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In an extraordinary wrangle between government departments, the Treasury accused Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, of ‘making things up’ by saying he had held talks with the Treasury about helping companies badly hit by soaring energy prices. With the price of wholesale gas having risen fourfold in a year, businesses expected to close factories. To stir the pot of government discord, some demanded that Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, should ‘knock heads together’, though he was on holiday in the mountains above Marbella at a villa belonging to Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park. There were signs that prime-ministerial favour rested upon Mr Kwarteng. The Queen, aged 95, used a walking stick when she attended Westminster Abbey to mark the centenary of the Royal British Legion.
There were a record 1.2 million job vacancies in September; the number of workers employed, at 29.2 million, exceeded the pre-Covid peak of 29.06 million. Maersk, the world’s biggest shipping line, diverted vessels from Felixstowe, where thousands of undelivered containers were blocking the docks because of the shortage of lorry drivers. At least 1,476 migrants in small boats crossed the Channel during the weekend of 8-10 October, the Home Office said, with 925 prevented by French police; in September 3,879 had crossed, and so far this year more than 18,000. Lord Frost, the Brexit minister, said in a speech in Lisbon: ‘The protocol is not working. It has completely lost consent in one community in Northern Ireland.’ The EU offered a reduction in bureaucracy. Police with batons were forced back by Hungarian fans during a match against England at Wembley. James Brokenshire, the Conservative politician, died aged 53 after a recurrence of lung cancer.
Delaying lockdown in March last year was ‘one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced’, said a joint report by the Commons science and technology committee and the health and social care committee.
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