Marchioness
30 years on
‘I was the last
survivor’
Bake Off Why is the
new cast so young?
News, page 7 Features, page 17BRITAIN’S BEST QUALITY NEWSPAPERNEWS BRIEFING
Children ‘are being
enticed to gamble’
Tens of thousands of children are
being enticed into gambling through
the social media feeds of betting firms,
an investigation has found. About
41,000 UK followers of gambling-
related accounts on Twitter are under
16, according to Bristol University and
the Demos think tank. They found
children made up 6 per cent of
followers of traditional gambling
accounts and 28 per cent responding
to e-sports betting tweets in the UK.
Page 2newsPuzzles 16
Obituaries 25
TV listings 33
Weather 34
‘He’s terrified of a no-deal
Brexit, but he thinks
the measles threat has
been exaggerated’British rover to search
for life buried on Mars
A British-built rover is to drill deep
into the surface of Mars looking for
signs of alien habitation.
Engineers at Airbus in Hertfordshire
are this week installing cameras on the
European Space Agency’s ExoMars
vehicle before it leaves for testing in
France. If all goes to plan, the system,
designed by engineers at University
College London, will be launched from
Kazakhstan next year and will land on
Mars on March 19 2021. The rover
named “Rosalind Franklin” after the
first person to photograph DNA, will
drill 6ft into the ground for samples.
Page 9newsSudan dictator ‘given
$90m by Saudis’
Senior Saudi royals gave Omar
al-Bashir, the former dictator of Sudan,
$90 million (£74 million) before he was
ousted, investigators said at the start of
his corruption trial. The 75-year-old is
charged with illicit possession of
foreign currency and accepting gifts
through unofficial channels.
Page 11worldJohnson
tears up
backstop in
talks push
NCA declares war on ‘unexplained wealth’ of county lines drug gangs
By Charles Hymas
Home AffAirs editorCOUNTY lines gang bosses will have
their property, luxury cars and watches
seized by police under laws designed
to tackle corrupt oligarchs, says the
head of the National Crime Agency.
In an exclusive interview with The
Daily Telegraph, Lynne Owens said
NCA investigators already had a num-
ber of gangs “in their sights” and would
force the crime bosses to account for
their wealth or have it seized.
It came as she warned that the Gov-ernment’s focus on boosting bobbies
on the beat could hamper the fight
against the drugs gangs by “squeezing”
funding to the NCA and other units.
She said a failure to combat organ-
ised crime could result in more vio-
lence on the streets, more children
abused online and more cyber attacks.
Ms Owens said £2.7 billion more was
needed to tackle the “staggering dam-
age” caused to Britain by the 181,
people the NCA estimates are involved
in serious and organised crime at a cost
of £37 billion a year. The NCA issued
the UK’s first “unexplained wealth or-der” last year against the wife of an
Azerbaijani banker who spent £16 mil-
lion in Harrods. Now, Ms Owens said,
the order could be used against county
lines gang chiefs who use social media
to lure recruits with online displays of
their flashy lifestyle and wealth.
“I think you best tackle the drugs
trade by making it not pay,” she said.
“And actually, we now have the powers
to do it.” A single “county line” – where
drugs are shipped from cities to towns
miles away – can make £800,000 in a
year. The number of lines have more
than doubled in 12 months to 2,000,worth £500 million annually. She said
the NCA will use account-freezing and
recovery orders as well as “unexplained
wealth orders”, which were a vital “in-
vestigative tool where you’ve identified
somebody might have 10 houses, butthey’re currently on benefits.” She
added: “And if they can’t account for
the wealth, then we can then apply to
the court to seize their property.”
The NCA would target people like
“jobless” Londoner Anthony Okopie,
29, who was jailed for 12 years for run-
ning county lines that took high purity
heroin and cocaine into Plymouth. He
spent thousands on cars, designer
watches and trainers, banking more
than £227,000 over three years.
Previously, police could only seize
assets after a prosecution. Asked if they
Continued on Page 2FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA / AP / POOL EPA
Sir Elton John has leapt to the defence of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex amid “relentless and untrue character assassinations” over
the couple’s private jet flights. Sir Elton said he paid for a “carbon neutral” flight to his home in France for their short break. Page 3A knight to the rescue
PM demands new arrangements with EU
after clash with Irish premier over border
By Christopher Hope
CHief PolitiCAl CorresPondentBORIS JOHNSON last night tore up the
Northern Irish backstop and demanded
new terms for the UK to leave the EU
with a deal in 10 weeks’ time.
In a letter to the EU he said the back-
stop was “anti-democratic and incon-
sistent with the sovereignty of the UK”
and it risked “weakening the delicate
balance embodied in the Belfast (Good
Friday) Agreement”. He said: “The back-
stop cannot form part of an agreed
Withdrawal Agreement. That is a fact
that we must both acknowledge.” He
proposed replacing the backstop with
“flexible and creative” arrangements to
manage a soft border between Ireland
and Northern Ireland after Brexit.
It came after a one-hour phone call in
which the Prime Minister and Leo Var-
adkar, the Irish premier, clashed over
the backstop. Tomorrow Mr Johnson
heads to Berlin for dinner with Angela
Merkel, the German chancellor, before
lunch in Paris with Emmanuel Macron,
the French president, on Thursday, to
persuade them both to agree that the EU
should remove the backstop.
The week ends with Mr Johnson’s
first appearance on the global stage
when he represents Britain at the G
meeting of world leaders in Biarritz in
the south of France.
Mr Johnson has made the removal of
the backstop – which will keep the UK in
a customs union and the single market
after Brexit until a solution is found to
prevent a hard border – a central part of
his plans to take the UK out of the EU by
Oct 31. In his letter to Donald Tusk, the
EU Council president, he said he could
not endorse “full alignment with wide
areas of the single market and customsunion” after Brexit. “That cannot be the
basis for the future relationship and it is
not a basis for the sound governance of
Northern Ireland.”
He told Mr Tusk both the UK and EU
should agree neither side “will put in in-
frastructure, checks or controls at the
border” and said the backstop should be
replaced with “alternative arrange-
ments” north and south to allow the
sides to monitor movements of goods
and people without a hard border.
The majority of MPs would agree to a
deal without the backstop, he said, add-
ing Parliament could act rapidly if it
reached “a satisfactory agreement that
did not contain the backstop”.
Last night’s call with Mr Varadkar
broke up with neither side agreeing a
way forward. They will meet for further
talks in Dublin next month but a joint
statement said: “The PM indicated the
Withdrawal Agreement in its current
form will not get through the House of
Commons, that the backstop would need
to be removed and that an alternative
solution is required. The Taoiseach
reiterated the EU27 position that the
agreement cannot be reopened and
emphasised the legally operable guaran-
tee to ensure no hard border and contin-
ued free trade on the island of Ireland.”
Senator Neale Richmond, EU affairs
spokesman for Fine Gael, Ireland’s
ruling party, last night tweeted:
“Nothing new, alas.”
Last night, an unnamed EU diplomat
representing a country traditionally
friendly to the UK, said: “Hope and im-
agination don’t keep the border away.
This letter is not request to renegotiate- it’s an attempt to avoid it at all cost.”
Reports: Page 4
William Hague: Page 14Lynne Owens, the
National Crime
Agency chief, aims
to make county lines
operations ‘not pay’Tuesday 20 August 2019 **^ telegraph.co.uk No 51,088 £ 2.00 | Subscriber price just £ 1.9 ujöeöu#yxc-xc ÊÓËÄ
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