English football’s top flight is toasting a £40m sponsorship deal with Guinness after the Diageo-owned brand saw off competition from Heineken.

Sky News has learnt that the Premier League has informed its 20 clubs, which include Everton, Manchester City and Sheffield United, that it is backing a £10m-a-year agreement beginning next season.

The deal, which has not yet been formally signed, represents a big financial uplift on the Premier League’s existing partnership with Budweiser’s owner, AB InBev.

Guinness has historically been more closely associated with promoting itself through an association with rugby union – through the sport’s Premiership and Six Nations competitions – than football.

One Premier League club executive said they had been told the Guinness deal was valued at over £41m over its four-year duration.

Budweiser has been associated with the Premier League for the last five years, while it has also been a principal sponsor of the FA Cup.

The proposed agreement comes at a time of unprecedented scrutiny of the Premier League’s finances after its failure to reach a redistribution settlement with the English Football League.

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This week’s second reading of the Football Governance Bill represented another step towards the creation of an independent watchdog for the sport.

Richard Masters, the Premier League chief executive, has warned in the last fortnight that more intense regulation will risk damaging the English football pyramid.

The Premier League and Diageo declined to comment.

Shipping traffic through the vital Suez Canal artery in Egypt has plunged by 66% since cargo was forced to divert due to attacks on vessels, according to official figures.

The data, from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), covered the period from mid-December to the beginning of April.

It is important as it represents the scale of disruption to supplies through the artificial channel linking the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea since Iran-backed Houthi fighters started firing on ships in the run-up to Christmas last year.

There are fears that soaring costs for insurance, fuel and wages risk stoking a fresh wave of inflation as the diversion to Europe from destinations such as manufacturing powerhouse China, around the southern tip of Africa, adds up to 14 days to transit times.

Separate ONS data covering the pace of price increases is yet to show any real impact on the UK economy but the Bank of England is among institutions monitoring the situation as a number of companies report a hit from higher costs.

Container prices, for example, rose by more than 300% as the disruption gathered pace early this year.

Houthi fighters based in Yemen have been targeting ships which, they claim, have links to Israel.

They argue that they are acting in sympathy with Palestinians and a number of attacks have found their targets despite a US-led naval operation to protect vessels in the Red Sea.

The vast majority of major shipping companies have, for some months, used the diversion around the Cape of Good Hope.

The ONS said volumes started to increase in December 2023 and throughout the first weeks of 2024, more than doubling levels observed in February 2023.

“By the first week of April 2024 (week 14), the volume of cargo and tanker ships through the Suez Canal was 71% and 61% below the level of ship crossings seen in the previous year, respectively.”

It added that weekly crossings through the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Iran between February and April, showed a “significant decrease” compared with previous years.

It noted that shipping journeys were particularly low between weeks five and 10, with an average 23% reduction in crossing volumes compared with the same weeks in the previous year.

This was mainly due to lower tanker crossings, it noted.

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The prospect of more perilous journeys for tankers has been a factor behind rising oil prices.

Brent crude, which had been trading around the $80 a barrel mark at the start of the year, rose as high as $91 earlier this month amid the see-saw of tension across the conflict in the Middle East.

It culminated in tit-for-tat attacks between Israel and Iran.

It is currently trading at $88, reflecting the lack of escalation since last week.

The AA reported on Tuesday that average petrol costs in the UK had crossed back above the 150p-a-litre mark for the first time since November.

Experts have warned that they probably have further to go, with a weaker pound versus the dollar this month adding to higher oil costs as the commodity is priced in the US currency.

A former HR director at the Post Office, whose misconduct claims against chief executive Nick Read were dismissed following an internal investigation, has written to MPs in a bid to plead her case.

Jane Davies, who was in post for seven months from December 2022 until she was dismissed, claimed Mr Read led a “deliberate campaign to defame and ostracise me” after she failed to secure him a satisfactory pay rise.

In the March-dated letter released by the business and trade committee on Tuesday, Ms Davies said she spent the first eight weeks in her role as group chief people officer dealing with Mr Read’s “pay demands”.

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He has previously denied an allegation by sacked Post Office chairman Henry Staunton that he had threatened to resign numerous times on the pay issue.

Ms Davies said she was writing to the committee in support of Mr Staunton’s version of events in his evidence to the committee in February.

“He [Mr Read] regarded the final offer of 5% increase as insulting,” she wrote.

“As a result, he regarded me as a failure for not getting the remuneration increase. What followed was a deliberate campaign to defame and ostracise me.

“From my perspective, his charm had been replaced by someone who was not authentic or honest and importantly who lacked genuine concern or care for others, employees, hard-working postmasters and those that had been wronged.

“The role that I was being asked to do, looked nothing like the role that had been sold to me when I was recruited. It was clear that cultural change that needed to start with the senior leaders, was simply not high on Nick Read’s agenda.”

The Post Office announced last week that its chief executive had been “exonerated of all misconduct allegations” following an independent review into the bullying allegations.

The issue has proved to be a further thorn in the organisation’s side as it faces a public inquiry over the handling of the Horizon IT scandal that saw hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly convicted of theft and fraud.

At the same time, the government has moved to speed up redress for all those failed.

Mr Staunton, who also wrote to the committee in correspondence that was released on Tuesday, expressed concerns over a “lack of clarity around the investigation” into Mr Read’s conduct.

The former Post Office chair, who was sacked by the government in January, was also the subject of a complaint raised by a whistleblower that he said related to an alleged use of politically incorrect and potentially offensive language.

“The implications of the allegations, namely that I am racist and misogynistic, are ones that are deeply distressing, would be contested by everyone who knows me, and are definitely not borne out by my behaviour as a champion of diversity in all the organisations I have worked for, including the Post Office”, Mr Staunton wrote.

“It is not clear to me how these allegations became incorporated into an investigation which was prompted by a whistleblower complaint about alleged bullying by the chief executive, particularly as the complaint was directed at no-one else, and did not mention me by name.”

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The business and trade committee issued no comment when it released the contents of the letters.

A Post Office spokesperson responded: “Just last week a highly reputable barrister produced an extensive, robust, and impartial report that fully exonerated Nick Read of all the misconduct allegations levelled against him, and in so doing discredited many of the claims raised in these letters.

“For the avoidance of doubt, the barrister was fully empowered to investigate and conclude as she saw fit.

“Our focus remains on providing redress for postmasters; learning from the grievous errors of the past; and building an organisation able to meet the challenges of the future.”