卫报 2022 11 08

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Nurses will be striking for their pay ???? and for the future of the health service

What is behind the decades????long media obsession with ‘spotting’ the fugitive peer?

Sam Wollaston meets the men trying to invent a real????life invisibility cloak

Rishi Sunak has sunk plans by Boris

Johnson’s administration to build a new royal yacht, sparking criticism

about the £2.5m of taxpayers’ money already spent on the “vanity project”.As Whitehall braced for cuts ahead

of Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement

in nine days’ time, the project – intended to promote post-Brexit

trade – was abandoned in favour of

The scheme, championed by John-son when he was prime minister , was

to cost up to £250m , with additional annual running costs of up to £30m .

The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, who had previously sup-

ported the idea and branded critics pipelines, adding that he thought it

was “right to prioritise at a time when

diffi cult spending decisions need to be made”.

Labour welcomed the news that

the government was scrapping

Johnson’s “taxpayer-funded vanity

project”.John Healey, the shadow defence

secretary, said: “At a time when

threats to this country are growing,

and the Conservatives’ economic mismanagement threatens future

prosperity, this money would have

been better spent on our nation’s

The vessel had been expected to be

constructed in the UK and had been planned to take to the water in or 2025, touring the world as a “????oat-

ing embassy”. Harland & Wolff , the shipbuilding

and marine engineering operator

based in Belfast, said it had been one of two ????nalists in the design procure-

John Wood, the company’s chief

executive, said the decision to scrap

the scheme was disappointing , but

added: “We understand the rationale

for doing so, considering the current

macro economic environment and

the ongoing situation in Ukraine.”

He said the ????agship would have “returned many multiples of her build cost to the UK economy over

many decades, acting as an interna-

tional demonstration of the creativity

and engineering talent the UK has to offer”.

However, the Commons defence

committee warned in 2021 that there

was “no evidence of the advantage

to the Royal Navy of acquiring the

national ????agship” and that the cost

would pile extra pressure on the

Sunak scraps Johnson plan for royal yacht in favour of navy vessel

 The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh leave the royal yacht Britannia for the last time in Portsmouth in ????????????????????????????????????????: ???????????????? ????????????????????????????????????/????????

“doomsters”, told MPs yesterday that

He said given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s

“reckless disregard of international

arrangements designed to keep

world order”, it was more important

to deliver “capabilities which safe-

guard our national infrastructure”.

Wallace con????irmed he had “directed the termination of the

national ????agship competition with

immediate effect”, in order to priori-tise the multi-role ocean surveillance

MROSS, Wallace said, will “protect sensitive defence infrastructure and

civil infrastructure” and “improve

our ability to detect threats to the sea-

Sunak’s spokes person said MROSS

would protect undersea cables and

Johnson the‘foot????soldier’ goes on hisown Sharmoffensive

’m here in a purely supportive, foot-soldier role.” Words no Tory prime minister ever wants to hear when they’re spoken by Boris Johnson. He has never knowingly done anything supportive for a colleague unless there’s an upside for him , let alone a deadly rival who only a few weeks ago refused a deal to allow the Convict back into Downing Street. So no wonder Rishi Sunak reconsidered his earlier decision not to travel to Cop27 when he heard that Boris had already secured an all-expenses paid trip to Egypt. Rish! just couldn’t take the risk that Johnson would ????nd some way to upstage him. As it turned out, though, Sunak would probably have been better off following his ????rst instincts and staying away. He’s already made clear where his priorities l ie and he isn’t much interested in climate change. The sooner the Maldives were under water the happier he’d be. No amount of Rish! turning up in Sharm el-Sheikh and getting all loved up about the environment was going to fool anyone. It was a bedraggled Johnson – he looked like he had just crawled out of bed – who was ????rst out of the blocks in the battle of the two PMs with an early morning Q&A session. Cop26 at Glasgow had been a brilliant success, he insisted. It had been the best Cop ever. All thanks to him. Me. Me. Me. Never change, Boris. Never change.Rish!, meanwhile, spent much of the day in an existential meltdown , still struggling to understand the primal urge that had driven him to come to Egypt. The con????ict was between the need to be seen and having nothing of value to do or say. Then again, Sunak wasn’t entirely alone. As the leaders’ speeches rolled on, the contradiction at the heart of Cop27 became ever more apparent. Climate change may be the most important issue on the global agenda, but most of the speakers were devoid of passion and emotion. Almost as if no one was really bothered. So no one was in a hurry to hear what Rish! had to say. He tried varying his tone to sound as if he really meant it, while giving the usual bare-minimum “something must be done ” climate change speech that he always gives. All he did was admit that the Tories had nearly bankrupted the UK so he wasn’t going to be able to contribute any more than the tiny sum already pledged. The applause was barely applause. Just a smatter of people waking up with a jolt when he had ????nished. To ????ll in time before making his keynote, three-minute speech, Rish! had squeezed in a ????reside chat about forests. To add insult to injury, having upheld Liz Truss’s ban on Kin g Charles coming to the conference, he got the King to record an introductory message. And he held a couple of bilateral meetings, with Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni; he sounded a great deal more animated about sending migrants back in punctured small boats than he ever had about ????oods in Pakistan. Sunak also reluctantly gave a short interview with the BBC, in which admitted he did ????nd Gavin Williamson’s texts abusive. But not so much that he was going to do anything about them. Heaven no! He hadn’t sacked him, because Rish! was a compassionate Conservative. And someone who had already been sacked from the cabinet twice clearly deserved yet another chance. That was also why he had reappointed Suella Braverman as home secretary six days after she was ????red. Will no one spare a thought for her?

Former PM Boris Johnson poses for a picture with Cop27 delegates