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Sir Gavin Williamson resigned from the cabinet as minister without portfolio following publication of texts he had sent (annoyed at not being invited to the Queen’s funeral) to the chief whip Wendy Morton, full of swear words. ‘There is a price for everything.’ A former civil servant said that Sir Gavin had told him to slit his throat, which he denied. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, agreed with Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, £35 billion of tax cuts and £25 billion of tax rises, in time for the Office for Budget Responsibility to peruse the proposals before the Autumn Statement next Thursday. The Bank of England had raised interest rates by 0.75 percentage points to 3 per cent. The government came up with a scheme to import liquefied natural gas from America to get through the winter. Plans for a £250 million national flagship to promote Britain abroad, to succeed the royal yacht Britannia, were shelved. Downing Street said that talks were in their ‘final stages’ on an unspecified agreement with France over migrants crossing the Channel in small boats.
Nurses voted on strike action. Members of the Univ ersity and College Union decided to go on strike this month. The BBC was to blame for ‘significant editorial failings’ in reporting an anti-Semitic attack on Jewish students in Oxford Street on 29 November 2021, Ofcom found. Police made arrests when members of Just Stop Oil brought the M25 to a standstill three mornings running; on the third day two lorries crashed and a policeman was injured. The number of people testing positive for Covid was steady in England and Scotland at about one in 35, according to the Office for National Statistics. Sir David Butler, the psephologist, died aged 98.
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