The Week

A surviving fragment of an ancient forest in southeast London has been saved by the local community. The three-acre Gorne Wood in Brockley was once part of the Great North Wood that stretched for miles between the Thames and Croydon. It was made a public park 100 years ago, and used by Scouts, until it was sold in the 1980s. Lately, it had been mainly used by fly-tippers. Now, however, residents have raised more than £100,000 to acquire the site and restore the wood. A hundred years after hunting by fishermen drove their numbers down to as low as 500, grey seals are once again flourishing in British coastal waters. In a single colony on the Norfolk coast, nearly 4,000 pups were born in this winter’s breeding season, according to local…

What happened Rishi Sunak sought to draw a line under weeks of negative coverage on Sunday by sacking Nadhim Zahawi as chair of the Conservative Party. The PM acted after an inquiry by ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus found that Zahawi had repeatedly breached the ministerial code by failing to be transparent about his tax affairs. The inquiry had been launched six days earlier in response to media reports that Zahawi had reached a £4.8m settlement with HM Revenue & Customs last summer over unpaid taxes, which included a penalty of around £1m. Magnus criticised Zahawi for, among other things, failing to declare that he had been under investigation by HMRC from April 2021, and dismissing news reports last summer about him being under investigation as “smears”. At a Cabinet “away day”…

What happened Days after Germany, the US and other allies agreed to send tanks to Ukraine last week, Kyiv put in a plea for 200 advanced fighter jets, such as US-made F-16s. President Biden was quick to rule out the idea. The UK said it would not be sending any jets for now; France said that it might offer fighter jet pilot training, and that nothing was “excluded”. Ukraine said that it expects to receive up to 140 Western tanks in a “first wave” of deliveries, from as many as 12 countries. Germany is sending 14 of its Leopard 2 tanks; Poland has confirmed that it will send 74 tanks, including a further 14 Leopard 2s; other European countries, including Norway and the Netherlands, are expected to send smaller numbers. In response…

This week, the International Monetary Fund “consigned Britain to the economic doghouse”, said Chris Giles in the FT. It forecast that the UK would be the only major industrialised country to see its economy shrink in 2023, by 0.6%. Even Russia, fighting a war and besieged by sanctions, is expected to do better, growing by 0.3%. As ministers have pointed out, such predictions are often wrong, said The Times. But the IMF forecast is broadly in line with the Bank of England’s. And Britain has certainly “suffered a unique combination” of economic shocks in recent years. The energy crisis has hit us hard, given our reliance on gas. The “workforce is shrinking” due to ill health, early retirement and shortages of low-skilled workers. Trade has recovered slowly, “held back by…

The Associated Press (AP) news agency has apologised for suggesting that its journalists avoid terms such as “the French”. In a much-mocked tweet last week, AP’s stylebook said: “We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanising ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated.” In response, the French embassy in Washington tweeted that it would be renaming itself the “embassy of Frenchness”. AP later decided that its advice had been “inappropriate”. Just a third of people under the age of 26 in England and Wales identify as Christian, according to the latest data to be released from the 2021 census. The average age of Christians is now 51.…

Caffeine junkies, who learnt where to go for the biggest caffeine hits. According to a Which? analysis of coffee chains, Costa sells the strongest cappuccino, with a “massive” 325mg per cup: five times more than the Starbucks version, which trailed last with 66mg; Pret a Manger has the strongest espresso, with 180mg of caffeine per shot, six times more than the Starbucks one. The Treasury, with reports that a Moscow-born businessman who recently renounced his Russian citizenship was Britain’s biggest taxpayer last year. According to The Sunday Times, Alex Gerko, 43, contributed £487m to the public finances in the year to last April, equivalent to £55,639 per hour. The figures include various taxes including corporation and capital gains.…