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Brandon Lewis, the chairman of the Conservative party, demanded that Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, should apologise for saying, in an article defending the right of women in Britain to wear the burka or the niqab, that it was at the same time ‘absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes’. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘The language that Boris used has offended people.’ Jennie Formby, the general secretary of the Labour party, wrote to Dame Margaret Hodge saying that no further action would be taken against her. Dame Margaret was said to have called Jeremy Corbyn, the party leader, an ‘anti-Semite’. Dame Margaret denied that she had expressed regret, and her lawyers said she would ‘not apologise for her conduct and words, as she did nothing wrong’. The words ‘Posh scum’ were sprayed on windows at the Somerset home of Jacob Rees-Mogg MP while he was on a family holiday in New York. Ian Paisley, the MP for North Antrim, faced a formal petition of recall that would unseat him if 10 per cent of constituents signed it.
Police were said to have identified two people from video images as suspects in the nerve agent poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March; the question remained of whether Russia should be asked to extradite them, in the light of its refusal to send to Britain for trial the two men suspected of murdering Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. The BBC interviewed El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, two Londoners held in northern Syria accused of being members of Isil and murdering and torturing westerners; ‘What makes the British government want a British citizen to be tried in America?’ asked Elsheikh, who denied that the revocation of their British citizenship had been confirmed.
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