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Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, having shelved his Brexit Bill in the face of parliamentary opposition, persuaded the Commons to vote by 438 to 20 for a general election on 12 December. A one-clause Bill was given its third reading after an amendment put by Labour to change the date to 9 December was defeated by 315 to 295. That majority of 20 coincided with the voting power of 10 MPs to whom the Conservative whip had earlier that day been restored, including Alistair Burt, Ed Vaizey and Sir Nicholas Soames, but not Philip Hammond, Sir Oliver Letwin, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve or Kenneth Clarke. The government had failed the day before to secure an election through the provisions of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which required the support of two-thirds of MPs. Labour had come to countenance an election after the EU accepted the formal application for a delay to Brexit up to 31 January. There was fierce combat within the People’s Vote campaign, with Roland Rudd, its chairman, announcing that James McGrory, its campaign director, and Tom Baldwin, its head of communications, had been dismissed, only for him to be denounced by Alastair Campbell as ‘a disgrace to the cause’.
The bodies of 31 men and eight women all thought to be from Vietnam were found frozen to death in a lorry at Grays, Essex. A text in Vietnamese from one woman, aged 26, said: ‘I’m sorry Mum. My journey abroad hasn’t succeeded. Mum, I love you so much. I’m dying because I can’t breathe.’ A lorry driver was charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and people trafficking. The London Fire Brigade showed ‘serious shortcomings’ in its response to the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, when 72 people died; the condemnation came in a report by Sir Martin Moore-Bick after the first phase of the inquiry he chairs.
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