Good morning. For the first time since the 18th century, the sun will set on the British empire. When the UK formally cedes sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, there will once again be a point in the day where all of the UK’s remaining overseas territories (and the UK itself) will be in darkness.

Betrayal of British interests? Glorious feat of diplomacy? Something else entirely? Some thoughts on that in today’s newsletter.

Notorious BIOT

The agreement over the British Indian Ocean Territory gives the UK and the US a 99-year lease over the US-UK military base in Diego Garcia with an option to extend it further. It has been welcomed by US secretary of state Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden.

Yet according to James Cleverly and his campaign proxies, the UK decision is a betrayal of vital British interests.

Or, if you prefer the version of events advanced by Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick, it cedes power to China, and, in addition to being the fault of Labour, is also the fault of Cleverly, the former foreign secretary who started the ball-rolling on the talks in 2022 that led to this treaty!

No, it’s really the fault of Liz Truss, the prime minister at the time, but also, somehow, Keir Starmer. So say some, I would say, slightly confused allies of Cleverly, who are looking to deflect blame somewhere, anywhere, other than the desk of their chosen candidate for the Conservative leadership.

Who’s right? Well, bluntly, in terms of global rivalry, Mauritius, along with Eswatini, are the only former British colonies in Africa who are not part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It seems more likely that Mauritius will continue to stay outside the BRI and not fall into China’s influence if the UK is paying it money to rent a military base on a long-term lease, than if the UK is not giving it money and is insisting that it is not going to honour its half-a-century-old promise to cede the Chagos Islands.

There are many, many things you can reasonably say about Truss but I don’t think being insufficiently hawkish on China is one of them.

There’s a historical irony here: until now, the 50-year period in which the archipelago and its residents have been politically contested has been one in which Labour governments have done their utmost to first dispossess and uproot the Chagossians. During that time Conservative governments have been the ones recognising the scale of the problem.

Back in 1965, when the then-Labour government drastically reduced the UK’s global military commitments, they hived off the 58-island archipelago from the rest of what is now Mauritius ahead of negotiations over the terms of Mauritius’ independence. The UK pledged to return the islands as and when it was no longer needed by the US military, knowing full well at the time that this promise was unlikely to be made good on.

Harold Wilson’s government then embarked on a systematic programme of uprooting and dispossessing the Chagos Islanders — dismissed in a government memo at the time as “some few Tarzans and Man Fridays whose origins are obscure” — which continued to run until 1973. It was not until defeat in court and the arrival of another Conservative government, that of Margaret Thatcher, in 1982, that proper compensation was paid to the islanders directly.

Under New Labour, the government used the royal prerogative — powers held by the executive that do not require parliamentary approval — to overturn court verdicts that ruled the Chagossians’ expulsion was unlawful. The UK created a marine protection area which, according to a Foreign Office official quoted in a cable published by the Guardian and WikiLeaks in 2010, would ensure there would be “‘no human footprints’ or ‘Man Fridays’ on the British Indian Ocean Territory uninhabited islands”. (If you want more on this, do check out Andrew Jack’s excellent Big Read from back in 2015.)

The last Conservative government in 2016 announced a further programme of compensation. It was the last Tory administration that started the ball rolling on this set of negotiations.

Ultimately, this deal has been welcomed by the White House. The talks were initiated by a Conservative government. Tory MPs were hardly shy of criticising aspects of the Truss government at the time, yet Cleverly, Tugendhat and Jenrick have, remarkably, only now objected. Both Cleverly and Tugendhat held relevant ministerial roles at the time, to boot. The deal has rather more continuity with Conservative approaches to the archipelago than to Labour’s much grubbier history.

Call me unduly cynical but it feels as if the biggest change here is that it suits the perceived self-interest of some Conservatives to censure the government no matter what, and the interest of others to attack Cleverly.

Now try this

One final recommendation from Birmingham: it’s one of the places blessed with a Boston Tea Party, a lovely small West Country chain that sadly has yet to come to London. If you are lucky enough to live near one, you should give them a visit.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!

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MARTIN Lewis has warned Brits to stock up on first-class stamps before next week’s 22 per cent price hike.

The price of first-class stamps will rise by 30p to £1.65, the second rise in a year, Royal Mail confirmed.

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The delivery giant revealed that the price hike will be in effect from Monday 7.

Martin Lewis is urging Brits to bulk-buy first-class stamps in advance as they are “still valid after the hike”.

He said: “For years, every time stamps go up in price I’ve suggested people stock up and bulk-buy in advance, as provided the stamp doesn’t have a price on it and instead just says the postage class, it’s still valid after the hike.

“So you may as well stock up now, even if it’s just for Christmas cards for the next few Christmases.”

The founder of Money Saving Expert has also warned Brits against buying fake stamps when stocking up.

He recommended buying from reputable high street stores and making sure to keep the receipt.

Stamps can also be bought directly from the Royal Mail online shop, but you have to spend £50 to get free delivery.

In April, the UK postal service announced it had paused the £5 penalty for anyone receiving a letter with a fake stamp.

However, you still risk facing charges if caught sending mail with counterfeit stamps.

Royal Mail has introduced a new stamp scanner, available for free via their app, to check if stamps are genuine.

The price increase for first-class stamps is the second one this year after they rose by 10p to £1.35 in April and by 10p to 85p for second class.

The company has frozen the cost of second-class stamps at 85p until 2029 in a bid to keep the sending of letters affordable.

Royal Mail says it has tried to keep price increases as low as possible in the face of declining letter volumes, and inflationary pressures.

When announcing the price rise earlier this month, it also cited the costs associated with maintaining the so-called Universal Service Obligation (USO) under which deliveries have to be made six days a week.

Royal Mail said letter volumes have fallen from 20billion in 2004/5 to around 6.7billion a year in 2023/4, so the average household now receives four letters a week, compared to 14 a decade ago.

The number of addresses Royal Mail must deliver to has risen by 4million in the same period meaning the cost of each delivery continues to rise.

Nick Landon, Royal Mail’s chief commercial officer, said: “When letter volumes have declined by two-thirds since their peak, the cost of delivering each letter inevitably increases.

“The universal service must adapt to reflect changing customer preferences and increasing costs so that we can protect the one-price-goes anywhere service, now and in the future.”

How prices have changed

Royal Mail previously raised the price of first-class stamps from £1.10 to £1.25 last October, before boosting them again in April.

Right now, a first-class stamp costs £1.35, which covers the delivery of letters up to 100g.

Historically, the cost of stamps has seen a steady increase over the years, reflecting inflation and operational costs. For example, in 2000, a First Class stamp was priced at 41p.

A second-class stamp is priced at 85p and also covers letters up to 100g.

The stamps can be bought individually if you buy them at a Post Office counter.

Otherwise, you can typically buy them in sets of multiple stamps.

The first class service typically delivers the next working day, including Saturdays, while the second class service usually delivers within 2-3 working days, also including Saturdays.

For larger letters, the cost of a first-class stamp is £2.20 for items up to 100g, and a second-class stamp for the same weight is £1.55.

Parcel delivery prices vary based on size and weight, starting from £3.69 for small parcels.

Additional services include the “signed for” option, which requires a signature upon delivery and adds an extra level of security.

The cost for first class signed for is £3.05, and for second class signed for, it is £2.55.

The “special delivery” service guarantees next-day delivery by 1pm with compensation cover, with prices starting from £7.95.

Royal Mail periodically reviews and adjusts stamp prices, so it is advisable to check the latest rates on their official website or at your local post office.

Other Royal Mail changes

Royal Mail has urged the Government and Ofcom to review its obligations, arguing that it is no longer workable or cost-effective, given the decline in addressed letter post.

In its submission to Ofcom in April, it proposed ditching Saturday deliveries for second-class post and cutting the service to every other weekday.

Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s group director for networks and communications, said: “If we decide to propose changes to the universal service next year, we want to make sure we achieve the best outcome for consumers.

“So we’re now looking at whether we can get the universal service back on an even keel in a way that meets people’s needs.

“But this won’t be a free pass for Royal Mail – under any scenario, it must invest in its network, become more efficient and improve its service levels.”

Royal Mail owner International Distribution Services (IDS), which agreed to a £3.57billion takeover by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky in May, said “change cannot come soon enough” to the UK’s postal service.

Royal Mail also ousted old-style stamps and replaced them with barcoded ones last July.

The business said the move would make letters more secure.

Anyone who still has these old-style stamps and uses them may have to pay a surcharge.

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EU member states agreed to impose tariffs on imports of Chinese electric vehicles on Friday, marking the biggest trade dispute between the economic superpowers in a decade.

They backed a European Commission proposal for anti-subsidy tariffs of up to 35.3 per cent, on top of the existing 10 per cent, despite vocal opposition from Germany and Hungary.

According to two people briefed on the matter, 10 member states voted for the tariffs, five voted against and 12 abstained.

The EU tariffs will last for up to five years and range from 7.8 per cent for Tesla to 35.3 per cent for SAIC, which owns the MG brand.

China has already retaliated by threatening tariffs on EU brandy imports and opened investigations into pork and dairy products.

Since Brussels launched its investigation into the European EV market a year ago, Beijing has blasted Brussels for what it says is rising protectionism.

The commission has said its investigation was compliant with world trade rules and uncovered subsidies to carmakers and their suppliers. including cheap land and loans from Chinese banks.

China’s carmakers had offered to restrict sales and raise prices to avoid tariffs — concessions that were rejected by the EU. Brussels has said it would continue talks aimed at a negotiated settlement to curb the big rise in Chinese electric car imports.

This is a developing story.

Additional reporting by Guy Chazan in Berlin.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Nothing is certain except death, taxes — and uncertainty. From the mundane (“what’s for breakfast?”) to the existential (“will AI replace humans?”), the human condition is inextricably bound to being unsure of what’s coming next. Uncertainty, David Spiegelhalter believes, “is all about us, but, like the air we breathe, it tends to remain unexamined”.

Taking a closer look has been Spiegelhalter’s stock in trade in a career spanning some five decades during which he has established himself as one of Britain’s most eminent statisticians. His 2019 book The Art of Statistics was a bestseller; during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Cambridge university emeritus professor of statistics acquired national treasure status as he helped an anxious nation interpret the data.

Disasters such as this illustrate the dangers of using words to express magnitude

Another group of readers that might benefit is politicians who, Spiegelhalter writes, “find it extremely difficult to admit uncertainty” and “are even more challenged by admitting the provisionality of advice”.

Curiously, one word missing from the book’s full title is “probability”, and yet this is where our story begins. For at least 5,000 years, from Greece to Mongolia, humanity has fancied a flutter. Yet, despite millennia of people throwing objects and gambling on outcomes, it was only in 16th-century Renaissance Italy that probability — an “elusive phenomenon, incapable of direct observation and measurement” in Spiegelhalter’s words — came to be formalised as a discipline.

Around 1550 Gerolamo Cardano, who made, and lost, plenty of money gambling, distilled his accumulated wisdom into The Book on Games of Chance. In it he presented the first systematic computation of probabilities, listing all 36 basic outcomes with the roll of one die and another. While today my 11-year-old school students can replicate this, this was not obvious back then.

This is just one of Spiegelhalter’s delightfully instructive excursions into the past. Others include the story of how Casanova’s mathematical prowess led to an “extraordinarily successful French lottery” or how Halley (of comet fame) essentially invented the life insurance and annuity industry by observing ages of when people died.

More recently in 1961, President Kennedy was informed that the potential Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba had a “fair chance of success”. The chiefs of staff were sceptical about the invasion proposal and actually gave it a 30 per cent probability of success. However, the brigadier drafting the report for Kennedy translated this into a “fair chance”, by which he actually meant “not too good”. It never occurred to him that not using a numerical probability might lead to a misunderstanding.  

Disasters such as this illustrate the dangers of using words to express magnitude. The intelligence community has since learnt to be “more transparent about their degree of uncertainty”. A 2019 Nato technical report, magnificently titled Variants of Vague Verbiage, highlights how for UK intelligence, “likely” means 55 to 75 per cent whereas for Canada it is 70 to 80 per cent.

Super-forecasting — predicting election outcomes, investment decisions or disease outbreaks — often involves statistical models trying to quantify both low probabilities and high impacts. At the onset of the financial crisis in 2007, David Viniar, a number cruncher from Goldman Sachs, observed that analysts “were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation events, several days in a row”. These are events with a probability of about one in 10 to the power of 135 (that is one followed by 135 zeros).

To give this context, the chance of winning the UK lottery jackpot is about one in 45mn. So an event with a probability of one in 10 to the power of 135 is similar to winning this jackpot seventeen times on the bounce. It doesn’t take sharing my experience as a trader at US investment bank Lehman Brothers at the time of 2008 bankruptcy to tell you that financial models were inadequate in modelling extremes.

As he guides us through his story, Spiegelhalter comes across as a warm, personable and knowledgeable uncle trying to equip us with the tools to deal with uncertainty. He effortlessly shifts from trivial issues like the probability of pulling matching socks out of a drawer to more serious questions about the risk of cancer. As a maths teacher, I understand why Spiegelhalter apologetically writes that it is “impossible to completely avoid technical material when discussing probability”. Though the maths is kept to a minimum, you can still understand the big picture even if you skim over these dense thickets.

Yet, like a powerful movie sequel that does not quite hit the same heights as the original, The Art of Uncertainty lacks some of the fresh punch of Spiegelhalter’s earlier bestseller, with which it is perhaps best paired. That said, it is a useful and persuasive account that gets us to recognise, understand and ultimately accept uncertainty.

Uncertainty means none of us should feel we have to speak with “absolute and unchanging conviction”. After all, as he notes, “each of us wouldn’t be here were it not for a chain of apparently fortuitous occurrences”. Constitutive luck is a property of the person we were born as: we have no control over our parents, backgrounds, country or era. However, as with gamblers, we can make the best of the hand we have been dealt with.

The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck by David Spiegelhalter Pelican £22, 512 pages

Bobby Seagull is a school maths teacher and author of ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers’

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