Former England manager Gareth Southgate, London mayor Sadiq Khan and actor Stephen Fry have been knighted in the New Year Honours.
Others who have received honours include a host of Team GB athletes – among them gold medal-winning runner Keely Hodgkinson – as well as author Jacqueline Wilson and television presenter Alan Titchmarsh.
Honours have also been awarded to some of the wrongfully convicted sub-postmasters following the Horizon scandal.
Sir Gareth, who has been knighted for services to association football, led the England team to the finals of the Euros in 2020 and 2024, as well as the semi-final of the 2018 World Cup.
However, the Three Lions did not manage to win any tournaments under his leadership, and he resigned following their 2-1 final defeat to Spain in July.
His knighthood matches that earned by Sir Bobby Robson, the last England manager to take a team to the World Cup semis. Fifty-four-year-old Southgate declined to comment on the honour.
Sir Stephen, best known for appearing in Blackadder and hosting quiz show QI, has been recognised for services to mental health awareness, the environment and charity.
The actor has been president of mental health charity Mind since 2011 and also supported the conservation group Fauna and Flora International.
Image: Stephen Fry has been knighted for services to mental health awareness, the environment and charity
He said he was “startled and enchanted” after receiving a letter informing him of the knighthood, adding: “When you are recognised it does make you feel a bit ‘crikey’, but I think the most emotional thing is that when I think of my childhood, and my dreadful unhappiness and misery and stupidity, and everything that led to so many failures as a child.
“And for my parents, really, what a disaster. I mean every time the phone rang, they thought, ‘Oh, God, what has Stephen done now’. It was a sort of joke in the family.”
London mayor Sir Sadiq has been honoured for political and public service, having held his role since 2016.
Image: London mayor Sadiq Khan said he was ‘humbled’. Pic: PA
He said he was “humbled” to have received a knighthood and “couldn’t have dreamed when growing up on a council estate in south London that I would one day be mayor of London“.
“It’s the honour of my life to serve the city I love and I will continue to build the fairer, safer, greener and more prosperous London that all of the capital’s communities deserve,” he said.
Conservative London councillor Matthew Goodwin-Freeman launched a petition to “stop” the knighthood which surpassed 200,000 signatures earlier this month.
Beloved author Jacqueline Wilson, who created the Tracy Beaker series, has been made a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for services to literature.
Image: Jacqueline Wilson has been made a dame. Pic: PA
Actress Carey Mulligan and television presenter Alan Titchmarsh have become Commanders of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is made a Companion of Honour for services to literature, actor Eddie Marsan is an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and Myleene Klass becomes a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).
A number of gongs also went to athletes following this year’s Paris Olympics, where Team GB won 65 medals, and the Paralympics, where Team ParalympicsGB finished in second place with 49 gold medals.
Twenty-two-year-old Keely Hodgkinson earned an MBE after claiming gold in the 800m at the Olympics, setting a new British record of one minute 54.61 seconds, making her the sixth fastest woman at the distance in history.
Image: Tom Pidcock crosses the line to win gold during the men’s cross-country mountain biking. Pic: PA
Other honoured gold-medallists include swimmer Duncan Scott (OBE), sailor Ellie Aldridge (MBE) and rowers Lola Anderson, Hannah Scott, Lauren Henry and Georgie Brayshaw (all MBEs).
Former F1 driver and broadcaster Martin Brundle has become an OBE and former Scotland and Liverpool footballer and BBC pundit Alan Hansen is an MBE.
Sky News royal and events commentator Major General Alastair Bruce has been made a Companion of the Order of the Bath – an honour which recognises the work of senior military officials and civil servants.
Maj Gen Bruce served as an officer of the Scots Guards, including during the Falklands War. Earlier this year, he retired as governor of Edinburgh Castle, a position he had held since June 2019.
Image: Major General Alastair Bruce (left) with the King and Queen at Edinburgh Castle. Pic: PA
As a commentator for Sky News, he has covered numerous state events, including Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022 and the King’s coronation the following year. Most recently, he provided commentary for this year’s Remembrance Day events and the ceremony marking the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris.
Horizon IT scandal victims Lee Castleton, Jo Hamilton, Christopher Head and Seema Misra have been made OBEs for services to justice.
Politicians who received honours include Labour MP Emily Thornberry, who has become a dame, and former West Midlands mayor Andy Street, who has been knighted.
Image: Labour MP Emily Thornberry
The oldest person on the list is 103-year-old World War Two Mosquito pilot Colin Bell, who was given a British Empire Medal (BEM) for charitable fundraising and public speaking.
The youngest to receive honours are 18-year-olds Mikayla Beames, given a BEM for her fundraising efforts supporting children with cancer, and para-swimmer William Ellard, made an MBE after winning gold in the S14 200m freestyle at the Paris Paralympics.
More than 1,200 people from across the UK received honours in the latest list.
Heathrow Airport bosses had been warned of a potential substation failures less than a week before a major power outage closed the airport for a day, a committee of MPs has heard.
The chief executive of Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee Nigel Wicking told MPs of the Transport Committee he raised issues about resilience on 15 March after cable and wiring took out lights on a runway.
A fire at an electricity substation in west London meant the power supply was disrupted to Europe’s largest airport for a day – causing travel chaos for around 200,000 passengers.
“I’d actually warned Heathrow of concerns that we had with regard to the substations and my concern was resilience”, Mr Wicking said.
“So the first occasion was to team Heathrow director on the 15th of the month of March. And then I also spoke to the chief operating officer and chief customer officer two days before regarding this concern.
“And it was following a number of, a couple of incidents of, unfortunately, theft, of wire and cable around some of the power supply that on one of those occasions, took out the lights on the runway for a period of time. That obviously made me concerned.”
Mr Wicking also said he believed Heathrow’s Terminal 5 could have been ready to receive repatriation flights by “late morning” on the day of the closure, and that “there was opportunity also to get flights out”.
However, Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye said keeping the airport open during last month’s power outage would have been “disastrous”.
There was a risk of having “literally tens of thousands of people stranded in the airport, where we have nowhere to put them”, Mr Woldbye said.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Another 23 female potential victims have reported that they may have been raped by Zhenhao Zou – the Chinese PhD student detectives believe may be one of the country’s most prolific sex offenders.
The Metropolitan Police launched an international appeal after Zou, 28, was convicted of drugging and raping 10 women following a trial at the Inner London Crown Court last month.
Detectives have not confirmed whether the 23 people who have come forward add to their estimates that more than 50 other women worldwide may have been targeted by the University College London student.
Metropolitan Police commander Kevin Southworth said: “We have victims reaching out to us from different parts of the globe.
“At the moment, the primary places where we believe offending may have occurred at this time appears to be both in England, here in London, and over in China.”
Image: Metropolitan Police commander Kevin Southworth
Zou lived in a student flat in Woburn Place, near Russell Square in central London, and later in a flat in the Uncle building in Churchyard Row in Elephant and Castle, south London.
He had also been a student at Queen’s University Belfast, where he studied mechanical engineering from 2017 until 2019. Police say they have not had any reports from Belfast but added they were “open-minded about that”.
“Given how active and prolific Zou appears to have been with his awful offending, there is every prospect that he could have offended anywhere in the world,” Mr Southworth said.
“We wouldn’t want anyone to write off the fact they may have been a victim of his behaviour simply by virtue of the fact that you are from a certain place.
“The bottom line is, if you think you may have been affected by Zhenhao Zou or someone you know may have been, please don’t hold back. Please make contact with us.”
Image: Pic: Met Police
Zou used hidden or handheld cameras to record his attacks, and kept the footage and often the women’s belongings as souvenirs.
He targeted young, Chinese women, inviting them to his flat for drinks or to study, before drugging and assaulting them.
Zou was convicted of 11 counts of rape, with two of the offences relating to one victim, as well as three counts of voyeurism, 10 counts of possession of an extreme pornographic image, one count of false imprisonment and three counts of possession of a controlled drug with intent to commit a sexual offence, namely butanediol.
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Moment police arrest rapist student
Mr Southworth said: “Of those 10 victims, several were not identified so as we could be sure exactly where in the world they were, but their cases, nevertheless, were sufficient to see convictions at court.
“There were also, at the time, 50 videos that were identified of further potential female victims of Zhenhao Zou’s awful crimes.
“We are still working to identify all of those women in those videos.
“We have now, thankfully, had 23 victim survivors come forward through the appeal that we’ve conducted, some of whom may be identical with some of the females that we saw in those videos, some of whom may even turn out to be from the original indicted cases.”
Mr Southworth added: “Ultimately, now it’s the investigation team’s job to professionally pick our way through those individual pieces of evidence, those individual victims’ stories, to see if we can identify who may have been a victim, when and where, so then we can bring Zou to justice for the full extent of his crimes.”
Mr Southworth said more resources will be put into the investigation, and that detectives are looking to understand “what may have happened without wishing to revisit the trauma, but in a way that enables [the potential victims] to give evidence in the best possible way.”
The Metropolitan Police is appealing to anyone who thinks they may have been targeted by Zou to contact the force either by emailing survivors@met.police.uk, or via the major incident public portal on the force’s website.
An 11-year-old girl who went missing after entering the River Thames has been named as Kaliyah Coa.
An “extensive search” has been carried out after the incident in east London at around 1.30pm on Monday.
Police said the child had been playing during a school inset day and entered the water near Barge House Causeway, North Woolwich.
A recovery mission is now said to be under way to find Kaliyah along the Thames, with the Metropolitan Police carrying out an extensive examination of the area.
Image: Barge House Causeway is a concrete slope in North Woolwich leading into the Thames
Chief Superintendent Dan Card thanked members of the public and emergency teams who responded to “carry out a large-scale search during a highly pressurised and distressing time”.
He also confirmed drone technology and boats were being used to “conduct a thorough search over a wide area”.
He added: “Our specialist officers are supporting Kaliyah’s family through this deeply upsetting time and our thoughts go out to all those impacted by what has happened.”
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“Equally we appreciate this has affected the wider community who have been extremely supportive. You will see extra officers in the area during the coming days.”
On Monday, Kerry Benadjaoud, a 62-year-old resident from the area, said she heard of the incident from her next-door neighbour, who “was outside doing her garden and there was two little kids running, and they said ‘my friend’s in the water'”.
When she arrived at the scene with a life ring, a man told her he had called the police, “but he said at the time he could see her hands going down”.
Barge House Causeway is a concrete slope that goes directly into the River Thames and is used to transport boats.
Residents pointed out that it appeared to be covered in moss and was slippery.