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Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he did not think Britain was in a crisis; he wanted it to move towards ‘a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy’ that was not addicted to cheap foreign labour. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Conservative party conference in Manchester that he had committed £500 million to renew job-support schemes, now that furlough and the £20 a week universal credit bonus had ended. Of the unemployed, he told Sky News: ‘We are throwing literally the kitchen sink at helping them.’ A group of people in the street shouted ‘Tory scum’ at Sir Iain Duncan Smith and hit him with a traffic cone; there were five arrests. Sir John Chilcot, who headed the inquiry into the invasion of Iraq in 2003, died aged 82.
About 200 servicemen and women from the army and RAF were detailed to drive tankers from depots to petrol stations, one in five of which in London and the south-east were dry, according to the Petrol Retailers Association. Only 214,000 new cars were sold in September, the lowest number for more than 20 years. Morrisons supermarket chain was won by the American company Clayton, Dubilier and Rice (advised by Sir Terry Leahy, the former head of Tesco), in a blind auction run by the Panel on Takeovers and Mergers. The BBC’s Panorama and the Guardian became very excited about 12 million documents leaked in the so-called Pandora Papers that, they said, revealed hidden wealth, tax avoidance and, in some cases, money laundering by some of the world’s rich and powerful. Lord Frost, the Brexit minister, said that Britain might invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol because the provision for cross-border trading was ‘not working and needs to change’.
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