Portrait of the week

Home MPs voted by 382 to 128 to make Britain the only country to allow genetic modification of embryos to prevent mitochondrial flaws: this could be done by the removal of the nucleus of a donor’s fertilised ovum and its replacement by the nucleus of two parents’ fertilised ovum, thus giving a child three parents. William Hague, the Leader of the House, outlined his plan for resolving the West Lothian question: ‘Before a Bill or parts of a Bill affecting only England was put to its final vote in the House of Commons, the English MPs would meet separately in what would be called the English Grand Committee and decide whether they agreed on it.’ Sir Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Churchill, died, aged 78.

Home Party leaders mercilessly launched 100 days of campaigning before the general election on 7 May. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said he would reduce the annual maximum household receipt of welfare to £23,000 from the current limit of £26,000. Ed Miliband announced a ten-year plan for the National Health Service, but Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary, said: ‘You’ve got a pale imitation actually of the 1992 general election campaign and maybe it will have the same outcome.’ Amjad Bashir, a Ukip MEP, switched to the Conservative party, upon which Ukip said he was being investigated over ‘unanswered financial and employment questions’, allegations he denied.

Home More than 1,100 imams and Islamic leaders received a letter from Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, and Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, the communities minister, saying: ‘We must show our young people, who may be targeted, that extremists have nothing to offer them.’ Imran Khawaja, from Southall, west London, who had posed for a picture in Syria with a severed head before trying to re-enter Britain, pleaded guilty to four terrorism offences and will be sentenced next month. Sir John Chilcot confirmed that the report of his inquiry into the Iraq war, which took its last evidence in 2011, would not be published until after the election. A workers’ dispute left 1,300 houses in Northern Ireland without water; some people boiled snow.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that he wanted to change the law so that there would be no ‘means of communication’ which ‘we cannot read’, in order to thwart terrorists. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said this meant ‘scooping up vast amounts of information on millions of people — children, grandparents and elderly people who do nothing more offensive than visiting gardening centre websites’. Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, said that 20 terrorist plots against the West had links to Syria in the past 14 months.

Home The electorate was bombarded with contrary claims by parties beginning campaigns for the election in May. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that only electing the Conservative party could ‘save Britain’s economic recovery’. His party issued a dossier with figures compiled by Treasury civil servants, which sought to show that Labour’s spending plans did not account for where £21 billion was to come from. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said that a vote for the Conservatives would mean that after five years ‘the NHS as we know it just won’t be there’. Labour unveiled a poster that said: ‘The Tories want to cut spending on public services back to the levels of the 1930s, when there was no NHS.

Home King’s Cross railway station was out of operation, stranding thousands, and Paddington saw badly delayed services after Network Rail engineering works overran beyond Christmas and Boxing Day. Connection with the internet for Xbox and PlayStation games consoles was disabled on Christmas Day and a group of hackers called Lizard Squad said it had interfered. Before the end of 2014, Mandy Rice-Davies, who had come to public attention during the Profumo scandal of 1963, died, aged 70; John Freeman, the journalist and interviewer on the BBC television programme, Face to Face, died, aged 99; and Jane Bown, the outstanding black-and-white photograph portraitist, died, aged 89. Sales of sherry rose 15 per cent in 2014, Marks & Spencer reported.

January Floods covered 28,000 acres of the Somerset Levels. Ukip suspended an Oxfordshire councillor for saying floods were God’s punishment for legalising same-sex marriage. An Afghan was granted asylum because he had become an atheist. Fallujah fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis). Half a million fled fighting in South Sudan. Cannabis went on sale in Colorado. In Amsterdam, alcoholics were paid in beer to clear up litter. Jeremy Paxman shaved off his beard. February Floods grew worse in the West Country. The railway at Dawlish, Devon, was swept away. The Thames then flooded. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, visited London to have tea with the Queen and urge Britain to stay in the EU.

Home The government spent days announcing how the Autumn Statement would allocate funds. ‘Frontline’ parts of the National Health Service would get an extra £2 billion for the time being, £750 million of it diverted from elsewhere in the Department of Health budget. Another £1.1 billion from bankers’ fines would go to support GPs. Labour said it would give the NHS twice as much. Out of the £15 billion already set aside by the government for roads, a tunnel would be built for the A303 past Stonehenge. Of £2.3 billion (over six years) earmarked for flood prevention, only £4.3 million was set aside for the Somerset Levels, but £196 million for the Thames estuary.

Home Theresa May, the Home Secretary, spent a few days announcing things. She broadcast on the Andrew Marr Show on television and then on Desert Island Discs. She said Britain was ‘unlikely’ to meet a target of reducing net immigration to the tens of thousands, because EU migration had ‘blown us off course’. Regarding child abuse, she said: ‘What we have already seen revealed is only the tip of the iceberg.’ She then announced a new Security Bill, obliging internet providers to retain Internet Protocol addresses to identify individual users, and requiring schools, universities and councils to counter radicalisation.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global economy.’ He then offered £650 million to a ‘green climate fund’. In a speech in Singapore, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, said that fines for banks over rigging foreign exchange rates showed that ‘it is simply untenable now to argue that the problem is one of a few bad apples. The issue is with the barrels in which they are stored.’ Official figures showed that the number of British Army reservists has been boosted by a recruitment drive in the past year from 19,290 to 19,310. Friends of the Earth went to law to secure the future on the river Otter of a family of beavers living wild there.

Home The government, expecting a backbench rebellion over the European Arrest Warrant, did not present it for a separate vote in the Commons, which enraged backbenchers all the more. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, tabled a procedural motion, forcing David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to hurry from the Lord Mayor’s banquet in white tie to vote amid angry scenes. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came back from Brussels claiming that Britain would now only have to pay half of a £1.7 billion bill that the European Union had presented; but critics said that he was merely counting a future rebate that Britain was owed in any case.

Home Fiona Woolf, the Lord Mayor of London, resigned as the head of an inquiry into historical child sex abuse three months after Baroness Butler-Sloss, the former president of the family division of the High Court, resigned from the same appointment. Both had been criticised for having establishment links. ‘It is really going to be hard to find someone with no connections,’ Mrs Woolf said. ‘A hermit?’ Exploitation of vulnerable children has become the social norm in some parts of Greater Manchester, according to a report by Ann Coffey, the Labour MP for Stockport. The Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal investigation into accounting irregularities at Tesco.

Home The last British combat troops turned over Camp Bastion in Helmand to Afghan forces and withdrew from Afghanistan after 13 years and 453 deaths. Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, spoke of ‘whole towns and communities being swamped by huge numbers of migrants’. He later withdrew the word ‘swamped’, but David Blunkett, a former Labour home secretary who used the word 12 years ago, said: ‘I believe that both Michael Fallon and I were right to speak out.’ This came after Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, responded to an idea of David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that European Union migration could be renegotiated; she said: ‘Germany will not tamper with the fundamental principles of free movement in the EU.

Home A hundred firemen could not prevent wooden cooling towers at Didcot B gas-fuelled power station in Oxfordshire from burning down. A consortium said it could power 2.5 million houses in Britain by 2018 with solar energy generated in southern Tunisia. The Bank of England indicated that interest rates would stay low for longer because of a poor outlook for the global economy. Government borrowing rose to £11.8 billion in September: £1.6 billion more than a year earlier. HSBC offered a mortgage at 0.99 per cent interest. The government is to pay a bounty of £55 to GPs for every patient they diagnose with dementia.

Home Checks began at British airports for passengers who might have come from west Africa with Ebola fever (even though there are no direct flights from the countries most affected). People who rang 111 with suspicious symptoms were to be asked whether they’d come from a high-risk country. Police arrested three men and three women from Portsmouth, Farnborough and Greenwich as part of an anti-terrorism operation. Of five men arrested the week before, two were released. The trial began before a jury at the Old Bailey of Erol Incedal on charges of preparing for acts of terrorism; parts of it will be held in secret.

Home Alan Henning, 47, a British volunteer aid worker taken captive in Syria by Islamic State, was murdered, and footage of his death, which included an appearance by a man with an English accent nicknamed Jihadi John, was posted online. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We will do all we can to hunt down these murderers and bring them to justice.’ Four men were arrested in London on suspicion of terror offences; MI5 sources suggested that the arrest might have ‘foiled the early stages’ of a planned attack. A 12-year-old girl in a wheelchair was saved from injury by her arm-braces when two men set a pit bull dog on her in a Northamptonshire wood. Fungicide injections derived from garlic were tried out on trees suffering from ash dieback in Northamptonshire.

Home The Commons, having been specially recalled, passed, by 524 votes to 43, a motion supporting ‘the use of UK air strikes to support Iraqi, including Kurdish, security forces’ efforts against Isil in Iraq’. Only after four days did RAF Tornados from Akrotiri in Cyprus find some targets in Iraq to bomb. In support of her contention that Isil’s ‘hateful ideology has nothing to do with Islam’, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, in a well-received speech at the Conservative party conference, quoted the Qu’ran: ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion’ (Sura 2:256).

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited New York for talks at the United Nations; he said Britain supported the American air strikes on the Islamic State. ‘These people want to kill us,’ Mr Cameron said on NBC news. Mr Cameron met President Hassan Rouhani of Iran in New York, the first such meeting since the Iranian revolution in 1979. Mr Cameron was caught by cameras in New York saying to Michael Bloomberg, its former mayor, that when he rang the Queen with the Scottish referendum result, ‘She purred down the line.’ Alex Salmond resigned as First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party, with effect from November. This followed the referendum for Scottish residences, which rejected independence by 2,001,926 votes (55.

Home People living in Scotland voted in a referendum that asked: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ A great deal of ill feeling had been generated as the referendum campaign went on. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, was told by backbench Conservative MPs that he faced a ‘bloodbath’ for joining the United Kingdom leaders of the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party in offering continued high levels of funding for Scotland.

Home England suddenly began to take the prospect of Scottish independence seriously after a poll of 1,084 people by YouGov put support for it at 51 per cent and opposition at 49 per cent. A survey by TNS showed 38 per cent of Scots backed independence compared to 39 per cent opposing it (with 23 per cent not knowing). The pound fell to its lowest for ten months against the dollar. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in concert with Labour and the Liberal Democrats, promised a timetable for further devolution if voters in Scotland would only reject independence. The Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition agreed to cancel Prime Minister’s Questions and fly to Scotland, in the apparent belief that it would help. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, went too.