Portrait of the week

Home The cost of the HS2 railway line was expected by some in the Treasury to rise from £43 billion to £73 billion. The number of new homes being built in England rose by 6 per cent in the three months to June. The United Kingdom has lost more than 40 per cent of its bank and building society branches since 1989, according to a report by Nottingham University. The proportion of candidates achieving A or A* grades at A-level fell a little to 26.3 per cent, from 26.6 per cent in 2012. The overall pass rate rose marginally to 98.1 per cent from 98 per cent. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told the BBC that he was suffering from a ‘protruding disc’ in his back.

Home The population of the United Kingdom rose by 420,000, to 63.7 million, by the middle of last year, with the number of births, 813,000 (more than a quarter to mothers born abroad), being the highest since 1972. Thames Water asked the regulator Ofwat to allow it to impose a 12 per cent increase on bills. Unemployment fell by 4,000 to 2.51 million in the second quarter. Regulated rail fares will rise by 4.1 per cent, a percentage point higher than the rate of inflation in July, which, measured by the Retail Prices Index, fell from 3.3 to 3.1 per cent, and, measured by the Consumer Prices Index, from 2.9 to 2.8 per cent. The rate of house price inflation rose from 2.9 per cent to 3.1 per cent. Jeremy Paxman appeared on Newsnight with a beard.

Home Retail sales enjoyed their fastest July growth in seven years, thanks to demand for beer, sun cream, swimwear and barbecue food. Manufacturing output rose by 1.9 per cent in June, following declines in both April and May. Lloyds Banking Group announced profits of £2.1 billion for the first half of the year and António Horta-Osório, its chief executive, said he expected it to pay out 70 per cent of profits in dividends by 2015. Sir Ian Andrews resigned as the chairman of the Serious Organised Crime Agency after failing to declare a directorship in a management consultancy firm.

Home Barclays decided to issue £5.8 billion in shares to meet capital reserve requirements from the Bank of England. Lord Howell of Guildford, a former energy secretary, who does not speak for the government but happens to be George Osborne’s father in law, asking a question in the Lords about fracking for shale gas, said: ‘There are large and uninhabited and desolate areas. Certainly in part of the north-east.’ He later apologised. Vicky Pryce, the disgraced former wife of Chris Huhne, the disgraced former Cabinet minister, had her companionship of the Order of the Bath ‘cancelled and annulled’. A third Army reservist who took part in an SAS selection training exercise in the Brecon Beacons died. A £1.

Home The Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a boy, weighing 8lb 6oz, an heir to the crown, third in line to the throne. Great public excitement was expressed by taking photographs of an official notice of the birth posted on a gilt easel inside the railings of Buckingham Palace. Bells rang and gun salutes were fired. Mel Smith, the comedian, died, aged 60. Thunderstorms cut off power and disrupted train services after a fortnight of hot weather reached temperatures of 33.5˚C in London, the highest since 2006. Many-fruited beardless moss, found in only four locations in the world, may have disappeared from two places in Cornwall.

Home Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, put into ‘special measures’ 11 hospitals among the 14 with the worst death rates examined in an inquiry by Professor Sir Bruce Keogh. Professor Sir Brian Jarman, a contributor to the report, said: ‘If you don’t have enough trained nurses, as with doctors, you get higher death rates.’ The government announced that the Liverpool Care Pathway (for the dying) would be phased out after a review headed by Lady Neuberger found that the strategy, which can entail withdrawal of food and drink, was being ‘misused’. The government decided not to press ahead with legislation to impose plain packaging for cigarettes. The BBC announced that it had so far spent £4.

Home There was a fine game of hunt-the-issue over the process to find a replacement, as parliamentary candidate in Falkirk, for the Labour MP Eric Joyce (who had decided not to stand again after being convicted of assaulting a Labour whip in the Strangers’ Bar). The union Unite was accused by Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, of signing up its members to the Falkirk constituency Labour party without their knowledge. Unite’s chosen candidate Karie Murphy had been the officer manager of Tom Watson MP. Mr Watson resigned as Labour’s national election co-ordinator. The next day, Mr Miliband referred the imbroglio at Falkirk to the Scottish police, but not before a Tory MP, Henry Smith, had written to the Chief Constable alleging fraud.

Home Business confidence in Britain was at its highest level since 2007, according to a survey by the British Chambers of Commerce, which said it expected gross domestic product to have grown by 0.6 per cent in the second quarter of the year.Ofgem, the energy regulator, warned that spare electricity capacity could fall to 2 per cent by 2015, increasing the risk of blackouts. The regulator urged companies to deal with theft of electricity, a third of it said to power cannabis farms. Butterflies and bees were found to have suffered badly from the cold May. Channel 4 is to broadcast the dawn call to prayer each day during Ramadan.

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, outlined cuts of £11.5 billion from departmental spending for the tax-year beginning in 2015. David Gauke, a Treasury minister, gave a ‘firm commitment’ in a letter to backbenchers to introduce a transferable tax allowance of £750 between spouses and civil partners paying tax at the basic rate. This would benefit them by £150 a year at most, and not before the next election. Sir Mervyn King, retiring after ten years as governor of the Bank of England, was to be created a life peer. Mark Harper, the minister for immigration, broke his foot by falling off a table while dancing with his wife in a bar in Soho.

Home On the eve of the G8 summit, at a press conference with David Cameron, the Prime Minister, President Vladimir Putin of Russia bluntly opposed British proposals to aid the Syrian opposition: ‘People who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their entrails in public before the cameras. Are these the people you want to support?’ At the summit, in a golfing hotel protected by the waters of Lough Erne, Co. Fermanagh, none of the leaders wore a tie. A joint statement on Syria did not call for the removal of President Assad. Before the summit, Mr Cameron made British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies agree to inform on investors to the tax authorities.

Home Six men from the West Midlands — Omar Khan, Jewel Uddin, Mohammed Hasseen, Mohammed Saud, Zohaib Ahmed and Anzal Hussain — were jailed for 18 or 19 years on terrorism charges after planning to bomb an English Defence League rally in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, last year. After a fire caused minor damage at the Darul Uloom Islamic boarding school in Chislehurst, Kent, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said: ‘We should not allow the murder of Lee Rigby to come between Londoners.’ Police clashed with protesters against the G8 summit who had taken possession of a house in Soho. A temporary custody centre for those arrested during the summit was built at Omagh, Co. Tyrone.

Home Patrick Mercer MP resigned the Conservative whip after being filmed in discussion with a fake Fijian firm that paid him £4,000 to ask parliamentary questions; he was in fact being investigated by BBC’s Panorama and the Daily Telegraph. Lord Cunningham and Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate were suspended by the Labour party after the Sunday Times filmed them discussing lobbying terms, and Lord Laird resigned the Ulster Unionist whip over the same matter. All the parliamentarians deny wrongdoing. Mike Hancock MP resigned the Liberal Democrat whip while he defends a civil case in which a woman constituent is alleging sexual assault.

Home Ten men were arrested in connection with the public, daylight murder of Drummer Lee Rigby near his barracks in Woolwich. The two chief suspects, Michael Adebolajo, 28, and Michael Adebowale, 22, Britons of Nigerian descent and converts to Islam, had waited in the street after the hacking to death of the soldier until armed police arrived, and were then shot. Adebolajo had made some statements recorded on a mobile phone. The two men were taken to different hospitals with wounds said not to be life-threatening, and Adebowale was discharged into police custody after six days. MI5 was said to have previously attempted to recruit Adebolajo, who was found to have been arrested in Kenya in 2010.

Home A senior figure in the Conservative party with strong social connections to David Cameron, the Prime Minister, was reported by the Telegraph and Times to have said that Conservative constituency associations ‘are all mad swivel-eyed loons’. Lord Feldman, the party’s co-chairman, said it was not he. Mr Cameron sent an email to party activists saying: ‘I am proud of what you do. And I would never have around me those who sneered or thought otherwise.’ The rumpus erupted as Conservative voters defected to the UK Independence Party, and Conservative MPs became impatient with the leadership of Mr Cameron.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, flew to Sochi, on the Black Sea, to talk with President Vladimir Putin, principally about Syria. He then flew to Washington, to support the American tour by Prince Harry and hold talks with President Barack Obama. They said that Britain and America wanted to strengthen the moderate opposition in Syria somehow. In a joint press conference, Mr Obama also said: ‘The UK’s participation in the EU is an expression of its influence.’ Mr Cameron tried to placate Tory MPs by rushing out a draft EU referendum bill, in the face of an amendment in the Queen’s Speech debate expressing regret at the absence of such a bill in the government programme. EU officials investigating price-fixing raided the London offices of BP and Shell.

Home The UK Independence Party gave the government and opposition a jolt by doing well in the elections for 34 English councils, increasing its number of councillors from eight to 147 and gaining a projected national vote share of 23 per cent (compared with 25 per cent for the Conservatives, 29 per cent for Labour and 14 per cent for the Liberal Democrats). In a parliamentary by-election at South Shields, the Lib Dems were driven into seventh place, with only 352 votes, with Labour retaining the seat with 12,493 and Ukip coming second with 5,988. Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, grinned a good deal and said ‘Send in the clowns,’ throwing back at him Kenneth Clarke’s pejorative description of Ukip supporters.

Home In the run-up to local elections, Kenneth Clarke, the Minister without Portfolio, described the UK Independence Party candidates as ‘clowns’. RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire, assumed control of ten Reaper drone aircraft in use over Afghanistan. Irfan Naseer, 31, from Birmingham, the ringleader of a plot to use eight suicide bombers in attacks that could have killed thousands, was sentenced to five life sentences; of ten others charged, four men who admitted an offence of travelling overseas for terrorism training were sentenced to three years, and six men to between four and 18 years. Six men from the West Midlands pleaded guilty to planning to bomb an English Defence League rally at Dewsbury; five took a homemade bomb to the rally but arrived too late.

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, visited Glasgow to cast doubt on the probability of an independent Scotland being allowed to continue to use the pound: ‘Why would 58 million citizens give away some of their sovereignty over monetary and potentially other economic policies to five million people in another state?’ The government borrowed £120.6 billion in the financial year 2012–2013, £300 million less than in the previous year. Fitch became the second agency to downgrade Britain’s credit rating by a notch from AAA. The Co-op pulled out of buying 632 branches of Lloyds Banking Group, put up for sale to meet European competition rules. The government planned to sell its one-third stake in Urenco, the uranium enrichment company.

Home With the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, the 2,300 invited to attend Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s cathedral included the three surviving former prime ministers, members of her cabinets, the leader of the opposition, F.W. de Klerk, June Whitfield, Joan Collins, Dame Shirley Bassey and Sir Terry Wogan. Mikhail Gorbachev did not attend, because of ill health, Lord Kinnock because of a previous funeral engagement, the Argentine ambassador for an unstated reason and Sally Bercow, the Speaker’s wife, because she didn’t want to. Much time had been spent discussing whether the BBC should play on its singles hit chart programme ‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’, which had been downloaded by those who held the memory of Lady Thatcher in disdain.

Home Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister from 1979 to 1990, died aged 87. She had suffered a stroke while reading in her room at the Ritz hotel, where she had been staying since being discharged from hospital at the end of 2012 after a minor operation. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, cancelled talks in Paris with President François Hollande and returned to Britain. News broadcasts and newspapers were dominated by coverage of her political career. Seven policemen were injured when perhaps 200 people gathered at Easton, in Bristol, celebrating the death and setting fire to dustbins after dark. Both Houses of Parliament were recalled for a day in tribute to Lady Thatcher, a life peeress since 1992.