Kitchens and bathrooms will be utilised, and food must be prepared in salubrious conditions. While none of us should be striving for festive perfection, perhaps it is time to step away from the decorating (just temporarily of course) and tick off some of the less appealing tasks on your to-do list? Here is our unholy trinity of pre-Christmas chores.

Let’s start with a job that most of us dread. My oven was not fit for a frozen pizza, let alone a turkey, so I scrolled through TikTok, hoping to find an amazing hack to make the job a doddle. Sure enough, multiple creators had posted videos showing how to clean an oven using only a lemon. The method involves putting a dish of sliced lemon and water in a hot oven for half an hour, leaving it to cool and then wiping the oven with a sponge. It sounded so simple and I wish I could tell you it worked — but it didn’t.

Enter Jessica Turner, a cleaning content creator (@jessicamay_home) who says cleaning the oven is up there with cleaning the bin in terms of terrible (and avoided) chores. “It is one of those jobs that people delay until it looks bad enough,” she says. For a proper deep clean, her tips include using a foam cleaner — one you spray on and leave on for about 30 minutes — before wiping away the residue with a damp cloth or kitchen towel. For the oven racks she has two methods: put them in the dishwasher on a hot wash, or pop them in the bathtub with hot water and a dishwasher tablet. I tried both with good results and only had to do minimal scraping of burnt bits.

What is important, Turner says, is not to leave it too long between cleans: “When you are able to keep on top of your oven, you will enjoy [cleaning] it a lot more.” She also suggests getting an inexpensive liner for the bottom of the oven. “I whip out my liner once a week and wipe it and feel like I have a nice clean oven again.”

The freezer

Next up is making vital space in the freezer. With no room for ice cubes, let alone frozen canapés or emergency milk, I approached Kate Hall, @thefullfreezer, who teaches people how to freeze almost everything successfully (including prepped veg and sauces for Christmas dinner) and also runs a regular freezer clear-out challenge, because it’s impossible to have an organised, ready-to-cook-from freezer when everything is a total mess.

Hall walks me through her five steps to freezer happiness, the first one being to clear everything out drawer by drawer, removing anything that you are never going to eat: “If something in there is horrible, I give people permission to get rid of it,” she says. Hall also suggests removing excess packaging and placing solitary fishfingers etc in freezer bags.

The next step is to itemise the contents, by taking a picture or writing a list. Then everything goes back into the freezer. Next it is time to go through your list and divide the food into simple categories that work for your space or number of drawers, for example, “bakery”, “fruit and veg” or “meat and fish”. Then open the freezer again and put things in their new places, labelling drawers if you wish.

Finally, empowered by your inventory, it’s time to eat. Hall suggests thinking of three meals to cook this week using your existing freezer stash — and it feels a bit like free food. “When people realise just how much food they have already got, it is really, really satisfying to use it,” she says.

The bathroom

Last on the unholy list is a deep clean of the bathroom. This task can feel quite epic, but Lyndsay Gardner, a decluttering and cleaning influencer (@lyndsay.and.the.girls), promises that it can be enjoyable, especially with a good podcast to accompany your efforts. I ask her about sink blockages. She suggests pouring a couple of cups of bicarbonate down the plug before spraying the plughole with white vinegar — let it bubble and fizz then wash it down with a kettle full of boiling water. What about the shower screen? I tell her that mine is permanently covered in a thick layer of limescale: “My biggest tip is to squeegee the screen every single time you have a shower.”

Gardner says that narrow-edged brushes — all the rage in TikTok cleaning circles — are good for getting the dirt out from around the taps. She also recommends a battery-powered scrubbing brush, ideal for those nail varnish streaks that sometimes get left on the bath. Also popular on social media is a floor scrubbing brush with an integrated squeegee, from the Dustpan & Brush Store. There are many videos online of people scrubbing their floors and then using the squeegee to soak up dirty water, ready to be wiped up with a kitchen towel. Oddly satisfying.

My shower screen continues to give me grief, though, and various limescale removers don’t shift the dirt. The miracle cure turns out to be a simple mixture of vinegar, washing-up liquid and water — thanks to @carolina.mccauley on TikTok. McCauley also suggests keeping a “dishwand” filled with white vinegar and washing-up liquid in the shower so you can clean the screen daily. I know I won’t do this but I’m sharing the tip in case somebody wants to make it their new year’s resolution.

Purdy & Figg have released limited-edition Christmas scents: Frankincense & Myrrh, Orange & Clove and Fir & Bergamot. They are available as concentrates that can be added to a reusable bottle and topped up with tap water to make a multisurface cleaner, from £15, purdyandfigg.com

This Lakeland sonic cleaning tool has four different brushes and is ideal for getting into small corners or around plugholes. No elbow grease needed, £22.99, lakeland.co.uk

These between-the-gaps brushes from Lakeland are perfect for cleaning around taps and they also work a treat on the shower screen seal strip, £4.99 for two, lakeland.co.uk

Tiktok’s favourite scrubbing brush has a built-in squeegee blade, £12.99, thedustpanandbrushstore.co.uk

Using a liner, like this Teflon one by Oven Mate, helps to protect the base of the oven from drips and spills and saves on cleaning time, £11, johnlewis.com

’Tis the season to swap your sponge for a scratch-resistant Scrub Daddy, £3.49, scrubdaddy.co.uk

The ChatGPT creator is advertising two new roles, for an election programme manager and a rapid response lead. They will “identify election-related risks and design, coordinate and implement mitigation plans”, according to the job ads, which offer a salary range of $190,000 to $280,000.

Business leaders and politicians gathered in Davos have honed in on the complications thrown up for the democratic process by misinformation and bias from the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence.

The World Economic Forum kicked off with a survey warning that election disruption from AI posed “the biggest global risk in 2024”.

The job ads came as Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said at the conference: “I believe that America is gonna be fine, no matter what happens in this election. I believe that AI is going to be fine, no matter what happens in this election, and we will have to work very hard to make it so.”

The ad for the rapid response lead said: “We are seeking a leader who can independently develop our playbook and drive internal coordination around high-stakes incidents, including critical moments around elections and civil unrest.”

OpenAI is trying to get on the front foot because companies have been increasingly drawn into the debate about fairness in elections.

Meta, for example, was heavily criticised for its delay in removing Donald Trump’s profile from the platform following the last election, after it was used to co-ordinate action among his supporters which led to a violent storming of the Capitol building in Washington in 2021.

In a recent blog post, OpenAI said: “As we prepare for elections in 2024 across the world’s largest democracies, our approach is to continue our platform safety work by elevating accurate voting information, enforcing measured policies, and improving transparency.”

The data centre, which will be built on a 33-acre site in Hertfordshire, will power Google’s cloud and AI services for British customers and will be the company’s third big site around the capital, after King’s Cross and Central Saint Giles in London.

It marks the latest investment by a leading American technology company in Britain, coming less than two months after Microsoft said it would invest £2.5 billion to expand data centres for artificial intelligence nationwide.

• Google unveils ‘future of work’ in its $1bn London property

Google already has more than 7,000 staff in the UK and sites in London and Manchester. Its DeepMind AI research and development laboratory is also based in the capital.

Ruth Porat, 66, the chief financial officer of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said the Waltham Cross site would “create construction and technical jobs for the local community”.

Rishi Sunak, who has been wooing Silicon Valley companies to invest in Britain over the past year, said the Google investment “is testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge potential for growth. Foreign investment creates jobs and grows all regions of our economy and investments like this will help to drive growth in the decade ahead.”

The announcement was made on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Jeremy Hunt has been meeting the world’s business leaders to sell the UK as a destination for foreign investment and technology jobs.

The chancellor told a panel that Britain was the “third largest tech economy in the world after the US and China” and he called on global governments to adopt a “light touch” approach to regulating AI. He added that Google’s investment was “a huge vote of confidence in Britain as the largest tech economy in Europe, bringing with it good jobs and the infrastructure we need to support the industries of the future”.

Ben Barringer, technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, a wealth manager, said the investment was a “drop in the ocean” for Google and “simply represents prudent business. The announcement on the Google data centre is a good start, but lots more is required before the UK can start thinking in such grand terms as a future Silicon Valley.”

Google said it had started to build the facility on a 33-acre site in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, with an aim for construction to be completed by 2025. The company said it was too early to say how many jobs would be created at the site, but it confirmed the centre would require engineers, project managers, data centre technicians, electricians, catering and security personnel.

It adds to its 27 data centres worldwide, with sites in 11 countries, including 13 in the United States.

Google said that the site, which it bought in October 2020, also would be constructed in line with its net-zero aims, with plans for the significant heat generated by the data centre to be used to heat homes and businesses in the local area.

Musk, 52, is said to have taken a range of illegal mind-altering substances, including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and magic mushrooms, according to an extensive report in The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times.

The article paints a picture of drug-taking at hedonistic parties in glamorous locations around the world, attended by sources who alleged that they had signed non-disclosure agreements in which they swore not to discuss Musk’s drug use.

Ketamine is his drug of choice, according to the Journal, with sources saying they were concerned that his drug use could harm his businesses or his health.

The newspaper recounts that Musk appeared at a public SpaceX meeting slurring and incomprehensible, leading to unsubstantiated speculation that he was taking drugs.

In response Musk, who has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, and has trouble sleeping, posted on X/Twitter early on Monday morning: “TMZ has vastly higher standards than the WSJ (actually).” He was comparing the American business newspaper unfavourablywith the tabloid news organisation famous for covering celebrity gossip and scandal.

The reports are significant because Musk is a hands-on entrepreneur whose business and personal lives are heavily entwined. Furthermore, SpaceX works closely with Nasa, the American space agency, and the Pentagon and drug use could jeopardise these contracts.

Musk’s drug-taking is said to be affecting his business relationships. Linda Johnson Rice, a former Tesla director, was so concerned about his habit and volatile behaviour that she did not stand for re-election to the board of the electric car company, according to the Journal, quoting sources.

This is not the first time that reports have appeared about the state of Musk’s mental health and drug use. In 2018 the billionaire did a long interview with The New York Times under the headline Elon Musk Details Excruciating Personal Toll of Tesla Turmoil. It sent Tesla shares down 9 per cent.

In a subsequent effort to quash speculation that there was alarm around his health, he joined the Joe Rogan podcast, where he appeared to take a puff of a joint that the interviewer offered him after being told that smoking marijuana was “totally legal” because they were in California. Images from the studio went viral and Tesla’s share price fell again.

In a recent biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson, the SpaceX owner said this event had resulted in Nasa, a key customer, subjecting him to “random drug tests for a couple of years”. He added: “Fortunately, I really don’t like doing illegal drugs.”

Alex Spiro, one of Musk’s lawyers, reiterated this point in response to the latest allegations in the Journal and told the newspaper that Musk was “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test”. He added that there were “other false facts” in the article.

There are innumerable examples of the businessman’s erratic and unpredictable behaviour. On one occasion, he announced that he was taking Tesla private on Twitter, flouting US financial market regulations and landing him with a $20 million fine. After he committed to buying Twitter, he tried to wriggle out of the deal, almost culminating in a court case. He eventually won a defamation case in which he called a British caver who helped in the rescue of trapped Thai boys a “pedo guy”.

Tesla shares rose 1.3 per cent, or $2.96, to close at $240.45 in New York.

Topping the Stoxx Europe 600 index has been the early feat of the new boss, Tufan Erginbilgic: the ex-BP exec who inherited a share price of 93¼p when he took the engine maker’s controls at the start of 2023 before piloting it through £3. His swift success brings obvious questions, too. How much of it was down to him? How much was luck? And how much extra is to come?

Plenty of new bosses begin their tenure with a spot of kitchen-sinking. But Erginbilgic didn’t need to bother with that. The business had been nicely kitchen-sunk for him: first by hapless or luckless former bosses, then by Covid. His predecessor-but-one was the profits warning machine John Rishton. And then came a chap with all the luck of Devon Loch — Warren East. His endless revamp was finally getting somewhere when it flew headlong into a global pandemic. The result? A rescue refuelling, topped off with an overly delayed £2 billion rights issue at a pitiful 32p.

So when Erginbilgic pitched up in melodramatic style, he had a right to label Rolls a “burning platform” that had been “grossly mismanaged” — the Trent 1000 engine fiasco under East that cost the group £2 billion being a case in point. Yet his timing was also impeccable: just as the long-haul aviation market bounced back, with the Ukraine war also giving Rolls’ power systems and defence wings a boost. On top, he inherited a leaner business, thanks to East’s 9,000 Covid job cuts.

Even so, Erginbilgic has brought far more focus. Rolls makes money at its core aerospace wing from selling and servicing engines and from simply having them in the skies, so-called flying hours. And, from the September before taking charge, Erginbilgic benchmarked Rolls against all its big rivals, not least GE and France’s Safran.

The upshot? He hit the ground running, removing unnecessary spending from 2023’s budget, while bringing a plausible strategy to boost margins. It allowed him to raise guidance at his first full-year figures last February, with investors quickly warming to the no-nonsense leader fresh from two BP turnarounds: its vast downstream operations and its lubricants arm.

At Rolls, Erginbilgic found a business that had spent 25 years chasing market share: the wrong emphasis when the group already had more than a third of it. Yet, in doing so, it had racked up £1.6 billion of lossmaking contracts: a figure he cut by £200 million within his first six months. To instil a culture focused on better pricing, he changed a hundred direct reports among senior management. So far, the price rises have not stopped Rolls winning orders, either, as a Turkish Airlines contract showed.

All this has given Erginbilgic the credibility to claim he can take 2022’s civil aerospace margins of 2.5 per cent to “15 per cent to 17 per cent” by 2027 — towards the likes of GE’s. All the same, hitting double-digit margins is the quick-win easy bit. The rest depends on improving operations, such as cutting engine maintenance.

His promise to crank up free cashflow from 2022’s £505 million to £3.1 billion by 2027 also has to be taken on trust, while dividend-free Rolls still has too much debt — £2.85 billion — and a credit rating that’s junk. A planned £1.5 billion of disposals will help. But on shares now at 298¼p, a forward earnings multiple of 29 times leaves scant room for error.

There are investment decisions to come, too, not least over modular nuclear reactors, while Rolls’ power systems wing makes diesel engines. Still, no question Erginbilgic is off to a flyer. And Rolls is trading better than it was when the shares were £1 higher in 2013. Don’t expect a rerun of 2023. But they should reach a higher altitude yet.

It’s all been gravy

Deck the aisles with loads of trolleys. Fa la la la la, la la la! Aldi and Lidl have each had a record Christmas. And who’s surprised about that? A cost of living crisis is made for the discounters — both of which got in quick with the bragging rights.

Aldi, where sales rose by 8 per cent to £1.5 billion in the four weeks to Christmas Eve, is styling itself “the UK’s lowest-priced supermarket”. Lidl, whose sales were up 12 per cent to some undisclosed figure, reckons it’s the “fastest-growing supermarket in the country”: a boast that would have added oomph if it had revealed how much it took.

Still, the price-cutting duo have done their bit to keep food inflation on a downward trend, falling for the eighth successive month to 6.7 per cent in December, on British Retail Consortium figures. And they’ve also highlighted something else: that their shoppers aren’t just on the hunt for cut-price staples.

Aldi’s were taken with its “alternative roasting joints” — the type you cook, not smoke — spanning such delights as the “wagyu rib joint” and “crackling gammon joint”. Lidl’s knocked back its Montaudon champagne, which apparently they prefer to Moët — at least in blind taste tests uncannily organised by Lidl. Whatever, with the pair setting the supermarket pace, none of Britain’s Big Four can afford to be a Christmas turkey.

Elon is ticked off

Happy new year, Elon Musk. First, Fidelity marking down its stake in his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, now X, by 71.5 per cent. Then, China’s BYD overtaking Tesla in the final quarter of 2023 as the world’s bestselling electric carmaker. Maybe Tesla would have struggled to keep up with the Chinese anyway. But it can’t help that Musk’s Twitter X-ploits saw him take his eyes off the road.

Taking its cue from a new law that aims to break the dominance of Big Tech, from March the new iPhone version of the Swedish streaming service in Europe will display offers and pricing to its members and will allow customers to make purchases, for example of new subscriptions, via the app. Customers elsewhere will see the old version.

It is the first example of a leading technology company making a change to how it does business in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. A similar bill is going through the House of Lords and Spotify hopes it will lead to these changes being made for consumers in Britain.

Apple previously had not allowed Spotify to advertise in-app promotions or discounts. It was a longstanding source of friction between the two companies, with Spotify arguing that it was unfair, especially because Apple is a fierce competitor in music streaming.

Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder, said recently that Apple was drowning out its competition by including a 30 per cent fee on in-app sales for companies with apps on the store: “They won’t charge 30 per cent [the App Store fee] to their own music service, so they should allow us not to pay 30 per cent so we can compete on a level playing field,” the Swedish entrepreneur, 40, said.

The changes will mean that customers in Europe now will be able to buy audiobooks or to upgrade their subscriptions by making a few clicks from within the Spotify app, rather than logging in via a web browser.

“For the first time, you will be able to see the price of an audiobook when browsing, easily buy it and quickly start listening,” Spotify said in a statement. “For years, even in our own app, Apple had these rules where we couldn’t tell you about offers, how much something costs or even where or how to buy it. We know, pretty nuts. The Digital Markets Act means that we’ll finally be able to share details about deals, promotions and better-value payment options in the EU.”

Avery Gardiner, Spotify’s lawyer, said that so far Apple had not pushed back on the changes. “I think it’s very clear that the Digital Markets Act says we can do these things,” she said.

Spotify and Apple have clashed many times over the years about the commercial terms of the iPhone company’s app store. In 2019, Spotify filed a competition complaint against Apple in Europe, alleging that the American group had abused its App Store dominance to give preferential treatment to Apple Music. In response, Apple argued that Spotify owed its success to Apple’s ecosystem. It prompted a European Commission investigation and a final ruling is expected to be delivered soon. The commission’s preliminary view, published last year, stated that Apple had abused its dominant position. If it is found guilty, the company could face a fine of up to 10 per cent of its annual sales.

Spotify is not the only company to object to the terms on Apple’s app store. Epic Games took the company to court over in-app transaction fees after it tried to introduce direct payments into its Fortnite game. It lost the dispute in the Supreme Court this month.

Gardiner would not say what the revenue implications would be of the changes for Spotify, only that “there will be opportunities for customers to benefit and from developers like Spotify to benefit”.

Alex Haffner, competition partner at Fladgate, the City law firm, said: “This is quite a bolshie move from Spotify, to say the least. It is pushing the envelope somewhat for them to claim that Apple’s 30 per cent developer fee structure will no longer prevail post-implementation of the Digital Markets Act, given, in particular, that Apple is in the middle of a legal challenge to any designation of its App Store as a “gatekeeper” subject to the provisions of the new legislation. Further, Apple has confirmed that it expects to have to make changes to its App Store policies, including the charging structure, but has not yet gone public on those.“What the statement shows, however, is that Spotify feels emboldened by the regulator headwinds facing Apple, and certain court cases that seem to have gone in favour of developers, to go on the offensive and effectively mark Apple’s card that absent significant changes to its App Store charging structure, Spotify and others will be going straight to the regulators to demand further action.”

Spotify is the world’s biggest music streaming business with 574 million monthly active users. While there are no official figures for Apple Music, analysts at JP Morgan estimate that it will hit 110 million subscribers by 2025.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Shares in Spotify closed on $211.18, up $4.47, or 2.2 per cent in New York, while Apple ended the session down by 68 cents, or 0.4 per cent, at $194.50.

Investment and confidence go hand-in-hand. Whether you’re a business contemplating a new piece of machinery or a person eyeing up a new car, a purchase is more likely if you’re confident about your future finances.

Confidence is contagious, as is negativity. Pessimistic forecasts tend to become the received wisdom and self-fulfilling prophecies.

We need to find ways to break the stalemate. PwC’s latest annual survey of 4,702 chief executives worldwide provides some clues as to how this can be achieved. Now in its 27th year, it has proved a reliable bellwether of business sentiment and intentions.

The picture it paints of the UK does not gloss over the challenges. Only 39 per cent of bosses expect the domestic economy to improve this year. But neither does it portray an economy in freeze-frame, especially when it comes to investment in technology

Strikingly, Britain’s business leaders appear to be adopting generative AI faster than their peers overseas. Forty-two per cent say they’ve implemented GenAI in their business, compared with only 9 per cent of Germany’s chief executives and 20 per cent of those in France. We’re even ahead of the United States and China. The only countries that have adopted GenAI faster are Japan, Norway and Finland.

On the face of it, the UK’s head start feels surprising. While Britain has a strong technology scene, we’re not Silicon Valley. We don’t have the AI big hitters and we don’t have the same investment power. But we shouldn’t underestimate the strength of the UK’s services sector and the role it can play in the GenAI revolution. California may have an edge on building tech models, but there’s a huge opportunity to apply them to different businesses — and to ensure that people have faith in them.

As well as technologists, it requires data scientists, researchers, ethicists, trainers and lawyers. Yes, people — not bots — which may explain why the majority of chief executives are not looking to cut jobs. In fact, almost 50 per cent are planning to increase their headcount by 5 per cent or more this year.

Whether they’ll be able to remains to be seen. Although the jobs market has softened, unemployment remains relatively low. To boost productivity, we need to make the most of existing labour by investing in skills, alongside software. At PwC, the bulk of our £100 million of UK investment in emerging technology is for training. There’s little point having the best technology if our workforce can’t put it to good use.

Indeed, adopting GenAI is just the start. The test for companies is the extent to which it will help to improve their businesses. Will it give people greater and more accurate insights? Will it free up time and boost productivity? And could the risks, such as cyberbreaches and misinformation, outweigh the benefits?

On balance, chief executives in the UK are confident of more upsides. The majority — 64 per cent — say that GenAI will increase employee efficiency in the next 12 months and a significant proportion expect revenues to increase in the same period.

Ultimately, we have to be in it to win it. Being weighted to services, our economy has advantage. It’s more agile than one based on heavy industries, so can seize the opportunity. Moreover, training people is a core part of what services firms do. Our strong education sector will also help, as will the right balance of regulation.

GenAI is only a small piece of a complex economic picture, but it’s an illustration of UK potential. It may be too early to call a new era of growth, but we need to light up the signs for all to see.

Kevin Ellis is the senior partner of PwC UK

Like the overall tech sector, which has been solemnly swearing for some time now that artificial intelligence is on the cusp of changing everything, Eagle Eye is adamant that its deployment of machine learning on its vast haul of data will power it ahead.

Beyond the bluster, though, are positive signs. Highly personalised digital marketing is a buzz phrase for retailers — and Eagle Eye’s AI platform allows brands to target individual customers with deals based on their likes and past shopping, and that data vault. It is already running at scale, sending out 750 million offers each week, and managing 100 million members of loyalty schemes.

Revenues for the year to June 29, 2023, rose by a third to £43.1 million, and post-tax profit doubled, albeit from just £600,000 to £1.2 million. More significant, however, was the extent to which clients stick with the firm once its platform sits in their “stack”: churn — quitting customers — was a mere 0.2 per cent. International growth is strong, with US revenues doubling last year.

Investec is a house broker, and this may colour perceptions of the near-evangelical tone it takes on Eagle Eye, which is singled out as an AI winner in the bank’s review of 2024 technology stocks. Analyst Julian Yates claimed it is “outshining most of the sector, delivering impressive growth”. He has a 900p target price — some way off the 515p at which Eagle Eye Solutions is currently trading, which itself is 12 per cent lower than a year ago.

Only weeks into 2024, Eagle Eye is showing that AI lucre is more than just talk: last week, it signed its first client — a large Canadian food business — to EagleAI, which offers a new way to autonomously concoct offers and target them to customers. “The first win is important,” said Katie Cousins at the investment firm Shore Capital. AI, she added, will result in Eagle Eye “leading an industry where effectively harnessing data to… generate incremental revenues is increasingly important”.

The make-up of the board heft may appease any nervous investors: Eagle Eye’s chief executive, Tim Mason, was the No 2 at Tesco for two years of Sir Terry Leahy’s tenure, and indeed, that retail king is now an Eagle Eye non-executive board member. The firm is interesting the industry and it’s not impossible a takeover could emerge from a retail giant that’s lagging on marketing tech — or a software giant could also be on the horizon. Buy.

Barbara Furlow-Smiles, 38, who led a number of Facebook diversity, equity and inclusion schemes from 2017 until 2021, stole the money “through an elaborate scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fictitious charges, and cash kickbacks’, the attorney’s office in Atlanta said.

Furlow-Smiles, who pleaded guilty in an Atlanta federal court this week, was not the most senior leader of Facebook’s diversity programmes.

Keri Farley, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta office, said: “Furlow-Smiles used lies and deceit to defraud both vendors and Facebook employees. The FBI works hard to make sure greed like this doesn’t pay off and those who commit fraud are held accountable.”

A filing states that Furlow-Smiles committed the fraud by linking PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App accounts to credit cards given to her by Facebook and used those accounts to pay friends, relatives, nannies, babysitters, a hairstylist and others for goods and services that were never provided to the company.

After those people received the money, they returned a percentage of the funds to Furlow-Smiles, prosecutors said. The kickbacks were paid in cash and through transfers to accounts in various names, including the husband of Furlow-Smiles, prosecutors claimed.

To conceal the fraud, Furlow-Smiles submitted false expense reports, claiming the individuals performed work on Facebook programmes and events, the Department of Justice said. After they were hired, Furlow-Smiles allegedly approved fake and inflated invoices. She received a portion of the money paid to the vendors.

Furlow-Smiles also misled Facebook, which is owned by Meta Platforms, into paying money to entities who did not provide kickbacks, including nearly $10,000 to an artist who created specialty portraits and more than $18,000 to a pre-school.

Ryan Buchanan, the US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said: “Motivated by greed, she used her time to orchestrate an elaborate criminal scheme in which fraudulent vendors paid her kickbacks in cash. She even involved relatives, friends, and other associates in her crimes, all to fund a lavish lifestyle through fraud rather than hard and honest work.”

While volunteers are delighted that visitors are sharing views from Britain’s highest peaks on social media, the trend appears to have spurred climbers with more enthusiasm than sense.

The 12 mountain rescue teams in the Lake District were projected to have handled a record 714 emergency calls last year. The average for the previous seven years was 602 and has never surpassed 681.

The Llanberis mountain rescue team responds to emergencies on Snowdon, known in Welsh as Yr Wyddfa, and reached 305 incidents by mid-December, which is a record for a single team in Britain. Before 2008 the team had never had more than 100 incidents a year.

Lochaber, the team responsible for Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in Britain, reached 158 rescues in mid-December, higher than the 154 recorded for the whole of 2022.

Phil Kirby, chairman of Langdale Ambleside Mountain Rescue in the Lake District, put the trend down to “Instagram tourism”.

“It’s a term we picked up from our colleagues in Norway a few years ago,” he said. “It’s people seeing pictures of places on the internet and saying: ‘I’ve got to go and see that’.”

Visitors not only wish to replicate the photos, but take selfies at the beauty spot.

In Norway the honeypot for tourists is Pulpit Rock, a natural platform with spectacular views over a fjord.

Kirby said: “People trek up to this thing and the weather changes. They’ve had up to 30 people they’ve had to get off.

“Instagram has expanded people’s awareness of places they can go. They pick it up and think ‘I’ll go there’ but without the necessary preparation.

“It’s just the way we are now. We have access to so many things we didn’t have.”

There have also been a small number of emergency calls caused by the trend for wild swimming, including one on Christmas Day last year.

Rescue volunteers became so concerned that they set up adventuresmart.uk, a site that encourages trekkers to take simple precautions that could prevent hundreds of callouts each year. Most rescues result from people failing to take basic equipment such as waterproofs or boots, to check the weather forecast beforehand and to recognise when they should return home.

Dr Richard Griffiths, chairman of Llanberis Mountain Rescue, said that volunteers were finding it hard to balance their commitment to help others with their personal lives as callouts became more frequent.

“As we get busier and busier there is a very real risk that the service becomes overloaded and we are not able to respond to those in need quickly,” he said.

Llanberis’s 56 operational team members have completed more than 8,000 hours of rescue work last year on top of other duties such as training.

“As a group of volunteers we are nearing the limit of what we can do to support those in need in the mountains,” Griffiths said.

Mike Smith, a director of Lochaber Mountain Rescue, suggested that people were embracing outdoor life after the pandemic. His team, which increased from 35 to 50 people a year ago, has spent about £40,000 on new equipment in recent weeks. The money comes from public donations.

“If we were to speculate on it, we would put it down to increased activity in outdoor spaces. The NHS are encouraging people, rightly, to go out into outdoor space.”

Kirby, 70, said that the biggest curse has been the false sense of security provided by smartphones. Google Maps is ill-suited to mountain navigation and even the more specialised maps of Ordnance Survey are only good for as long as the phone’s battery lasts.

“If you’re using anything with a battery in cold weather, the battery performance degrades far quicker, so by mid-afternoon you can have very little battery left.

“I’ve been out on Christmas Day and somebody was in exactly that situation. He had spare batteries but they suffered in the same way the phone did. The cold just sucked the power out.”

Kirby added that a map, compass and torch were far more reliable in an emergency but that they were unfashionable and some people did not know the basics of map reading.

“It relies on common sense, which is far from common these days,” he said.

On a pleasant day in the valley it could be at freezing point on the peaks, according to Kirby. He said: “3,000ft up it’s a different environment. If you’ve not done it before, you wouldn’t know.”

Penny Kirby, of Wasdale and Eskdale Mountain Rescue, said that in the 1970s there would be 12 callouts a year for her colleagues. This year her team has responded to more than 150.

“I think because it’s called a park, people have the idea that it’s very manicured, it’s safe but where I am there are no made paths, there are no signposts,” she told the Radio 4 programme Open Country. “There’s no café at the top and the weather can be just hideous. Very quickly it can change, and that catches people out.”

She urged people to make sure they went out with proper clothing, food, water and a torch each. “I think people have got out of the way of being so self-reliant.”