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Dame Alison Rose resigned as the chief executive of the NatWest group, which owns Coutts bank. She had been the source of a BBC report that Nigel Farage’s account at Coutts had been closed because it no longer met the bank’s financial requirements. Dame Alison also apologised to Mr Farage for ‘deeply inappropriate’ comments in a Coutts dossier on him which showed his account had been closed because of his political views. Her resignation came only after No. 10 had expressed ‘significant concerns’ about her remaining as the board wanted. The volume of goods sold by Unilever fell by 2.5 per cent in the first half of the year, but sales measured by price grew by 9.4 per cent. A fire destroyed more than 40 businesses on an industrial estate at Baldock, Herts. Railway workers belonging to the RMT union called another day’s strike. Gatwick cancelled one in ten flights. Trevor Francis, the footballer, died aged 69. George Alagiah, the newsreader, died aged 67.
City centres should be made denser and betting shops turned into housing, Michael Gove, the Levelling Up Secretary, said. In response, Anthony Browne, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, said: ‘I will do everything I can to stop the government’s nonsense plans to impose mass housebuilding on Cambridge, where all major developments are now blocked by the Environment Agency because we have quite literally run out of water.’ Anjem Choudary, the Islamic radical, was charged with three terror-related offences including encouraging support for the Islamic Thinkers Society, which prosecutors say is Al-Muhajiroun, a proscribed organisation. Labour dropped its policy of making self-identification the criterion for changing gender. Police Scotland postponed a ban on its officers wearing beards.
Conservatives wondered if Rishi Sunak, the party leader, might soften the pursuit of net zero in the light of the part that Ultra Low Emission Zones played in thwarting Labour’s attempt to take Boris Johnson’s old seat at Uxbridge in a by-election.
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