Lawrence Gosden’s award comes amid high levels of corporate debt, serious sewage leaks and recent hosepipe ban

Southern Water has nearly doubled its chief executive’s annual pay package to £1.4m, despite financial difficulties and a government ban on it awarding bonuses.

Lawrence Gosden was awarded £691,000 under a “two-year long-term incentive plan” (LTIP), on top of fixed pay of £687,000 in its last financial year, according to the company’s annual report, published this week.

Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, West Yorkshire
Stupendous set design brings E Nesbit’s children’s classic to new life as a wealthy Anglo-Indian family is forced to adjust to reduced life in Yorkshire in this irresistible adaptation

This site-specific experience begins with a ride on a stream train. Audiences travel to a purpose-built auditorium inside an engine shed at Oxenhope station. It is a delightful mood-setter to Mike Kenny’s adaptation of E Nesbit’s 1905 novel, which premiered in 2008. It is back on the road, this time chugging its way along the same five-mile line comprising the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway on which the Green Dragon travelled in Lionel Jeffries’ iconic 1970 film.

Inside the shed, the impressive stagecraft arrests the senses over the story of Roberta (Farah Ashraf), Peter (Raj Digva) and Phyllis (Jessica Kaur), the children forced out of their well-to-do London home and into a shambling house by the tracks in Yorkshire, after their father (Paul Hawkyard) is wrongly imprisoned.

Pre-tax profits fall 24% despite rise in Sports Direct sales, driven by closures of House of Fraser and Game stores

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A “challenging” luxury market and retreat from gaming have prompted a fall in sales and profits at Mike Ashley’s Frasers.

The group, which is majority owned by the billionaire former Newcastle United owner, said sales fell by 7.4% to £4.7bn and pre-tax profits slid by 24% to £379.5m as it closed some of its House of Fraser department stores and Game video game shops.

The chancellor’s first London visit is an opportunity for a modernising reset – on business, defence and even school trips

Look at the Germany shelf of your local British bookshop and, if one exists at all, it will almost certainly be filled with tomes about the Nazis and the two world wars. To write a book about contemporary Germany, to write anything complimentary – as I have done – is to buck the trend, even now, after all these years. And it still rankles. Many Germans still remember the infamous Mirror headline during the 1996 Euro football championships: Achtung! Surrender!

Which is why today’s signing of the first UK-Germany friendship treaty, with defence and military cooperation at its heart, is so important. The accord is designed to smooth out post-Brexit problems, and forms the centrepiece of Friedrich Merz’s first visit to London as chancellor. The Germans will be happy that school trips to the UK will be made less tricky. Britons will be relieved that regular visitors, especially for business, may at some point be able to register for E-gate entry.

John Kampfner is the author of In Search of Berlin and Why the Germans Do It Better

It seems paradoxical to look to Trump to save Palestinians, yet no recent US president has been better placed to stop Israel

It seems paradoxical to look to Donald Trump to save the Palestinians, yet no recent American president has been better placed to insist that the Israeli government stop its extraordinary repression and brutality. Trump so far has largely given Israel carte blanche to continue its genocide in Gaza, but Benjamin Netanyahu would be remiss to count on the fickle and self-serving American president. And there may be a way to turn Trump around.

Most US presidents have stuck with the Israeli government regardless of its atrocities because the political fallout of deviating was too high. Any pressure on Israel would be sure to trigger outrage from Christian evangelicals (Israel’s largest group of supporters in the US) and the conservative segment of American Jews represented by the lobbying group Aipac.