Boris Johnson

ED MILIBAND is a “walking, talking cost-of-living crisis”, according to shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho.

The senior MP — who will tomorrow unveil Tory plans for cheaper utilities — vowed to get her Labour arch-rival SACKED as gas and electricity costs rose again this week on his watch.

4

4

4

Experts have warned that Red Ed, who promised to cut energy bills by up to £300 a year before the 2024 General Election, will only drive prices higher with his Net Zero obsession.

Already, £1billion has been spent this year switching off wind turbines when it got too blowy for the network to cope.

Other sources, such as gas-fired plants, then had to be paid to be used as a replacement. The shutdown has pushed household bills up by £15 a year.

In an interview with the Sun on Sunday, Ms Coutinho fumed: “Ed Miliband is a disaster.

“Every decision (he) has made in government is going to send people’s bills up.

“He promised people £300 off their bills, and so far they’re already £200 up. People are rightly furious.

“I don’t know what he’s on. He is a walking, talking cost-of-living crisis.

“I’m going to make it my mission in this parliament to get him sacked.”

She continues: “I think he can’t add up because if you look at what he’s doing, gas at the moment is about £55 a megawatt-hour.

“He said he’s willing to pay up to £117 for offshore wind this year, and then he talks about cutting people’s bills. You don’t need a calculator to see that is just total madness.”

The top Tory also slated Energy Secretary Mr Miliband for “signing up to 20-year contracts” for offshore wind, adding: “We’re going to be saddled with these incredibly high prices for decades.”

Ms Coutinho is the face of the Conservative Party’s scepticism over a move to Net Zero.

At their annual conference in Manchester tomorrow, she will outline proposals to cut bills by scrapping green levies.

She said: “The most important thing the country needs — and we’re unashamed about this — is lower energy bills.

“Our priority for energy policy going forward will be simple: Make electricity cheaper.

“It will be good for growth, it’s good for cost-of-living — something we know lots of families are still struggling with — and, most importantly, it will be good for the whole of the UK to have much cheaper energy bills.”

Levies funding environmental and social projects add around £140 to annual electricity bills and £50 to gas bills, says innovation agency Nesta.

It comes as the UK energy price cap rose again this week by two per cent, meaning the average household paying for gas and electricity by direct debit will see costs increase from £1,720 to £1,755 per year.

Ms Coutinho’s stance marks a much harder line on eco-policies as the Tories try to stave off Nigel Farage’s party.

Reform UK promised to scrap the Net Zero target and told wind and solar developers they will end green energy subsidies if they win power.

It has prompted Mr Miliband to liken the Tories to a “Reform tribute act”.

But Ms Coutinho said: “That’s absolute rubbish, If you look at Reform, they’ve got the economics of Jeremy Corbyn.”

She claimed there was a huge black hole in Reform’s spending plans, adding: “That simply isn’t going to work for a country where you’ve got interest rates high, inflation is high. We need to be bringing those things down. So we need to live within our means.”

Tories have pledged to scrap the restrictive Climate Change Act 2008 brought in by the last Labour government, and the target of Net Zero emissions by 2050 enshrined by Tory PM Theresa May in 2019.

Ms Coutinho said: “We’ve got new leadership now and both Kemi and I strongly feel that the biggest problem that this country faces is that we’ve got the highest industrial electricity prices in the world and the second highest domestic prices. Now that’s just not going to work for Britain.”

Tories would also abolish quango the Climate Change Committee, which advises the Government on Net Zero.

Ms Coutinho said: “For too long, energy policy has been in the hands of people who are unelected and unaccountable — and that’s just not right.”

And she has left the door open to fracking.

A ban was lifted by Liz Truss during her short tenure in Downing Street – but this was abandoned by her successor Rishi Sunak.

Ms Coutinho added: “We’re a small dense island and it can be very disruptive. So it shouldn’t be done to communities without their say so.”

The shadow cabinet member admitted people are frustrated the Tories have taken their time to come up with policies after their disastrous loss at last year’s General Election.

But she insisted: “At conference, you’ll see a lot more from us. This is the moment where we’ll start telling people all the results of our work, and be able to explain what our plan is.

“The difference between us and Labour and Reform is our plans are real, they’re fully funded, they can be delivered tomorrow.”

She promised the Tories will bring forward plans the public can trust, adding: “People have really lost faith in government to be able to do the things that they want it to do. So we need to rebuild that trust.”

4

One civil service whistleblower told ITV filmmakers he was “disgusted” by amount of profits some companies made

Details of how the Tories presided over one of the biggest government spending scandals of all time are to be revealed in a shocking new documentary.

Eye-watering waste running into many billions of pounds resulted from huge Covid contracts for mountains of personal protective equipment and medical tests.

One civil service whistleblower told ITV filmmakers: “I was disgusted at the amount of money that these companies were making. It was just ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching for them.”

Some companies with little or no track record in supplying PPE landed massive contracts, including many introduced by ministers and key government figures via the high-priority VIP lane.

One firm, linked to Baroness Michelle Mone, is being sued by the Department for Health for more than £120 million for allegedly supplying unusable gowns. But the documentary names other previously unknown corporate winners.

Instead of buying four months of PPE stock as planned, within months of lockdown the government stockpiled years’ worth – including enough goggles to last 15 years.

One million pallets of unwanted PPE ended up being incinerated in what Gavin Hayman, of the Open Contracting partnership, says represents “probably the biggest government misspending scandal in the UK of all time”.

As the UK’s expensive Covid-19 inquiry rumbles on largely unnoticed by the public, new ITV documentary Exposures asks how we went from having almost no PPE to having more than we could possibly use.

The Mirror has previously revealed how thousands of ­ventilators bought for £50,000 each during the pandemic were sold off for as little as £100 via online auctions last year.

We also exposed how the NHS flogged 6,000 unused Nightingale hospital beds it had bought for £13million for just £410,000 as they were not suitable for hospitals. When the country went into lockdown in March 2020, the UK’s hospitals were woefully lacking in supplies of PPE.

Boris Johnson set up a new procurement unit run by Matt Hancock ’s Department of Health, with many of its staff coming from Michael Gove ’s Cabinet Office. The government put out public appeals to help source PPE from new suppliers, and the normal tender and competition rules were suspended.

Under pressure to respond quickly, a secret VIP lane was also set up by civil servants to deal with credible offers coming via ministers, MPs or senior officials.

According to the documentary, this is when things started to go wrong. A whistleblower who was working in the department at the time was exasperated that companies with a background in supplying PPE were being sidelined in favour of VIPs.

The source tells the programme: “It was very frustrating because you’ve done a lot of the background work, taking the time to find out about the companies, see who their manufacturer was, so that we could check the manufacturer had the capability of producing as many items as they said, and then to find out none of your deals have gone through.

“The VIP lane was obviously the Premiership, and all the rest of the suppliers were in the second division.” Mr Gove and Mr Hancock say the VIP lane was created by officials to effectively prioritise significant offers, that ministers were not involved in decisions to award contracts and just forwarded promising leads to civil servants. They say their priority at the time was to “save lives and protect the NHS”.

The ITV film shows how two previously unnamed Covid-testing companies, Tanner Pharma and Nationwide Pathology, both made huge profits thanks to their contracts.

Nationwide made £40million over the pandemic, while Tanner was given testing contracts totalling £1.4bn after it contacted a Department of Health official.

Tanner went from a pre-pandemic loss off £678,000 to a cumulative profit over the pandemic of £193m. Its American owner, Banks Bourne, paid himself a £148m dividend, courtesy of the British taxpayer.

Another company called Innova appeared from nowhere in March 2020. It was set up by Charles Huang, who rain a private equity firm in California.

Innova got its contract after it reached out to Dominic Cummings, who was Boris Johnson’s advisor at the time. By the end of the pandemic, Innova had been paid over £5bn by the UK government despite having no track record in supplying medical goods.

By contrast, Arco is a leading UK supplier of PPE with over 50 years’ experience. It sent 750,000 PPE kits to Sierra Leone during the ebola epidemic. But when Covid arrived, nobody was returning their calls.

Arco chairman Thomas Martin tells Exposure: “We used the government portals, we used all of our existing contacts. There would be 50 or 60 attempts every day to break through, and we were coming up against the closed door. I couldn’t understand why anyone in charge would choose to ignore the expertise on tap.

“The safety industry was not mobilised.” In all, the UK spent around £15bn on PPE. The whistleblower adds: “We had so much, but we were still buying when we didn’t need any more. We weren’t able to warehouse it, and it was getting left at docks.”

By March 2022, the UK had 300 pieces of unused PPE for every person in the country. Companies that were hired to supply PPE were now being rewarded again to store it. Much of it ended up incinerated. The whistleblower concludes: “We were wasting so much money.”

Tanner Pharma said: “Tanner Pharma was selected to provide lateral flow tests because they were determined by UKHSA to have high specificity and sensitivity. We were not referred to the high-priority lane and delivered over 480m reliable, accurate testing kits.”

Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Michelle Mone and Nationwide Pathology all declined to comment.

* The Covid Contracts: Follow the Money is on Sunday night on ITV at 10.15pm.

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Threads.

Airport has eased the 100ml liquids restriction for hand luggage that has been enforced globally since 2006

As of today (19 September), Dublin Airport, the most frequented airport by UK passengers, has relaxed a key rule. The airport has announced that it is easing the 100ml liquids restriction for hand luggage, a rule that has been globally enforced since 2006.

This is significant news for travellers, with approximately 27,000 people flying between Great Britain and Dublin daily – making it the top destination from British airports. Passengers at Dublin Airport will no longer need to remove liquids, gels, or electronics from their hand luggage at security in either terminal.

The previous rule limiting liquids to 100ml or less is also being relaxed. Departing passengers are now allowed to carry up to 2 litres in their hand luggage, and liquids and gels no longer need to be packed into clear plastic bags.

This change is due to a multi-million-euro upgrade in scanning technology used to screen departing passengers and their hand luggage before they fly, reports the Liverpool Echo.

Around 30 new state-of-the-art “C3” scanners and body scanners have been installed in Dublin Airport’s two terminals. These new C3 scanners use technology similar to CT scanners in hospitals, generating 3D images of bags, which make it easier to detect what is inside.

Dublin Airport is one of the first airports in Europe to fully switch over to C3, providing the best threat detection technology available within the aviation industry.

Gary McLean, Managing Director of Dublin Airport said: “This is a very positive and welcome development for passengers and staff. The new C3 scanners are best in class in terms of security detection standards and they significantly enhance the passenger experience, permitting passengers to leave all liquids and laptops inside their cabin bags with the systems working like CT scanners in hospitals to generate 3D images of bags.

“Nevertheless, security times over the recent peak summer months, when we handled a record 11 million passengers, were both smooth and efficient, with 96% of passengers proceeding through security screening in under 20 minutes. This investment puts Dublin Airport on a par with the best airports in the world when it comes to having the best and most efficient scanning technology available.”

Last summer travellers preparing to depart from UK airports were advised to assume the 100ml liquids rule remained in force unless they had been informed otherwise by their airport, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander cautioned.

What’s changed?

• Liquids, gels and electronics can stay in your hand luggage when going through security.
• There is no limit on the number of liquids and gels that can be carried in your hand luggage.
• The previous 100ml maximum limit on liquids and gels no longer applies and items of up to 2 litres can be carried.
• Liquids and gels no longer need to be packed inside clear plastic bags.

What’s staying the same?

• Items such as belts, footwear which extends over the ankle, jackets, hoodies and oversized jumpers and cardigans must be removed and placed in the security tray.
• Passengers must continue to remove all items from their pockets, including keys, wallets and phones.

Edinburgh and Birmingham airports were amongst the first to permit travellers to retain liquids in their bags whilst passing through security, with each liquid container permitted up to two litres.

Large electrical items, such as tablets and laptops, can also stay in bags. The introduction of CT scanners, which generate more detailed images of what’s inside luggage, is the reason behind this.

The current airport security rules regarding liquids were put in place in 2006 after a thwarted terror plot to blow up planes flying from London to the US with homemade liquid bombs.

This led to the rule that liquids must be no more than 100ml and placed in clear plastic bags. One of the main causes of delays at airport security is travellers failing to comply with this rule.

In August 2019, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson set a deadline for most major airports to install new scanners by December 2022.

However, after the aviation industry was hit hard by coronavirus travel restrictions, then-Transport Secretary Mark Harper pushed back the deadline to June 1, 2024, in December 2022.

Several airports struggling to meet the deadline, largely due to supply chain delays, were granted extensions in April last year.

Two months later, the 100ml limit was reinstated at compliant airports due to concerns about how the machines were functioning.

Several airports, including Gatwick, London City, Luton, and Teesside, allow passengers to keep liquids in their bags, but only in containers of up to 100ml each.

Birmingham installed its new scanners last summer, but kept the 100ml liquids rule until regulatory approval was given. Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, said the vast majority of its passengers are using the new security lanes, and it is working with the Government to complete the rollout.

Passengers are advised to brace themselves for the 100ml rule to be in effect for their flight.

A ROW erupted over the Tories’ record in power at a lavish event for allies of Donald Trump.

Ex-PM Boris Johnson “robustly defended” his time at No 10 during a debate on right-wing politics.

Words were exchanged after champagne and canapes at Tuesday night’s do, also attended by former PM Liz Truss and ex-ministers.

Mr Johnson came out fighting after a forceful intervention from broadcaster Andrew Neil, who questioned why the Tories did not do more to curb migration and boost defence spending.

A witness at the Peninsula Hotel in Mayfair, central London, said: “At that point Boris robustly defended his government’s record.

“Boris argued that Brexit gives us powers to reduce immigration if we wish and said he did reduce it.

“He also said we shouldn’t bash the contribution migrants make to Britain.”

Last month Boris was seen sporting a new bearded look in photos shared on Instagram by wife Carrie.

The couple were seen holidaying on the Greek island of Euboea with children Wilfred, 5, Romy, 3, Frank, 2, and baby Poppy.

The heartwarming images of the family holiday were captioned: “Our favourite place GR.”

1

The tiny chocolate box village of Great Tew in Oxfordshire has just 156 residents and is served by one pub and a small cafe – but A-listers are moving in in their droves

Welcome to Britain’s Beverly Hills – where the hum of private jets fills the air and a single sausage roll will set you back £8.

The tiny chocolate box village of Great Tew in Oxfordshire has just 156 residents and is served by one pub and a small cafe. But in recent years, famous names have arrived in their droves, with everyone from the Beckhams and Simon Cowell to US chat show host Ellen DeGeneres calling it home.

And hundreds descended on the local church last month to watch the late tech billionaire Steve Jobs’ daughter Eve, 27, wed Olympic showjumper Harry Charles, 26. The newfound popularity of Great Tew – which has more thatched cottages per square mile than anywhere else in the country – has sent house prices skyrocketing, with a simple three-bed in the OX7 postcode now fetching at least £2.5million.

READ MORE: ‘Best’ UK theme park is wildly overlooked and tickets are available for just £14READ MORE: Travel fans urged to visit European country now – ‘before it becomes popular’

Villagers reckon celebrities are drawn to the peace and quiet, but fear the parish will buckle under the strain. One says: “We’re overrun. People come here to celebrity spot. We’ve gone from being a place virtually nobody’s heard of to one of the UK’s most sought after. It’s pretty unbelievable when you think about it.”

It hasn’t always been this way. In the 1970s, many of the cottages lay derelict. One historian described it as “one of the most depressing sites in the country” and coachloads of people would visit to get a glimpse of the abandoned village that time had forgotten.

But things changed in 2015, when exclusive private members’ club Soho Farmhouse pitched up on the outskirts. The venue hosted Meghan Markle’s hen do in 2018. The £2,500-a-year club, which offers everything from surfboard yoga sessions to a Japanese grill house serving seared fish salads, quickly became the go-to weekend escape for the well-to-do.

A year later, David Beckham, 50, and wife Victoria, 51, nabbed the neighbouring barn conversion, which boasts a pool, football pitch and outdoor kitchen, for £6.15m. They were quickly followed by Simon Cowell, 65, and his fiancée Lauren Silverman, 48, who, locals say, have got stuck into village life.

One resident reveals: “Simon rides an electric bicycle. He’s a creature of habit and rides around the village each day on his set route before picking up a latte and smoothie from Quince and Clover.”

A small coffee at that cafe-cum-delicatessen costs £4, while ice creams start at £6.50 and smoothies at £7.95. Eggs and avocado on toast is priced at £17.50, a salt-beef bap is £16.95, and a sausage roll – albeit one adorned with fennel and sunflower seeds – comes in at £8.

Prices at the Falkland Arms pub next door – the go-to watering hole for the Soho Farmhouse set – are more modest, with cocktails starting at £8.45. Many of the rich and famous arrive in helicopters and private jets, landing at nearby Enstone Airfield before being ferried to the pub in one of the club’s electric Porsches.

Ellen DeGeneres is another local – and the 43-acre pad she bought there is on the market for £22.5m. The US TV host, 67, and her wife Portia de Rossi, 52, paid £15m in 2019 and, according to the estate agent, have transformed the converted barn into “an enchanting and secluded rural retreat”. There is a gym and pool, and the potential to turn the helicopter hangar into a tennis or padel court.

There wasn’t, however, enough room for Portia’s beloved horses, so they moved nearby. Great Tew is smack bang in the middle of the so-called Cotswolds’ golden triangle, sandwiched between the affluent market towns of Chipping Norton and Burford. Former PM Boris Johnson, 61, and his wife Carrie, 37, live in the nearby village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell and 65-year-old Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm is a 15-minute drive away. And US Vice President JD Vance, 41, is reportedly spending his summer in a sprawling manor house a stone’s throw away.