Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the past seven days
“What neither man knew was that the scheme they had stumbled upon had been overseen and authorised for decades, in Britain and Saudi Arabia, by the highest levels of government. It would be 14 years, three criminal prosecutions and two jury trials before the full truth would emerge.”
Ian Foxley had just started a job at a British company in Riyadh when he began to notice payments that didn’t add up. The company culture also struck him as a odd: when he joined, he was warned against talking to an accountant named Michael Paterson, deemed a “madman”. But, when Foxley’s attempts to report irregularities within the company went nowhere, he contacted Paterson. This fascinating longread by David Pegg follows what happened next when the two met, and the major secrets that would be uncovered.
David Lammy’s first year at the Foreign Office has been hit by a string of high-stakes conflicts, from the unfolding horror in Gaza to regime change in Syria and Trump’s humiliation of Zelenskyy. In this interview, journalist Charlotte Edwardes shadows the foreign secretary for five weeks. She had originally planned to meet him in Washington DC, but his trip was cancelled after Israel bombed Iran. Instead, she tails him as he meets the French foreign secretary at London’s British Library, greets constituents in Tottenham, and is met by a crowd of protesters in Peterborough, chanting about genocide and children orphaned – all the while grilling Lammy about Trump, Putin, the Labour party, and why “Gaza is the wound that will not heal”.
