The Week 1510

What happened Keir Starmer presided over an investment summit in London on Monday (see page 40), at which he pledged to “rip up” the bureaucracy holding back new homes, data centres, wind farms, grid connections, train lines and other infrastructure projects. The PM said he would do everything in his power “to galvanise growth” and show that Britain was “open for business”. In the run-up to the summit, the port operator DP World had threatened to reconsider a £1bn investment pledge after Transport Secretary Louise Haigh lambasted its subsidiary P&O for its hiring practices. But the row was ironed out and ministers ended up hailing £63bn of investment commitments from businesses. For Labour, which marked 100 days in office on Saturday, the event was an opportunity to allay concerns about…

What happened Campaigning in the Tory leadership election stepped up this week, after Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick won the final round of MPs voting. With Tory members now being balloted to choose a winner (to be announced on 2 November), bookies had Badenoch as the favourite. This week, she described the contest as “existential” for the Tories. “If we get this wrong,” she warned, “there’s not going to be a party.” Jenrick, meanwhile, repeated his calls for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. The pair, both from the right of the party, had reached the final two after James Cleverly, who’d come top in the previous round, was knocked out. His allies denied claims that they’d tried to game the contest by urging Cleverly’s supporters to…

A 23-year-old Londoner who became the youngest woman to climb K2 in 2022, has become the youngest to scale all 13 of the world’s other highest peaks. Adriana Brownlee reached the summit of Shishapangma in Tibet on 9 October, making her only the second Briton to complete the feat. Aged eight, she had written in a primary school homework assignment that her dream was to climb “the highest mountain in the world… and be one of the youngest girls to do this”. The wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, which sank in 1915 after being trapped for ten months in Antarctic ice, has been revealed in astonishing 3D detail for the first time. The digital scan is made up of 25,000 high-resolution images that were captured by underwater robots…

Controversy of the week At the end of the month, Rachel Reeves will deliver her first Budget as Chancellor, said Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times. “She finds herself in a near-impossible position”, because “she has made a series of near-impossible promises”. When she was running for office, Reeves told voters that there would be no increases to income tax, national insurance or VAT – no tax rises for “working people” – but “also that there would be more money for public services”. She promised higher investment, but also to control borrowing and debt. “She promised to be generous, but also thrifty. To spend, but also to save.” And the public finances, as Reeves often points out, were in bad shape to start with, said George Parker in the FT.…

Forget puffer coats and parkas: this autumn, fashionable types are wrapping themselves up in bathrobes, The Guardian reports. Celebrities to have adopted the trend include Rihanna, Angelina Jolie and Isabelle Huppert, who recently wore a fluffy white robe on the red carpet, accessorised with dark glasses and diamonds. King Arthur has been included on a council’s LGBTQ+ history timeline because he “wore women’s clothes”. Denbighshire County Council featured the folkloric warrior king as part of a project celebrating “local stories of sexual orientation and gender identity”. According to myth, Arthur once disguised himself as a woman to sneak into a ball and get close to a love interest.…

Han Kang, the 53-year-old South Korean novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The award cited her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. This year’s Peace Prize went to Nihon Hidankyo, a group that represents the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Interns, after the Wall Street trading firm Jane Street advertised a summer job with a salary of $250,000pa. “We don’t expect you to have a background in finance or any other specific field,” says the ad, but “research experience is a plus”. Wallace and Gromit fans, with the release of a “teaser” for the first feature film starring the Claymation duo since 2008. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl – which features the villainous penguin…