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At the Labour party conference, cheerful in the hall but overshadowed by the war in Israel, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said that in government he would build 1.5 million homes and a host of ‘Labour new towns’. He wanted to spend £1.1 billion a year on higher overtime payments within NHS England to reduce waiting lists. A protestor poured glitter over him. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, also said Labour would ‘rebuild Britain’. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist,’ said Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Labour took Rutherglen and Hamilton West in a by-election that the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, called a ‘seismic night in Scotland’. Labour polled 17,845, to the Scottish National Party’s 8,399; the Conservative candidate lost his deposit. Labour doubled its Scottish seats to two. The swing to Labour was 20.4 per cent; the turnout was 37.2 per cent, against 66.5 per cent in the general election. Sir Keir said that the by-election campaigners ‘blew the doors off’, a mangled reference to a line from The Italian Job. Medway Council in Kent cancelled its Christmas lights to save money.
Metro Bank shares fell by 25 per cent in a day; it then said it had raised £325 million in new funding, as well as refinancing £600 million of debt. A man who went to Windsor Castle in 2021 with a crossbow to assassinate the Queen became the first person in Britain to be convicted of treason since 1981; Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, was sentenced to nine years in prison after treatment in a psychiatric hospital. One of Chail’s many exchanges with his chatbot girlfriend went: ‘I am an assassin.’ You are? ‘Yes.’
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