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Szu Ping Chan Economics Editor |
Devolution is coming, and it is arriving in the shape of a holiday tax.
Andy Burnham is handing England’s mayors the power to impose uncapped taxes on tourists, creating a new revenue stream to plug the holes in their budgets.
Overseas visitors may bear much of the cost, but British families and staycationers will also face hundreds of pounds in extra charges.
The trade-off is clear: more money for mayors could mean fewer jobs in hospitality.
Bosses warned the tax could undermine efforts to get young people into work, with almost one million 16 to 24-year-olds already not in education or training and 400,000 actively looking for work.
Hospitality has traditionally provided a first rung on the jobs ladder. “There will be a jobs bloodbath at a time when they’re trying to get young people into work,” the exasperated chief executive of one top hospitality firm tells me.
Local government finances are in crisis, with 35 councils relying on £1.5bn of emergency government support to balance their books.
Devolution may give mayors more power and the Prime Minister political cover to raise more money, but at what cost?
Read the full story ➤ |
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Tony Diver Political Editor |
SAS veterans are training Russians to fight in Ukraine, according to a leaked intelligence memo obtained by The Telegraph.
An assessment compiled for Five Eyes intelligence agencies found, with “strong confidence”, that Western military veterans had been recruited to train Russian citizens as well as “active duty military” staff.
The Telegraph has been shown a copy of a memo compiled for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service based on interviews with two former Australian special forces operatives and an active-duty reservist who say they were approached to become instructors at training camps in Bulgaria and Serbia that allegedly hosted Russian clients.
The memo says a combat camp run by Alfa-Metal, a military training company, in Mejdeni, northern Bulgaria, employs instructors from “a range of backgrounds” including the SAS, the Australian Commando Regiment, US police forces and the US navy Seals.
The Alfa-Metal centre offers special forces training for around €4,000 (£3,400) per head, targeting prospective members of private military companies, bodyguards and corporate security teams.
However, the memo says that since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, private training camps in Europe have continued to accept Russian citizens for training courses, including “advanced close quarters combat”.
The special forces veterans interviewed to collect intelligence on the camp said that current employees had told them that it continued to train Russian nationals as of 2025, three years after Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine.
Alfa-Metal told The Telegraph it had never employed SAS veterans and had no connection to British special forces.
This report is available only to subscribers.
Continue reading ➤
Burnham: I won’t cut welfare to fund defence ➤ |
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Allister Heath The Foreign Secretary is ignorant, deluded and in denial, guilty of erasing the memory of the victims of the Oct 7 pogrom Continue reading ➤
Camilla Tominey The triple lock is a sideshow, the real crisis is young people not working Continue reading ➤
Tim Stanley Burnham takes seat for the family photo, but his stand-up performance needs work Continue reading ➤ |
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Some grid-improvement schemes such as subsea cables have seen their projected budgets balloon by nearly 500 per cent. Against the backdrop of the £200bn upgrade under way across Britain’s power network, critics fear that the Government risks a fresh HS2-style fiasco, with millions of households and businesses left to pick up the tab. For subscribers only ➤ |
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The size and shape of a British passport, Apple’s new iPhone Duo can open up like a miniature book. It starts from £1,999, making it the US tech giant’s most expensive smartphone ever released. Britta O’Boyle was among those to get a first look at Apple HQ in California and shared her initial verdict. Continue reading ➤ |
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Rob Dove spent two years refurbishing the Chieftain that he served as a gunner in, writes Hamish de Bretton-Gordon. I stepped inside Chieftain Mk10, registration 05EB53, at Eden Camp Modern History Museum in North Yorkshire with him. Dove put it perfectly: 05EB53 is not just a tank to him. It is part of his story. Continue reading ➤ |
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Sarah Jessica Parker’s grey-blend look has become her signature style |
For years, going grey meant either growing it out completely or committing to a hair colour appointment every three weeks to disguise it. Now there’s “grey blending”, a bespoke service provided by hairdressers up and down the country that aims to blend your greys rather than cover them up completely. Here’s what to ask for at your hairdressers. Continue reading ➤ Here is another article that may be of interest this morning:
- You don’t need to hit 10,000 steps to reap the rewards. From your heart and brain to blood sugar and digestion, this is why pace matters.
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Few can imagine the agony of motor neurone disease (MND), a condition that causes muscles to waste away and ultimately leads to paralysis and respiratory failure. One in 300 of us will develop it, and there is currently no cure.
For the past 18 months, one courageous Telegraph reader, whose face we never see, has been living with MND and, with the help of her family, has recorded her battle against a condition which, as she writes so movingly, “does tend to make one feel that one is disappearing from the world”.
Our anonymous author writes:
I had to face it: I had a disease with no recovery. Briefly I told myself I was almost relieved it wasn’t cancer – I wouldn’t have to “battle” it the way I’d watched a grandmother, an uncle, and my father battle theirs. Instead I should try to make the most of what time was left, and above all, hold on to some way of communicating.
Through all those long months of tests and waiting, the Speech and Language team were the steadiest presence. Ruth, my therapist, managed to be both encouraging and honest about what lay ahead. From our first meeting she showed me picture boards and printed phrases to point to, and told me about the software that could speak aloud whatever I typed – technology that has come a long way since Stephen Hawking’s flat, dead-pan American voice. Now, it seemed, I might get to keep something closer to my own.
At our very first meeting, Ruth had raised “voice banking” – recording my voice while I still could, to train a program to speak in it later. I was appalled. Surely I had years yet?
Then, quite suddenly, people were struggling to understand me, and my frustration would sometimes boil over. I realised I had waited too long to record anything usable. So my son, remarkably, collected years of my old voicemails – reminders, thanks, grumbles, reports that the train was late. My husband found old tapes of programmes I’d once contributed to; hearing my younger self holding forth was a small shock in itself.
Together, they built the raw material for the voice software, and my son, patient throughout, uploaded it all. Before long I could type a sentence and hear “my” voice say it back – tone, pace, cadence, unmistakably mine. Clumsy still, and slow, and I have to carry the device everywhere. It beats the silence which makes you feel you are quietly disappearing. By a background accident of one recording, my new voice occasionally comes wrapped in half a second of Elgar’s Nimrod – a small, undeserved glory.
Even so. I tried it out at our garden open days, ready with names of roses and lilies typed in advance. It went badly. The questions were never the ones I’d prepared for, and elderly visitors, uneasy with my strange electronic answers, looked away. I retreated to my room and listened to the voices below through the window.
I may know what I face now, but it is a long climb, and I am still at the bottom.
Read the full diary ➤
Next week: Our Garden
If you, a family member or a friend have had an experience with MND, share your story here. |
Happy couplesEvery weekday, Orlando Bird, our loyal Reader Correspondent, shares an off-piste topic that has brought out the best of your opinions and stories. Orlando writes...
Today, marriage proposals are big business. Although my wife and I, after well over a decade together, opted for a mumbled conversation about how we “probably ought to”, I occasionally see evidence of this burgeoning industry on social media: people popping the question beneath the Northern Lights, say, or in the middle of a bungee jump.
The trouble with these grand gestures, as Melissa Twigg’s article explains, is that things can go wrong. It’s not that the person you want to spend the rest of your life with might say “no”; it’s that you might both be eaten by a crocodile.
Readers have been recalling their own experiences, and it’s fair to say that you favour a more low-key approach.
Lily Assinder wrote: “If you’ve got the money, why not do these things? We wouldn’t have wanted anything so distracting for such an important and, for us, very private moment.
“We were in the sitting room and he asked me if I’d marry him. I said yes please. Then he hunted down a ring at an antique fair and asked me if I liked it before buying it. I don’t think I ever got him down on one knee, but he did slip the ring on with a kiss when it had been resized for me. As romantic as I could have asked for.”
Simon Curry suspected that “if the main point of the engagement becomes how good it looks on Instagram, you can guarantee it won’t last.”
Another reader told how “my sister’s fiancé tackily and rashly proposed at Disneyland for the benefit of their son. Her response was a slightly horrible/horrified ‘Get up! You’re causing a scene... but yes.’ I think he proposed again, properly, in a quiet spot at Bamburgh, minus audience.”
Matthew Cunningham added: “My fiancée and I got engaged in a photo booth in Florence. It cost me €2 (excluding the ring) and has been described as the ‘most romantic thing ever’ by peers of my partner. You don’t need to spend a bomb. It just needs to be special.” What do you think? Send your responses here, and the best of the bunch will feature in a future edition of this newsletter.
Please confirm in your reply that you are happy to be featured and that we have your permission to use your name. |
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1942 | The RAF drops 100,000 bombs on Düsseldorf, Germany
1945 | Mike the Headless Chicken is decapitated in Fruita, Colorado, but survives for another 18 months before choking to death
2022 | The Prince of Wales and Duke of Sussex reunite in sorrow alongside their wives, setting aside their differences to meet well-wishers in Windsor and honour their grandmother Elizabeth II (see our front page from the following day)
Birthdays: Jack Grealish (31), Guy Ritchie (58), Colin Firth (66)
Also, in today’s news, burglars who broke into a bungalow were oblivious to two decorative tiles that have since been identified as rare Renaissance treasures. How much were they worth?
1. £540,000
2. £220,000
3. £120,000
4. £95,000
Click one of the options to reveal the answer... |
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Find as many words as you can in today’s Panagram, including the nine-letter solution. Visit Telegraph Puzzles to play a range of head-scratching games, including The 1% Club, Cogs, and Quick, Mini or Cryptic Crosswords.
Yesterday’s Panagram was CENTIPEDE. Come back tomorrow for the solution to today’s puzzle. |
Thank you for reading. Have a fulfilling day and I hope to see you tomorrow.
Chris Evans, Editor |
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