I didn't even get to strip,' he says. 'There were 400 women there. I was introduced as the "new boy" and before I knew it 30 leapt up on stage and tore all my clothes off. I'd spent months rehearsing that routine and nobody got to see it.'

John – and Adrenaline – kept going and before long he was able to quit crane driving and become a full-time stripper.

‘It took me two years to be good. It really isn’t as easy as everyone thinks. In the beginning ‘a couple of more experienced guys called Rogue and Wild Thing had to teach me certain things,’ he says.

After building a name for himself, John also worked as a standby stripper for The British Chippendales, sometimes playing to 15,000-seat venues around Europe.

His five daughters, aged 32 to 20, have always known what their dad does for a living and, while they don't watch his performances, they have all helped out with the business in some way, from editing videos to designing stage sets and taking control of social media.

He recalls: ‘It was quite funny when they were little. They’d go to school and say “My daddy is a fireman”, then a week later they’d say “My daddy is a soldier”, followed by “My daddy is a policeman.” I mean, broadly speaking they weren’t wrong, but I think it got very confusing for the teachers.’

John was then hired to dance and put a crew together at a club in Birmingham. Although on a good night the men would earn £500, the venture didn't last and that's how the UK Pleasure Boys were formed in 2007.

While famous male strip acts such as Magic Mike (named after the Channing Tatum movie) do not take all their clothes off, John and his boys always have.

‘Acts like The Chippendales and Magic Mike are essentially dancers who happen to strip. We’re the other way around.’

There are 20 of them in total, all self-employed, and John holds open auditions every January.

Should anyone be tempted, what does it take to parade naked confidently in front of a group of wild women?

‘You need to look good,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be in shape, have some kind of rhythm and be able to learn a routine.

‘It also helps to have an additional talent. For example,

‘We need older guys,’ he says. ‘We’ve got some in their 40s but they look in their 20s, which isn’t any good when we play the social clubs. You get older women at those events and they want to look at someone closer to their age.’

D ESPITE most of the UK Pleasure Boys being fully waxed,

John insists it isn't compulsory and a hairy chest is permitted.

And, given that this is a totally nude show, all body parts need to fit the bill.

‘Yes, they must be a certain build, especially when we’re doing our XXL tour,’ insists John. ‘The women expect to get what they’ve been promised.

'I see what kind of a dancer a bloke is, let them do a bit of training... but if they don't measure up there are other non-performing jobs they can do - a topless host, maybe.'

The troupe change their routine every year. Next month, the lassos and Stetsons will be put away and the beach balls and rubber rings will come out, as they unveil their Beach Party Tour.

The strippers all have other jobs – there's an engineer, a few personal trainers and a gardener – because as John says: “The big money isn’t really there any more, but all it takes is for something to set it all off again.

'When The Full Monty came out, that gave the job a huge boost – although it did make every guy think he could be a stripper and the market got saturated with ones who were pretty rubbish. Then Magic Mike came along and that boosted it all over again. So you never know.'

In the meantime, the UK Pleasure Boys are putting the Banbury brouhaha behind them and, come January, will be cracking out the inflatables. Let's hope the vibe is more fun in the sun than Wild West.

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Coping mechanism!

Councillor uses an AirTag to catch thief stealing old stones from wall

Daily Mail Reporter

IT was the kind of trap any modern-day Sherlock Holmes would be proud of.

Parish councillor Matt Smith used latest technology to catch a culprit who had been stealing 300-year-old coping stones from an ancient wall.

He hid an Apple AirTag tracking device inside one of the valuable stones after about 30 of them started to disappear from the wall between the villages of Holmeswood and Rufford in Lancashire.

Recovered: Police tracked the haul of stolen coping stones to a Wigan address

When police said there were no CCTV leads or forensic opportunities, Mr Smith, 43, refused to accept the losses and devised his own plan to catch the culprit.

The father-of-two put an AirTag inside one of the already loose stones, hoping it would eventually be taken and reveal the thief's whereabouts.

The tracker led police to the Wigan home of Craig Barker, 41,

'Great to find the man responsible'

where a large quantity of stolen stonework was recovered.

He was given a suspended 12-month prison sentence last month at Wigan Magistrates' Court after admitting theft and handling stolen goods offences.

Mr Smith, from Holmes-

Theft: The ancient wall with missing stones in Lancashire. Right, Matt Smith with an Apple AirTag

wood, said: 'The audacity of him to steal from the community for his own personal gain. That's not what we stand for. It would have been nice for him to have been imprisoned for the impact he has had on the community. But getting the stones returned to where they belong was the main aim.'

The wall is believed to have

been built in about 1730 as part of the estate surrounding Grade II-listed Rufford New Hall.

Residents first noticed stones disappearing in May last year with further raids in June and October. After exploring options – including warning signs and CCTV – Mr Smith sought permission from landowner Green Belt to place an AirTag inside a loose stone.

The breakthrough came last October when Mr Smith woke to alerts on his phone showing the tracker had moved overnight.

Lancashire Police's South Rural Task Force traced the signal and recovered a substantial quantity of coping stones from Barker's property. Mr Smith claimed other stonework believed to have been stolen from sites across the country was also found and valued at as much as £40,000.

The stolen historic stones, worth up to £7,000, were later reinstalled with the help of contractors and farmers.

Mr Smith added: 'It was a great feeling to know we had found the man responsible for causing the community so much pain.

‘I’m glad we stood up and didn’t just tolerate it.’

'I'm worried how the cat might react'

Gen Z word that mogged competition

By Caitlin Leng

IT'S been named word of the year but you'd be forgiven for not knowing what it means.

Mogging - a Generation Z word meaning to outshine or dominate others - has been awarded the honour by the Collins English Dictionary.

Some trace the origins of the term back to the acronym Amog – meaning Alpha Male of the Group – which has been used by online forums associated with the ‘manosphere’.

Alex Beecroft, the Collins Dictionary's managing director, said ‘mogging’ was crowned winner after a consideration of ‘patterns of usage’ in words by lexicographers, as well as how ‘often words are used’.

It beat terms including ‘car-spreading’ referring to how carmakers increase the size of their vehicles and ‘Manchesterism’ which describes a political philosophy associated with Mancunian PM Andy Burnham.

Other popular terms included ‘friendslop’ – a type of independent video game played as a team – ‘fricy’, referring to foods and drinks which are fruity and spicy, and ‘bixie’ – a women’s haircut longer than a pixie but shorter than a bob.

The agonising fate of Egypt's tourist horses - and how a group of top equestrians is now riding to their rescue

A LATE September afternoon in Giza, Egypt. Rubbish and rubble are strewn across the dusty main road below the pyramids and the odd donkey or sorry-looking horse stands tethered with its head down.

A small truck trundles down the track, with an emaciated chestnut mare lying on its trailer, fastened by a rope. The driver halts outside a metal gate and, tipping the trailer on its side, deposits the broken body onto the dirt, its head still tied to the front of the cart.

The gates are the entry to Giza's only horse sanctuary and the animal is alive, just. Natasha Lee, a British national and former nurse, is volunteering there. She has returned to the sanctuary by chance after a day's work delivering veterinary care to horses around the pyramids.

‘I banged on the gates to get the grooms,’ Natasha told me. ‘Once they came out, we slackened the rope that was holding the horse as though it was being strangled and tried to get some water into it.’

Sadly, the mare died later, one of the many ill-treated equine victims of Egypt's tourism industry.

from Eleanor Harmsworth

Appalling suffering: Overworked horses with tourist carts in Giza and, right, the stricken mare the sanctuary tried to save

IN GIZA, EGYPT

working tourist horses which are ridden or pull carriages and carts suffer terribly. Owners do not feed them properly, tourists to

HILE some owners offering high-end riding holidays care lovingly for their horses, many

the pyramids yank them to and fro for Instagram photos and local boys race them through the desert or along concrete roads, often breaking their legs.

Once horses are too disfigured or weak to appeal to tourists, they are sold on to the poorest owners to carry out basic jobs, such as pulling rubbish carts, until they die of exhaustion.

Many owners dump horses in the desert or simply leave them half-dead in piles of rubbish.

It is common practice in the area to inject petrol into the horses' veins which can take up to 72 hours to kill them.

Just weeks on from the day that chestnut mare died after being dumped, a very different equestrian scene unfolded against the same backdrop. From October 22 to 24, the Longines Global Champions Tour (LGCT) brought leading riders and their world-class horses to compete beneath the pyramids for the first time.

The contrast was extreme: these elite sporting horses, which can sell for upwards of £1million, were competing yards from working animals suffering from exhaustion, untreated injuries and starvation. For horse lovers, the critical question was: what would this international celebration of horsemanship do for the working horses struggling just beyond its arena?

The answer came on October 26 when the LGCT, the Egyptian Equestrian Federation and other partner organisations including government bodies, Orascom Pyramids Entertainment (which manages the ancient site) and the equine charity Brooke announced a five-year welfare initiative.

Initially focused on approximately 700 horses, with a second phase intended to extend support to around 2,000, it promises better access to feed, water and veterinary treatment, alongside education and welfare monitoring.

‘Our agreement for the event in Cairo is for five years, which is why the initiative is also planned over five years,’ a spokesperson for LGCT said. ‘We want to get to the end of that period and be able to say that the area is completely different from when we arrived in the first year.'

With detailed funding and implementation arrangements still being developed, the test will be whether conditions improve permanently for working horses and whether global attention remains focused on their needs in between competitions in the Giza arena.

For those treating the suffering animals, the need is acute and immediate.

J OKE van der Post founded the Good Karma Horse Sanctuary in Giza after rehabilitating carriage horses in Mallorca, Spain.

During Covid she received word that vets in Egypt were not able to find medicine. 'I bought a plane ticket and took four suitcases of medical supplies over. That was my first visit and I ended up buying some horses to get them out of a bad situation,' she said.

From there she set up her own sanctuary which today is the only one with premises in Giza. There they encounter a daily flow of horses suffering from starvation, dehydration and exhaustion.

'Horses turn up at the gate with broken legs,' Joke said. 'Perhaps one leg has been broken previously and healed very badly, and another has been freshly broken.'

Most owners, the Dutch national says, expect these animals to return to work immediately after treatment, even if they are near death and the most compassionate solution is euthanasia.

According to Joke, when horses arrive in the Giza area to work, they usually last for around eight months to a year before dying of exhaustion.

To put that in context, a healthy horse will easily live to 30. 'The situation is especially horrible in tourist areas because cruelty has become normalised. It is not just neglect; it is normalised cruelty and that is different,' Joke said.

Dr Gemma Campling, the CEO and founder of Worldwide Vets, an organisation helping horses in the area, said there is a huge welfare problem because owners usually seek veterinary care too late:

Saviour: Joke van der Post, who founded the Good Karma Horse Sanctuary, comforts animal

‘There are good owners and that is important to know.

‘But there are also owners who are purely using horses for financial gain and who are not trying to maintain the animal in a healthy state.

‘They are just trying to make money. If a new horse is what is needed, they buy another one.’

Joke said many horses are abandoned on garbage heaps once they are no longer able to work: 'I saw one horse – they tied him to a carriage and dragged him there while he was still alive.'

As a way of addressing this issue, she offers a small fee – some £20, equivalent to a morning's takings – to owners who drop their dying horses at the Good Karma Horse Sanctuary to be euthanised rather than abandoning them.

'I cannot rescue every horse,' she said, ‘but I can at least give horses that cannot be rescued a peaceful death.’

Poverty helps explain this suffering but those treating the horses say it is only part of the story.

‘Before I went, I was always of the opinion that it was people from terribly poor backgrounds, who could not afford to eat themselves, who either did not feed their horses or could not feed them because there was no money,’ Natasha, who volunteers at the sanctuary, told me. ‘Unfortunately, what I learned while I was there was that some owners have multiple horses and simply work them into the ground.’

Joke distinguishes between poorer owners struggling to care for animals on which their livelihoods depend and wealthier stable owners who, she says, have the means to treat them better. Some keep prized Arabian horses in excellent condition alongside working animals afforded little care. 'The workhorses are treated differently because they are just tools for making money,' she said.

For the poorest owners, the cycle can begin with buying an animal that is already sick because they cannot afford a healthy horse and working it until it dies.

At Good Karma Horse Sanctuary, the pressure rarely eases. Grooms are on site around the clock and the most urgent cases take precedence.

‘They are really in the eye of the storm and it is like working in A&E,’ said Natasha of her time volunteering there.

The emotional cost of working with animals locked in a cycle of abuse and overwork can take its toll. 'When you watch the suffering day in and day out, it is very easy to get angry,' explained Dr Campling.

Love at last: Worldwide Vets staff care for animals, and above, action from the Longines Global Champions Tour in Giza

Pictures: JESSICA RODRIGUES

For Joke, that anger erupted during a confrontation with a young man who, she said, was repeatedly beating a donkey.

She admitted punching him and chasing him down the street with a whip.

‘I know you should not fix violence with violence but at that moment I lost it,’ she said.

A video of the incident circulated online and Joke subsequently received death threats.

Later, after leaving Egypt to renew her visa, she was refused re-entry. She has been forced to direct the sanctuary from abroad while seeking to resolve her immigration status.

about welfare. If they want to grow their reputations and their organisations, they have to get involved in supporting welfare and improving the situation for horses that are working in Egypt,' Dr Campling said.

Equestrian photographer Jessica Rodrigues travelled to Egypt to take photos for the LGCT show in Giza. She said the show opened her eyes and those of many others to the reality of conditions for working horses in the country.

After Jessica posted about the subject on Instagram, Dr Campling got in touch with an offer to show her the Good Karma Horse Sanctuary. 'It broke my heart to see so much suffering in these animals' eyes,' she said following her visit. 'Some of them have been through terrible experiences and still carry the physical and emotional scars of what they have suffered.

F

OR the Global Champions Tour, the challenge is to turn international

attention into sustained support.

The ambition extends beyond treating sick horses. A spokesperson described plans to provide feed, replace unsuitable tack and educate owners, alongside measures to hold them accountable for their animals' condition. The details and timetable, however, are still being finalised.

The real test is whether these initiatives are implemented and those involved are actually held accountable. Nonetheless, thanks to the LGCT, there is at least momentum as well as hope.

‘I think the world has made it very clear that we really care

‘I also felt an enormous sense of gratitude towards all the people who care for them every day.

‘They give them medical care, safety, patience and, most importantly, affection that many of these animals have never experienced before.

‘It was very moving to see that, in the middle of such a difficult reality, there are places where these animals can finally be respected and loved,’ she added. ‘I think the Global Tour can represent a real opportunity.’

As the tourist season begins in Giza this month, many more horses are about to be subjected to the same fate as that tragic chestnut mare. Help can't come soon enough.

Husband ‘who let men rape wife had sedatives sent to late mother-in-law’s home’

A MAN who drugged and raped his wife had sedatives posted to his dead mother-in-law's home, a court heard yesterday.

By Richard Marsden

Co-defendant David Graves agreed to supply the drugs in return for videos, the jury was told. He offered to send an unknown substance to the address in January 2021, said prosecutor Louise Oakley.

'His mother-in-law had recently died and the house was empty,' she said. 'Does it get any worse than that?' The package did not arrive and the husband, who cannot be identified to protect his wife's anonymity, accused Graves of failing to send it.

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Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court heard the husband began abusing his wife in 2004 before involving other men from 2015.

The tablets eventually arrived in March 2021 but proved difficult to use, Ms Oakley said, as they were hard to crush and left a ‘bitter’ taste when mixed with wine.

She said Graves then suggested concealing them in her food.

Graves, 60, exchanged a huge volume of messages with the husband demanding fresh ‘material’ and referring to the victim as a ‘slut’.

Eight other men are on trial with Graves, who all deny a variety of sexual offences. In September, the woman's husband of 40 years admitted 62 charges including multiple rapes, jurors were told.

The trial heard the first stranger

'When did you last abuse her?'

to come to the house was defendant Robert Stewart, 70, in 2016. He left without doing anything because the wife ‘stirred’, Ms Oakley said.

But he provided tramadol sleeping pills for the husband to use, the prosecution said, which became a 'blueprint for future offending'.

Ms Oakley read out messages between the husband and numerous men at all hours. In one 2018 exchange, Graves asked, 'When did you last abuse her?' and he replied: 'Don't keep a diary, lol.'

Defendant Philip Wild allegedly visited at 3am in August 2023 and 'crept' upstairs to assault the wife – but she stirred and he left.

On trial with Graves are Jonathan Kirk, 43, a paramedic; Robert Stewart, 70, a retired DJ; Mohammed Sabir, 28, a recruitment consultant; youth football coach Alan Keelan, 42; dog walker Jordan Wallace, 31; taxi driver Philip Wild, 60; metal worker Richard Townsend, 38; and Daniel Rayner, 42. Stewart, Wild,

Drugs accused: David Graves

Conspiracy denial: Philip Wild

Sabir and Kirk, all of Stockport; Graves, of Ilkeston, Derbyshire, and Rayner, of Whitstable, Kent, deny charges including conspiracy to rape. Stewart, Graves and Rayner deny conspiracy to administer a substance 'with the intention of stupefying' and Sabir denies three rapes. Wallace, of Stockport, denies rape; and Keelan, from Manchester, denies two attempted rapes and assault by penetration.

Townsend, of Heywood, Greater Manchester, denies assault by penetration, while Kirk and Stewart both deny two rapes. Four other men have pleaded guilty to various sexual offences at earlier hearings. The trial continues.

Army apologises for death of soldier in tank tragedy

By Richard Marsden

THE head of the Army has apologised to the family of a soldier killed by a defective vehicle after accepting a formal reprimand for health and safety failings.

Private Jethro Watson-Pickering, 23, died of catastrophic head injuries while driving a Scimitar light tank in a training excise on Salisbury Plain five years ago.

The gun barrel of the vehicle collided with a tree sending it into a 'violent rotation' towards the soldier of the 1st Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment who had been driving with his head out of the tank in order to see.

An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive found there was ‘no safe system’ of driving the vehicle after earlier modifications. It also found risk assessments were not properly reviewed after similar incidents and that training was inadequate.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) accepted a Crown Censure over the tragedy. It is the highest sanction available against the MoD, which cannot be prosecuted for health and safety breaches.

The sanction was given yesterday in front of Pte Watson-Pickering's family including his mother, Moira – who received an apology from Chief of the General Staff, Sir Roly Walker. He said: 'We failed him and those who loved him.'

Sienna Miller splashes £9m on London family home

SIENNA Miller is not to be outdone by her fellow Hollywood star Zendaya, who has bought a home in Wimbledon for almost £9million, as The Mail on Sunday disclosed at the weekend.

I can reveal that Sienna has made her own property purchase in the capital, for a similar amount.

Land Registry documents confirm that the actress, 44, who can currently be seen battling billionaire on-screen husband Dominic West for an eye-watering divorce settlement in Sky's drama series War, has spent £9.3million on a house in Notting Hill, west London.

The sprawling property will provide a new family home for Sienna and her fiance, actor Oli Green, 29, inset, with whom she's been in a relationship since 2021.

The couple (right) have two children: a daughter, who will be three next month; and a boy born in April.

Neither of the children's names has been made

public. The actress also has a 14-year-old daughter, Marlowe, from her relationship with actor Tom Sturridge, 40.

Sienna first caught the public's attention in Layer Cake, the 2004 crime thriller starring Daniel Craig and Tom Hardy. But it was her relationship with Jude Law that propelled her into the headlines.

The pair became engaged and lived together in London's Primrose Hill before their romance spectacularly unravelled when Law admitted having an affair with his children's nanny.

They split in 2006, before briefly rekindling their relationship three years later.

Marlowe recently made her red-carpet debut alongside her mother at the London premiere of War.

But Sienna admitted she 'somewhat regrets' the moment, explaining that neither had

anticipated the attention it would attract.

think I'm going to be sending her away to a nunnery for the next four years till she can emerge as an actual adult,' she joked.

Why comic Jack's father refused to watch the Traitors

Kirsty's fired up by new mystery man

AS BRITAIN'S richest divorcee, Kirsty Bertarelli was never likely to lack suitors.

So, perhaps inevitably, the singer, who received a reported £350 million divorce settlement from Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli in 2021, hasn't had to wait long to find romance after splitting from Marc Citron in the summer.

Kirsty, 55, v co-wrote girl band All Saints' No 1 hit Black Coffee, is going out with a dashing silver fox, pictured right.

She made her social debut with the mystery man at a party in Boston, US, where he could be seen giving her a kiss, left.

Describing them as 'two peas in a pod', the privately educated former Miss UK tells me:

‘It’s very early days in the relationship so I'd prefer to keep his identity under wraps.'

What made Wills feel old?

HE and his wife are the youngest working roy-als, but Prince William is already feeling old.

William, 44, made the admission to Sally Lindsay, who played Shelley Unwin in Coronation Street, when he handed her an MBE

COMEDIAN Jack Whitehall's father Michael, a retired theatrical agent, refused to watch The Celebrity Traitors because his former client Richard E. Grant was a contestant.

He landed Grant his breakthrough role in 1987's Withnail and I, after fellow client Daniel Day-Lewis pulled out to accept in the summer. 'The Prince of Wales was lovely,' says Sally, 53. 'He knew who I was, and what I'd done. He asked me when I left Corrie. I said, "21 years ago." He replied, "Oh, God - I feel so old!" I joked, "YOU feel old!"

a job in the US. Grant later told him he wished to sign with an American agent.

‘I said, “Your files and your contracts will be outside the door of your house,”” Whitehall explains. ‘I got somebody to take them in a van and said, “Just leave the stuff on his doorstep.”’

Comedian Omid leaves HMRC less than impressed

COMEDIAN Omid Djalili has discovered that tax is no laughing matter.

He's lost a battle with the taxman after judges found it 'implausible' that he could not remember how he obtained film investment contracts he claimed were vital to fighting an HMRC bill. Djalili, 61, argued the documents could prove he was being taxed on income he was never entitled to receive from a controversial movie investment scheme. But judges refused his appeal after he missed the deadline by almost 14 months.

The Gladiator star blamed the lengthy delay partly on missing paperwork.

Blenheim duke has been in the wars – with own home

Sore: Duke of Marlborough

SARAH Ferguson's attendance wasn't the only subject on the lips of those at the memorial service for businessman Paddy McNally in London's Knightsbridge last week.

McNally's old friends were just as intrigued by the battered appearance of the Duke of Marlborough, whose ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, is named after the Battle of Blenheim. Known as Jamie Blandford in his hell-raising days, the duke's right arm was in a sling and his face was bruised and cut. He tells me: 'I tripped on some cobbles at Blenheim and fractured my shoulder.'

Brian Blessed's finest hour... which he doesn't remember

HE'S traded judo holds with Vladimir Putin, has swum naked across a Venezuelan river teeming with piranhas, and assures friends that, while on an Arctic expedition, he thumped a polar bear on the nose.

But Brian Blessed's finest hour came in the rather more serene surroundings of a Stratford-upon-Avon pub back in 1984 - according to actress Frances

■ WHEN Manchester City-supporting Oasis singer Liam Gallagher bought a £4million house in Gloucestershire from former Arsenal footballer Tony Adams, there was one thing to which he objected. Outside the front door stood a pair of

Barber. 'A creepy guy went too far with a certain actress,' recalls Frances, who was appearing in Hamlet alongside Blessed. 'Brian picked him up by his lapels, walked over the road and threw him in the river.'

Blessed, 90 last month, modestly says he's unable to remember this act of chivalry, leaving Frances to murmur nostalgically about ‘the old stock of manliness’.

cannons, just like those outside

Arsenal's Emirates Stadium.

‘Liam went, “They’ve got to go,”’

Adams says. ‘But Debbie

[Liam’s partner] said, “No,

they’re staying here.” I said,

“They’re not staying.” They

were coming with me.’

Ban for teacher who hurled racist jibes at Chinese pupils

By Claire Duffin

A SUPPLY teacher who told a black pupil that ‘when he was younger he wouldn’t be allowed in the classroom’ has been banned from the job.

Anton Van Der Watt, 66, also called two pupils of Chinese origin ‘Ching’ and ‘Chong’, and told the class to ‘shut up’ or he would ‘rip their vocal cords out and feed them to the lions’.

All in the space of his first day covering lessons at a high school in Cheshire, he is said to have threatened to punch pupils and make a register of children who ‘needed to be hit’, telling one:

‘Do you want to go home on crutches? I will break your leg.’

Van Der Watt was sent home after just three lessons on April 24 at Brine Leas school in Nantwich, after pupils reported him.

He has now been banned indefinitely after a Teaching Regulation Agency panel found him guilty of conduct ‘significantly short of the standards expected’.

It held that he failed to maintain appropriate boundaries and used threatening and discriminatory language. The tribunal heard he had worked as a supply

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teacher through agency Simply Education between January 2019 and April 24, 2025.