During a hearing at Exeter Magistrates' Court, South West Water Ltd pleaded guilty to an offence under s70(1) of the Water Industry Act 1991 to supplying water unfit for human consumption.

Some people were treated in hospital and hundreds of others were also ill during the outbreak in Brixham in May 2024, after the water supply was contaminated by cryptosporidium, a parasite that causes sickness and diarrhoea.

A "boil water" notice was issued to around 17,000 households and businesses in the area, warning people not to use tap water for drinking without boiling it and cooling it first.

For some households, the notice remained in place for eight weeks.

The water firm was prosecuted by the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) and faces a fine when it is sentenced at the same court on 2 June.

Howard Leithead, representing the DWI, had asked for the case to be sent to the crown court for sentencing, arguing it is "high-profile or exceptionally sensitive", adding some complaints say the effects were "long felt after the lifting of the boil water notices".

But Dominic Kay KC, representing South West Water, said the firm had pleaded guilty at the first opportunity and had submitted a basis of plea, saying the case could be sentenced by a district judge in the magistrates' court.

District Judge Stuart Smith rejected the prosecution's submission and said he would keep jurisdiction.

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South West Water owner Pennon previously said the final bill for the outbreak reached nearly £40m, adding it was facing costs of around £36m for the supply contamination incident and its "reshaping and transformation programmes".

After the hearing, the Liberal Democrat MP for South Devon, Caroline Voaden, said: "This admission of guilt has been a long time coming. I am glad that SWW have owned up to their serious failures. This awful event should never have happened.

"But the mismatch between rhetoric and action plagues our broken water industry. Whether it is protecting customers or the environment, too many water firms say one thing, then do another."

Marcus Rink, chief inspector of the Drinking Water Inspectorate, said: "The company's decision to plead guilty to the offences relating to the Brixham incident reflects the seriousness of the failings identified during our investigation.

"While such incidents are very rare, this incident had a significant impact on the public and the wider community."

Water minister Emma Hardy added: "Contamination of drinking water is rare but it is utterly unacceptable.

"The communities affected by this abhorrent incident in Brixham deserve answers and today's guilty plea is a crucial step toward accountability."

No political issue is more potent or more divisive than the question of immigration.

In a nation not often roused to public anger, the streets of small towns have been convulsed with local fury over the presence of asylum seekers, particularly where they have been housed in much-loved local hotels.

And the seemingly endless stream of small boats crossing the English Channel, despite promises by all parties, has served as a conspicuous demonstration of political impotence.

Britain's conventional parties are facing an existential crisis. For the first time in our modern political history, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have all fallen behind Reform and the Greens in popularity.

Sir Keir Starmer and his government have to make a decision. Do they lean left, under pressure from Zack Polanski's Greens? Or should they acknowledge the extraordinary advance of Nigel Farage and Reform UK, which has now topped the polls consistently for almost a year?

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No figure will be more important in signalling which way Labour turns than Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary. Herself the child of immigrants and a practising Muslim, she is, this week, signalling a tough line on migration that would smash many of the taboos that constrained her predecessors.

In a special hour-long programme, the home secretary makes her case for radical changes by Sir Keir's government - and the defence of her controversial plans is aimed as much at her own party as it is at the wider electorate.

Some might ask, can Shabana save Labour?

Watch Trevor Phillips' exclusive interview with Shabana Mahmood in a Politics Hub special from 7pm on Thursday 5 March across all Sky News platforms.

The Labour meeting on Wednesday afternoon follows long-held concerns among the party's left that Number 10 has ignored its progressive voter base by trying to "out Reform Reform".

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One MP present at the meeting held by the cabinet minister, who oversees party strategy, told Sky News there was "a keenness to listen to experiences from people around the country who'd faced challenges from the Greens in the past".

However, others were sceptical about whether the government would take their concerns on board and what, if anything, could be done to turn things around while Sir Keir Starmer was still in charge.

Labour MPs are also split on attacks on the Greens, with some saying the party's by-election campaign was too negative but another arguing they must be called out on their "batsh*t views on defence".

The result on Thursday saw Labour lose a constituency it has controlled since the 1930s, coming third behind the Greens and Reform UK.

There was more bad news this week as a national YouGov opinion poll showed the Greens had now leapfrogged Labour into second place behind Reform UK.

The Labour Party is now said to be reassessing its voter coalition, as it gears up for potentially catastrophic local elections in May.

One MP at Wednesday's meeting said several colleagues raised the need to be more positive when campaigning, saying both Labour and the Greens "went low" and that Labour "needs to become the party of hope again".

Some MPs believe Labour focused too much of the campaign attacking the Greens on issues like legalising drugs rather than making a positive case for what the party has achieved so far.

However others have warned that winning back progressive voters doesn't mean going soft on the Greens.

One MP told Sky News: "We've got to hold the Greens to account for their batsh*t views on defence that would risk Britain's security, but also be confident that we are a progressive party. There's a balance to be struck, and that's exactly where the public's at."

While there was said to be a big turnout at the meeting, none of the left-wing socialist campaign group (SCG) faction were expected to attend. They felt it would be a "waste of time", a source told Sky News.

A separate source on the left said MPs had been warning the leadership about the threat from the Greens for years and nothing short of a leadership change would fix that now.

However after Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham was blocked from standing in the seat, they conceded there was no obvious choice as a replacement leader.

While Angela Rayner is often tipped to be the left-wing candidate, many within the left believe she is too tainted by her tax scandal and association with the Starmer government, as Sky News has previously reported.

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to fight on following the by-election defeat.

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He has also promised a better culture of engagement with backbenchers, telling them in a letter that Number 10 would host more policy roundtables and drop ins for Labour MPs to discuss policy issues.

One MP said: "The party that listens is usually the one that wins."

However other backbenchers told Sky News they were sceptical of the prime minister's promise.

One said that while Number 10 claimed to want loyalty "what they actually want is obedience".

There has been a big push behind the scenes for action to address the expense of Plan 2 Student Loans, which some MPs hope could win back younger voters from the Greens. However, the Treasury is said to be resistant to the idea - meaning a fresh fight could be on the horizon.

Hannah Spencer's victory in Gorton and Denton has made her the fifth Green Party MP in the House of Commons - the highest number of seats the party has ever had.

The plumber and plasterer beat Reform UK into second place, with a majority of 4,402.

The Labour Party, which had previously held the seat at the last general election, came third.

At Prime Minister's Questions, after Donald Trump's "no Churchill" jibe, Sir Keir Starmer insisted the relationship was still alive and well.

He was challenged by a Conservative MP, Gareth Bacon, on whether his "dithering" had made the special relationship stronger or weaker.

Politics Hub: Follow the latest updates

The prime minister was probably expecting Kemi Badenoch to punch the bruise of the president's brutal tirade against him in the Oval Office.

But, inexplicably, she didn't, instead making a rather silly joke about "a sea of orcs and goons" - a reference to Lord Of The Rings - on the Labour back benches.

So the PM was probably more than happy to get the chance to sound all statesmanlike and answer Mr Bacon with a powerful defence of the special relationship.

And, for good measure, he took the opportunity to deliver a subtle but effective riposte to the mercurial and erratic president's "Churchill" onslaught.

"American planes are operating out of British bases," said the PM. "That's the special relationship in action.

"British jets are shooting down drones and missiles to protect American lives in the Middle East on our joint bases. That's the special relationship in action.

"Sharing intelligence every day to keep our people safe. That's the special relationship in action."

And then came a withering put-down. "Hanging on to President Trump's latest words is not the special relationship in action," he concluded.

Note that the PM said the president's "latest words". After all, President Trump has changed his mind on the controversial Chagos deal several times.

It's fair to say that never has a British prime minister faced such a tough challenge in maintaining the "special relationship" with a US president as Sir Keir has over the past year.

In his Oval Office salvo against the prime minister, the president said Sir Keir had been "very, very unco-operative" by initially refusing to allow the US to use the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands.

He didn't mention it, but no doubt the president was also irked this week by Sir Keir's dismissal in the Commons on Monday of "regime change from the skies".

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In times of war, disputes between US presidents and British prime ministers don't just happen between Republican presidents and Labour PMs or Democrats and Conservatives.

And it's not always rosy between prime ministers and presidents of the two sister parties. There have been big fallings out: over Suez, Vietnam and the Caribbean island of Grenada.

It was Winston Churchill himself who first used the phrase "special relationship", defining the alliance between the UK and the US in a speech in Missouri in 1946, in which he also coined the phrase "the Iron Curtain".

That speech was introduced by president Harry Truman, a Democrat, with whom Churchill had attended the Potsdam Conference in 1945 to negotiate the terms of the end of the Second World War.

Churchill also had a close relationship with another Democrat president, Franklin D Roosevelt, and their close bond during the Second World War was described as a friendship that saved the world.

But Churchill's Conservative successor Anthony Eden fell out badly with the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower over the Suez Crisis in the mid-1950s.

Eisenhower bitterly opposed Eden's botched attempts with France to regain control of the Suez Canal after its nationalisation and blockade by Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was the beginning of the end for Eden.

And it took until the early 1960s and the unlikely friendship between stuffy Harold Macmillan and charismatic John F Kennedy for the damage done to the special relationship by Suez to be repaired.

"Between them they had rescued the special relationship after the rupture of the Suez Crisis and done so at a time of uniquely high tensions around the world," wrote British author Christopher Sandford in Harold And Jack, The Remarkable Friendship Of Prime Minister Macmillan And President Kennedy.

It was the early 1960s and they were dangerous times, rather like now, of course. Back then it was the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of nuclear weapons.

But it was a relationship abruptly cut short in 1963, by the demise of "Supermac", caused by the John Profumo sex scandal and then JFK's assassination in Dallas just a month later.

After Kennedy, the so-called "special relationship" was in trouble once again, when Labour's Harold Wilson rejected pressure from US president Lyndon Johnson to send British troops to Vietnam.

And even though Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were ideological soulmates, Thatcher was furious when she wasn't consulted before the Americans invaded Grenada, a commonwealth nation, in 1983 to topple a Marxist regime.

Even worse, according to Thatcher allies, a year earlier Reagan had stayed neutral during the Falklands war. He wanted a negotiated settlement and didn't want to humiliate Argentina. She was determined to recapture the islands.

Reagan said he couldn't understand why two US allies were arguing over "that little ice-cold bunch of land down there".

Sound familiar? On Tuesday in his broadside against Sir Keir in the Oval Office, President Trump called Chagos "that stupid island that they have".

Bill Clinton's political soulmate was Sir Tony Blair. They were as close as Reagan and Thatcher.

But it was with the Republican George W Bush that Labour's Sir Tony embarked on the defining mission of his premiership, the Iraq War. It was to be the turning point of Sir Tony's decade in Number 10.

He was branded a liar over claims about Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction", he was vilified by the Labour left, and Iraq haunts Labour to this day.

This week, as Sir Keir spent nearly two hours answering questions from MPs on Iran in the Commons on Monday, the spectre of Iraq again hung heavily over the Labour prime minister and his backbenchers.

In his statement, Sir Keir told MPs: "We all remember the mistakes of Iraq. And we have learned those lessons. Any UK actions must always have a lawful basis and a viable thought-through plan."

A lawful basis and a thought-through plan. That sums up the current rift between the prime minister and the president over Iran.

And it's the latest example that proves that for the much vaunted "special relationship" between the UK and the United States, wars spell trouble and in many cases threaten to put the relationship at risk.

For several days following the start of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the country felt like a lone EU voice questioning the legality of the operation.

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Then it went further, refusing to let the Americans use Spanish bases to launch their military operations.

Donald Trump rewarded these actions by threatening Spain with a trade war.

"We're going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don't want anything to do with Spain," he said while flanked by a conspicuously silent German chancellor.

But Spain isn't budging. Today, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez addressed the nation, summing up his position in four words, "no to the war".

He said this stance was by no means a sign of support for the Ayotollahs; instead, he was calling on Iran, Israel and the US to stop the fighting before it was too late.

"Twenty-three years ago, another US administration dragged us into a war with the Middle East. It triggered the largest wave of insecurity our continent has experienced since the fall of the Berlin Wall," Mr Sanchez said.

He also warned that the war risked "playing Russian roulette" with millions of lives.

Clearly not afraid to challenge the US president further, he said governments were meant to improve people's lives and provide solutions to problems, not make them worse, adding: "It is unacceptable that leaders who are incapable of fulfilling their duties try to cover up their failure with the smoke of war."

Ouch!

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Trump isn't used to being so openly defied. As I write, we are still awaiting his reaction to this morning's speech, but it feels unlikely that he will let it pass unchallenged.

Others have already reacted, the Spanish vice president of the European Commission, Teresa Ribera, throwing her weight behind her country, denouncing Trump's threats as detrimental to global stability.

"The tension arising from this way of relating to third parties, whether it be British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, or Pedro Sanchez, is deeply disruptive for societies, for peace, cooperation, and also for the economy," she said.

Meanwhile, sources in France and Spain told us the French president was planning on calling Sanchez to show his allegiance.

In a softer tone last night, Emmanuel Macron joined the Spanish prime minister in calling the legality of the strikes into question, concluding that they were conducted "outside of international law" and that Paris "cannot approve of them".

But what about Germany - the EU's biggest beast?

While Friedrich Merz didn't join Trump in his criticism of the Spanish stance on Iran, Germany's chancellor certainly didn't jump to Spain's defence.

In fact, he later mentioned that they were still negotiating with Madrid to up their NATO contributions - another sore spot for the US president.

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When questioned by reporters about this later, the chancellor said he addressed the attacks on Spain and the UK in private, reminding Donald Trump that Spain is an EU member, so cannot be singled out for treatment.

"I did not want to escalate or prolong the debate publicly," Merz explained.

While his reasoning - that an open challenge to Trump would have likely just enflamed the situation - makes sense given the experience of Zelenskyy last year, the Spanish are unimpressed.

Spain's foreign minister expressed his "surprise" at the chancellor's behaviour, pointedly remarking: "I cannot imagine Chancellor (Angela) Merkel or (Olaf) Scholz making such remarks."

While other Spanish sources went further, saying: "Merz had an attitude not befitting a European leader who defends the unity of his partners."

It seems by deciding not to antagonise Donald Trump, Friedrich Merz has put himself firmly in Madrid's firing line.