Proud to be British. Read more from journalists who champion our culture, history and values. |  | Gordon Rayner Associate Editor | If you thought the Brexit wars were over, it might be time to think again. Europhiles close to Sir Keir Starmer are hoping they can convince him to commit to rejoining the EU customs union in the next Labour manifesto, well-placed sources have told The Telegraph.
Sir Keir, who supported the idea of a second EU referendum when he was shadow Brexit secretary, has said Britain won’t be rejoining the customs union, single market or freedom of movement, but you might have noticed that Labour has suddenly started blaming all of the nation’s ills on Brexit, rather than the Tories, and that is no coincidence.
The main obstacle standing in the way of the Europhile cabal is Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir’s chief of staff, who is adamant the party must focus on retaining – or in some cases winning back – the support of Leave voters in Red Wall seats. He insists that refighting the Brexit battles of the past would be a disaster.
But there is a growing belief that McSweeney won’t be in his job much longer, leaving the way clear for a new chief of staff to steer Labour towards a new course: wooing Lib Dem and Green supporters who want nothing less than to rejoin the EU.
Continue reading ➤ | | Katherine Rushton Deputy Investigations Editor | Julie Ward’s murder is hard to forget. A young British woman violently killed in Kenya’s Masai Mara in 1988, and found in a way that posed more questions than answers: her 4x4 in one location and her burned, dismembered body in another.
Hauntingly, Julie’s father, John Ward, gathered up the few remaining pieces of her body himself.
I was a child when Julie died, and only learnt of her case years later. But after reinvestigating it, I understand why it shocked the nation.
The story that began with Julie quickly became John’s as he devoted the rest of his life to hunting her killers, encountering astonishing obstacles along the way. Julie’s post-mortem report was altered and a figure linked to MI6 tried to persuade him she’d been killed by lightning.
I can also reveal that the Kenyan government made a secret payment to John in the late 1990s.
By the time he died, in 2023, John felt there was only one suspect that made sense of everything he’d gone through. He was convinced Jonathan Moi, the son of a former Kenyan president, was implicated in Julie’s murder.
For my new podcast series, I pored over classified documents, interviewed the people caught up in the case and visited Kenya myself to try and work out what happened.
Read the full story and listen to the first two episodes of our new podcast series here ➤ | Join the debate. Share your thoughts with our journalists and your fellow readers. | | The Deeside Way, from Aberdeen to the Cairngorms National Park, is one of the best routes in the UK for a wintry walk, writes Sarah Baxter. Here are 10 other hikes to try, each with the promise of a pub in which to eat, drink and hunker down in at the end. Continue reading ➤ | | | Russia has dominated the work of Sir Antony Beevor, the great British historian of war. As the tragedy in Ukraine reaches a vital stage, he tells David Blair how Russia has always believed that “conspicuous cruelty is a necessary weapon of war”. Atrocities in Ukraine are not just individual crimes, but part of how Russia fights and has always fought. Continue reading ➤ | | | The burden often heaped upon brides to look perfect on their wedding day is sometimes just too much – with a third of women ultimately regretting what they wore. Three women share why they had second thoughts after their big days. Continue reading ➤ | | | Philippa, a retired solicitor, is dreading the arrival of Rachel Reeves’s mansion tax on homes worth £2m and more. The 77-year-old lives in a two-bedroom house in Kensington. “I’m terrified because my income is pretty low. They’ve been talking about figures which would wipe me out. I’d have no money at all,” she says. She will have to pay up while people in far larger but cheaper properties elsewhere escape the raid unscathed. Meanwhile, property experts also fear the tax will have a chilling effect on an already downbeat housing market. What was envisaged as a raid on the rich risks punishing the cash-poor, and stifling Britain’s struggling economy.
Continue reading ➤
‘I’ve paid millions in taxes – now mansion tax has ruined my retirement’ ➤ | |  | | Fans of the late Hollywood star’s dazzling dance routines will be disappointed to learn a biopic starring Spider-Man’s Tom Holland has been vetoed by Astaire’s estate. All the more reason, writes Marianka Swain, to celebrate the life of the man with the $1m legs. Continue reading ➤ | | | Imagine saving for years to move your family to the coast, only to find out your views over the water could be blocked by new developments. This is what happened to one Kent family, who emptied their savings and joined with neighbours to raise a £160,000 war chest to keep developers out. Their story reveals how far ordinary people will go to defend the spaces they love. Continue reading ➤ | | | | | While investigating everything from bizarre coincidences to ghoulish encounters, Sarah Knapton, our Science Editor, and Joe Pinkstone, our Science Correspondent, have found that apparently supernatural experiences tend to have perfectly rational explanations.
Now they want to help you out.
Every Sunday, they demystify your most bizarre personal stories, using science, psychology and a bit of common sense to find logic behind the madness – although sometimes a bit of mystery remains.
Today, our duo weigh up your theories about a reader’s mysterious bite marks...
Last week, we introduced readers to the strange tale of the Bowness Vampire and it caused quite a stir, with a flood of theories pouring in.
To recap, Maria had rented a cottage in Bowness, in the Lake District, in November 2024, and after an unsettling first night, found bite marks on her arm the following day.
Usually, the Inexplicable team manages to find a rational explanation for strange reader encounters, but this one left us scratching our heads, so we threw it out to Telegraph readers. Here are the best of your theories:
By far and away the most popular theory was that Maria was attacked by some sort of insect or spider.
John Troughton suggested that one of her dogs picked up ticks while she and her family were walking in the Lake District. “When they got back to a warmer house one of those bit her during the night. Tick bites can cause swelling, blistering or bruising,” he said.
Certainly ticks can cause multiple bites, which can trigger a nasty red lump, bruising and swelling along with itching and blistering. However, there tends to be an obvious central pinprick mark with tick bites, which was missing in Maria’s case.
Read more theories from Telegraph readers here ➤
We have loved bringing you our weekly Inexplicable feature in this newsletter, but we’ve had so much brilliant correspondence from you that we need a few weeks to go through them all. We’ll be taking a short break, and will be back soon.
Plus, send in your questions for Sarah and Joe here ➤ | | Soft-fondant icing, squidgy, rich fruit cake and a layer of yielding marzipan – that’s the promise made by the supermarkets’ line-up of Christmas cakes this year, but not all of them deliver the requisite dose of festive cheer. Read Xanthe Clay’s taste-test to swerve those that are “all fur coat and no knickers”. Continue reading ➤ Below are two more articles that I hope will improve your weekend: - The Home Office is set to begin issuing new passports from next month. Here’s everything you need to know.
- Find yourself having to deal with blunt kitchen knives? Here are the dos and don’ts of knife care to make them last as long as possible.
| | Pam Hogg on the runway in 2019 | “I don’t like raunch,” the Glaswegian Pam Hogg insisted, though her clothes featured acres of skin-tight latex, mesh and studded leather, writes Andrew M Brown, Obituaries Editor. Her designs were “sexy, not raunchy”, she said. Her punky, space-age aesthetic ideally suited the denizens of 1980s London clubland.
Hogg herself was “strikingly beautiful”, in the words of the fashion journalist Melanie Rickey, with her peroxide blonde ringlets, scarlet lips and black-lined eyes.
She’d started out as a musician, but fell into design when needing an outrageous outfit that would pass muster at the door of the New Romantic “Blitz” club, where Mick Jagger had supposedly been turned away for wearing the wrong shoes. Before long she was dressing glamorous friends from Siouxsie Sioux to Boy George, Princess Diana and, latterly, Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Björk.
Her operation was small-scale and fiercely independent. Her more mainstream contemporaries played it too safe, she felt: “If you’re just giving people what they want, it’s stagnant. Give them what they don’t know they want.” True to her word, later catwalk shows included one featuring nude models and another, called Best in Show, in which models wore giant poodle headdresses.
Pam Hogg’s was a life lived in dazzling colour and you can read her obituary in full here.
| | 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 PlusWord, Sorted, and Quick, Mini or Cryptic Crosswords.
Yesterday’s Panagram was REINFORCE. Come back tomorrow for the solution to today’s puzzle. | | Thank you for reading. Allister Heath, Sunday Telegraph Editor
P.S. Please share your thoughts on the newsletter here. | |
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