Portrait of the week

Home Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, who had not been told in advance of America’s killing in Iraq of Qassem Soleimani, the leading Iranian military leader, said that America ‘had a right to exercise self-defence’. British troops were put on standby to be sent to the region, and the frigate Montrose and the destroyer Defender sent to the Strait of Hormuz. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, returning from holiday in Mustique, said: ‘Given the leading role he has played in actions that have led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians and western personnel, we will not lament his death.’ England secured a 189-run victory over South Africa on the fifth day of the second Test in Cape Town, levelling the series 1-1.

January ‘If parliament backs a deal, Britain can turn a corner,’ Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said. The Commons defeated her withdrawal agreement with the EU by 432 to 202. Patrols found 15 people on inflatable craft off Kent. The Argentine footballer, Emiliano Sala, 28, died when a light aircraft crashed into the Channel. Off Libya and Morocco, 170 migrants drowned in two shipwrecks. Patisserie Valerie went into administration. US President Donald Trump refused to approve a federal budget without funds for a wall with Mexico. A fatberg 210ft long was found blocking a sewer beneath Sidmouth. February Seven MPs resigned from the Labour party, objecting to anti-Semitism and lukewarmness towards a second referendum on Brexit.

Home The nation went to the polls. Engineering works compounded the misery of passengers on the South Western Railway where the RMT union is holding a strike until the end of the year. Leatherhead was utterly cut off. Hundreds of Greater Anglia services were cancelled when a signals failure turned into problems with rolling stock. After 22 years, Virgin Trains relinquished the franchise to run the West Coast Main Line, which was granted to Avanti West Coast, a partnership between Aberdeen-based firm FirstGroup and Italy’s Trenitalia. All 27,000 chickens on a farm in Suffolk were culled after cases of avian influenza were found.

Home Usman Khan, aged 28, out of prison on licence after serving eight years of a 16-year sentence for preparing acts of terrorism, stabbed to death Jack Merritt, aged 25, and Saskia Jones, aged 23, at Fishmongers’ Hall and wounded three others before being stopped on London Bridge by members of the public and shot dead by police. A Polish kitchen worker called Lukasz Koczocik tried to disarm him with a pole; another man grabbed a narwhal tusk from the wall at the hall where Khan had been attending a conference on rehabilitation while a third let off a fire extinguisher to distract him from further bloodshed. One man who pursued the killer was said to be a murderer present at the conference.

Home The Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, intervened in the election campaign by declaring that anti-Semitism was a ‘poison — sanctioned from the very top’ of the Labour party, whose claim to have dealt with cases was a ‘mendacious fiction’.The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, said: ‘That the Chief Rabbi should be compelled to make such an unprecedented statement at this time ought to alert us to the deep sense of insecurity and fear felt by many British Jews.’ Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, insisted that ‘rapid and effective’ action had been taken against offenders, and refused to apologise. Chris Moncrieff, a longtime lobby correspondent of the Press Association, died aged 88.

Home In a television debate Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was jeered by the studio audience when he was asked about the importance of truth and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition, was jeered when he refused nine times to say whether he thought Britain should leave the EU. Neither dealt a knock-out blow and polls ranked them as neck and neck. The Liberal Democrats failed in an appeal to the High Court to include their leader Jo Swinson in the debate. But polls by YouGov indicated that the more voters saw of Miss Swinson, the less they liked her. Labour promised everyone free internet broadband, by nationalising Openreach and other parts of BT.

Home Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit party, climbed down from his resolution to field 600 candidates in the general election, promising not to contest the 317 seats won by the Conservatives in 2017. The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats said they would spend large sums of taxpayers’ money on things that might please voters (such as the NHS or, from the Lib Dems, a ‘skills wallet’ of £10,000 for every adult). The Conservatives claimed that Labour’s promises would cost £1,200 billion, which Labour denied. A review commissioned by the government into the HS2 railway said it should be built, despite the cost.

Home Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Labour MP for Chorley and deputy Speaker since 2010, was elected Speaker by the Commons. His first words were: ‘No clapping.’ Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit party, proposed an electoral pact with the Conservatives, but only if Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, repudiated the agreement on Brexit that he had made with the European Union. When this was not forthcoming, he said: ‘We will contest every single seat in England, Scotland and Wales.’ But he declined to stand for parliament himself (which he had done seven times before, without success). Philip Hammond, the former chancellor of the Exchequer, decided against standing as an independent in the election after all.

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, having shelved his Brexit Bill in the face of parliamentary opposition, persuaded the Commons to vote by 438 to 20 for a general election on 12 December. A one-clause Bill was given its third reading after an amendment put by Labour to change the date to 9 December was defeated by 315 to 295. That majority of 20 coincided with the voting power of 10 MPs to whom the Conservative whip had earlier that day been restored, including Alistair Burt, Ed Vaizey and Sir Nicholas Soames, but not Philip Hammond, Sir Oliver Letwin, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve or Kenneth Clarke. The government had failed the day before to secure an election through the provisions of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which required the support of two-thirds of MPs.

Home The Commons voted by 329 to 299 for a Brexit Withdrawal Bill but then stymied progress by defeating a timetable for enacting it by 31 October. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, immediately favoured a delay for Brexit. Downing Street called for a general election. Sir Oliver Letwin had torpedoed the government’s Brexit endeavours by amending a motion that had been intended to secure the Commons’ ‘meaningful vote’ for the withdrawal agreement triumphantly secured from the EU by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, only three days earlier.

Home Brexit teetered from uncertainty to uncertainty. Parliament had been summoned to sit on Saturday 19 October to debate what Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, had brought back from a European Union summit. He had held talks before the week began with Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach of Ireland, at Thornton Manor in the Wirral, from which optimistic noises emerged. Margaret Atwood, 79, from Ottawa, and Bernardine Evaristo, 60, from Eltham, shared the Booker Prize. The Queen wore the George IV diadem at the State Opening of Parliament instead of the heavy Imperial State Crown.

Home After a telephone conversation between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a Downing Street spokesman said she had made clear that a withdrawal agreement with the EU was ‘overwhelmingly unlikely’; Mrs Merkel had insisted on Northern Ireland staying in the Customs Union, which the Democratic Unionist party called ‘beyond crazy’. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, tweeted that Mr Johnson was playing a ‘stupid blame game’.There was great excitement over a message sent to James Forsyth of The Spectator, generally thought to have come from Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser.

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, presented the EU with a proposed withdrawal agreement. It entailed Northern Ireland remaining for a large part in the EU single market, along with Ireland, until January 2025, with the European Court retaining jurisdiction during that time. After that, the Northern Ireland Assembly would be able to choose whether to remain in the single market. In the meantime, there would be a border with Great Britain in the Irish Sea and, with none of the United Kingdom in the customs union, another, invisible border with Ireland, with checks made away from the border on goods in transit. Dominic Cummings said: ‘If they reject our offer, that’s it.’ Eighteen Scottish pine martens were released in the Forest of Dean.

Home Eleven justices of the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that in advising the Queen to prorogue parliament ‘the Prime Minister’s advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect’. This was because the prorogation had ‘the effect of frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the ability of parliament to carry out its constitutional functions’. The court was not ‘concerned with the Prime Minister’s motive’. The court cited the Case of Proclamations (1611) to show that the limits of prerogative powers were determined by the courts. The judgment overturned the decision of the High Court that the prorogation should not even be considered by the courts.

Home ‘I will uphold the constitution, I will obey the law, but we will come out on 31 October,’ Boris Johnson told the BBC, adding that the EU ‘have had a bellyful of all this stuff’. After a lunch of chicken and pollock at the Bouquet Garni in Luxembourg with Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, he found noise from British protesters made it impossible for him to join Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, in an open-air press conference, so Mr Bettel continued on his own, gesturing angrily to an empty podium and saying what a ‘nightmare’ of uncertainty Britain had left Europe in.

Home A bill sponsored by Hilary Benn and supported by Alistair Burt and other dissident Tories was passed — becoming the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019. It commanded the Prime Minister to send by 19 October a letter of stipulated wording to the President of the European Council requesting that the deadline for Britain leaving the EU under Article 50 be extended until 31 January. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he’d ‘rather be dead in a ditch’ than ask for an extension. The government was twice defeated on a motion for a general election to be held on 15 October. A tearful John Bercow told the Commons he would resign as Speaker on 31 October. Welsh MPs sang at 2 a.m.

Home The government was defeated by 328 to 301 on a motion to take over the business of the House, under a cabal including the former chancellor Philip Hammond, in order to introduce a Bill sponsored by Sir Oliver Letwin and Hilary Benn specifying that unless a deal is reached with the EU or parliament approves a no-deal Brexit by 19 October, the government must write to the EU seeking an extension to the Article 50 period until 31 January 2020. In response, the government removed the whip from 21 Tory members who had voted against the government, including Kenneth Clarke, Hammond and Sir Nicholas Soames. Moreover, plans were afoot to field a candidate against the Speaker, John Bercow in the next election.

Home The government sought to prorogue parliament on 10 September and have the Queen’s Speech opening the new session of parliament on 14 October. The Budget would be brought forward to 4 September. The prorogation caused much fury among Remainers. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, had met other opposition party leaders to hatch a plan to pass legislation to stop Britain leaving the European Union on 31 October without a withdrawal agreement. Mr Corbyn had proposed becoming prime minister for a bit, but few fancied that prospect. Bury was expelled from the English Football League after the company trying to buy the club pulled out.

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, wrote to Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, saying: ‘The backstop cannot form part of an agreed withdrawal agreement. That is a fact that we must both acknowledge.’ Mr Tusk said that those who opposed the Irish backstop ‘in fact support re-establishing a border. Even if they do not admit it’. Mr Johnson, after an hour of failing to agree with Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, on the telephone, prepared for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France. An atmosphere of plotting hung over prospects of an election on a date close to 31 October, when the United Kingdom is due to leave the European Union.