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Rishi Sunak’s decision to cancel the northern leg of the HS2 railway has ended the UK’s ambition to build a high speed line linking northern and southern cities along the spine of the country. The prime minister said he has ended the “old consensus” which focused on linking up major cities “at the exclusion of

Receive free US foreign policy updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest US foreign policy news every morning. A group of 20 Democratic senators has voiced significant concerns about the Biden administration’s efforts to normalise relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, raising the prospect that any such pact will

Receive free Congress of the United States updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Congress of the United States news every morning. Republicans on Capitol Hill began their search for a new leader on Wednesday, a day after a historic rebellion by hardline party members unseated House of Representatives

Receive free Metro Bank updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Metro Bank news every morning. Metro Bank is seeking to raise up to £600mn after its share price fell almost 50 per cent in recent weeks, said people with knowledge of the plan. The UK challenger bank is

Receive free The FT View updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest The FT View news every morning. Rishi Sunak was hailed a year ago as someone who would bring managerial competence to the role of UK prime minister after years of turbulence. Since that approach has failed to

Rishi Sunak made eye-catching announcements on a raft of different policy areas in his first conference speech as Conservative party leader, but sought to weave them together under a common theme: change. In his keynote address on Wednesday, the UK prime minister cancelled the northern leg of HS2 and redirected the £36bn of savings into

Rishi Sunak axed the northern leg of the HS2 high-speed rail line to Manchester, promised sweeping education reforms and announced a smoking crackdown as he told the Conservative party conference he would take “radical” decisions to change Britain. The prime minister argued that £36bn could be saved by scrapping HS2 north of Birmingham, and that

Receive free Rishi Sunak updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Rishi Sunak news every morning. Politicians and pundits like patterns. So we see an embattled government after 13 years in power and debate whether the next election will mirror that of 1992, 1997 or 2010. Our choice points

Receive free US Treasury bonds updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest US Treasury bonds news every morning. Bond yields on both sides of the Atlantic touched their highest levels for more than a decade on Wednesday as a sell-off in global fixed income continued. Yields on benchmark 10-year

Receive free US foreign policy updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest US foreign policy news every morning. Volodymyr Zelenskyy says there is no “expiration date” on Ukraine’s willingness to fight Russia. But it is becoming increasingly hard to ignore the potential shelf life of America’s support for his

Receive free Italy updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Italy news every morning. I remember the first time I stumbled on the mesmerising 1970s-era black-and-white video of Italian rock-and-roll icon Adriano Celentano belting out a song with the tell-tale nasal vowels and distinctive rhythm of American English, accompanied

© Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire Johnny Mercer, minister for veterans’ affairs, defended the UK government’s controversial legislation granting amnesties for Troubles-era atrocities in Northern Ireland, which has ended prosecutions for soldiers and others accused of historic wrongdoing. “That totemic scourge on the lives of our extraordinary people who served in Northern Ireland has been removed,” he

Receive free HS2 updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest HS2 news every morning. UK prime minister Rishi Sunak will announce the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2 in his Conservative conference speech today, defence secretary Grant Shapps has confirmed. The comments from Shapps are the first public

Receive free Japanese government bonds updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Japanese government bonds news every morning. Japan’s central bank made unscheduled purchases of government debt on Wednesday as yields on benchmark bonds hit their highest mark in a decade, while a global market sell-off also continued to

Barclays bank has been accused of damaging the credit records of buy-to-let mortgage borrowers by failing to fix a key software fault customers first reported at least six years ago. The high street bank has informed one affected customer that it is “unlikely” to resolve the problem before the end of 2024, when it plans

In a recent campaign video, Poland’s de facto leader Jaroslaw Kaczyński is seen on the phone allegedly with a German official urging him to raise the retirement age. “There is no more Tusk and these things are over,” Kaczyński says.  The ad was a spoof. But with elections due on October 15, the political intention

Receive free Commercial property updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Commercial property news every morning. It wasn’t really surprising that Meta, the tech giant formerly known as Facebook, decided to break its lease on one of two buildings it had taken at British Land’s development in London’s west

Receive free Satellites updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Satellites news every morning. The writer is a science commentator It was a well-intentioned comment, highlighting the need for humanity to be mindful as it continues expanding into the final frontier. “We need a Greta for space,” declared a

If Rishi Sunak pulls the plug on the northern leg of HS2 as expected, it will vindicate one of his advisers, Andrew Gilligan, who has railed against the scheme for more than a decade. Though Downing Street officials said all policy decisions in the Sunak administration stem from the prime minister himself, Gilligan, a former

The House of Representatives fell silent as Steve Womack, the Republican congressman from Arkansas, read the results of the historic vote: “The office of the Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.” “Now what?” one unidentified lawmaker loudly replied. It was a question that echoed across Washington

New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, with ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy behind her, talks to reporters last November. She is considered a potential replacement for McCarthy © Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The US House of Representatives is now in chaos. Nobody knows who the next Speaker will be. It took Kevin McCarthy 15 rounds before he won