Portrait of the week

•HomeThe crisis in the eurozone was ‘an opportunity to begin to refashion the EU so it better serves this nation’s interests’, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in his Mansion House speech. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a television interview: ‘There’s got to be more integration — the kind of thing actually that Britain would not tolerate and is one of the reasons we didn’t go in the euro.’ Unemployment among those aged 16-24 rose above a million. Inflation fell by 0.2 percentage points, to 5 per cent (measured by the CPI) and 5.4 (by the RPI). Mr Cameron threw a fork at a mouse during dinner at his Downing Street flat, but missed.

HomeTheresa May, the Home Secretary, blamed Brodie Clark, the head of the UK Border and Immigration Agency’s ‘border force’, for ‘relaxation of border controls without ministerial sanction’. Mr Clark left the agency, declaring that what Mrs May had said in parliament was wrong. An online petition urging ministers to reduce immigration gained more than 100,000 signatures, making it eligible for a Commons debate. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are to live in the apartment at Kensington palace once occupied by Princess Margaret. A road-cleaning crew found a pot of gold jewellery in a drain in Slough.

• Home St Paul’s Cathedral decided not to take court action against anti-capitalist demonstrators who, since 15 October, had kept 200 tents pitched outside. The Corporation of London suspended its own legal action. The Rt Rev Graeme Knowles resigned as Dean of St Paul’s, a post he had held since 2007. His resignation followed that of Dr Giles Fraser, who, as Canon Chancellor of the cathedral, had at first asked police not to clear protesters from its precincts. The Archbishop of Canterbury said that the protesters had a point. Sir Jimmy Savile, the disc jockey, died, aged 84. The government said that unemployed people sentenced to pay a fine would have to do so at a rate of up to £25 a week instead of the present limit of £5.

HomeDavid Cameron, the Prime Minister, insisted on being present, along with leaders of the 10 EU countries not part of the eurozone, at a summit on the crisis surrounding the currency bloc. At an earlier summit of leaders of all 27 EU countries, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France told Mr Cameron: ‘You say you hate the euro, you didn’t want to join, and now you want to interfere in our meetings,’ according to diplomatic sources. Eighty-one Conservative MPs (the two tellers included) voted against the government on a back-bench motion endorsing the need for a referendum on EU membership. ‘There’s no — on my part — no bad blood, no rancour, no bitterness,’ Mr Cameron said afterwards.

Home After the resignation of Liam Fox as Defence Secretary, a report by Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, found that there had been a ‘clear breach’ of the ministerial code in his working relationship with Adam Werritty, who had accompanied him on 18 foreign trips. Dr Fox, he said, had been warned about Mr Werritty’s role, although Dr Fox had not benefited financially and Mr Werritty was not a lobbyist, he found. Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, replaced Dr Fox and Justine Greening replaced Mr Hammond. Canon Giles Fraser, the Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, requested police on its steps confronting anti-capitalist demonstrators to leave; about 150 tents were pitched around the cathedral.

Home The Bank of England launched out on a further £75 billion worth of quantitative easing, but refused to buy government bonds maturing in 2017 because traders had driven up the price. Typical households will not return to the level of income they enjoyed in 2009 until 2015, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The Olympic stadium is to remain in public ownership after the Games, the government confirmed, and not sold to West Ham. Unemployment rose by 114,000 from May to August to 2.57 million. The BBC decided to cut 2,000 jobs as part of savings of £670 million a year. Dave and Angela Dawes from Wisbech won £101,203,600.70 in the Euromillions lottery, the third largest jackpot for British winners.

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Conservative party conference in Manchester that the Treasury would spend billions buying bonds from small and medium-sized businesses in an exercise called ‘credit easing’. He announced a freeze on council tax for a second year, saving householders an average of £72. He also remarked: ‘We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business.’ David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told the nation to pay off its credit card bills.

Home The International Monetary Fund reduced its growth forecast for Britain this year from 1.5 per cent to 1.1 per cent and for next year from 2.3 to 1.6 per cent. A debate rumbled on in government about whether to spend more money on public infrastructure works as dark financial clouds loomed. ‘What I will not do is provide cover for ideological descendants of those who sent children up chimneys,’ Vince Cable, the Business Secretary told the Liberal Democrat conference in Birmingham, in a speech warning of ‘difficult times ahead’ for Britain’s finances. Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the conference that the better off should pay more tax.

Home The Independent Commission on Banking, headed by Sir John Vickers, recommended that there should be insulation of high street banking from investment banking. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, accepted the commission’s call for its recommendations to be introduced by 2019. The report received cross-party support, although it would cost banking £7 billion a year, and some said it would make lending scarcer and lead to banks leaving Britain. The annual rate of inflation (by CPI) rose to 4.5 per cent, from 4.4 in the previous month; and (by RPI) to 5.2 from 5 per cent. Unemployment rose by 80,000 to 2.51 million. A shopping centre with 300 shops and 70 food outlets opened at Stratford near the Olympic site in London.

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech in the City: ‘We have all had to revise down our short-term expectations over recent weeks.’ Industrial production for the United Kingdom fell by 0.2 per cent in July. House prices, according to the Halifax, fell by 1.2 per cent from July to August. The Dixons group reported a like-for-like fall in sales of 7 per cent against a year earlier. Twenty economists wrote a letter to the Financial Times saying that the 50p tax rate was inflicting ‘lasting damage’ on the British economy.

Home In London more than 2,000 had so far been arrested in connection with the August riots, of whom 1,135 had been charged. Nationally, 70 per cent of those who appeared in court were remanded in custody for trial. In more than half of Britain’s postcode areas, the Royal Mail failed to meet its aim of delivering 91.5 per cent of first-class letters the next day, between March and June. BT was given planning permission to remove disused dish-shaped aerials from high up on the BT Tower before they fell off. Scratched depictions of reindeer made more than 12,000 years ago were found in a cave in the Gower peninsula. NF Simpson, the author of One Way Pendulum, died, aged 92.

HOME David Cameron, the Prime Minister, stood outside 10 Downing Street and commented on events in Libya. ‘This has not been our revolution,’ he said, ‘but we can be proud that we have played our part.’ He had broken off his holiday in Cornwall for a meeting of the National Security Council. He had only just resumed his holiday after having previously flown home from Tuscany for the riots in England. Of the 1,400 people to have appeared in court in connection with the riots, 157 were convicted, 327 bailed and almost 800 remanded in custody. Birmingham police released footage of some of the 11 shots fired at them during the riots.

Home Of the 1,179 people who had appeared in court on charges arising from the riots by 15 August, two thirds were remanded in custody. The number of arrests by then had reached 2,772. Seven were arrested in connection with the murder of three Asian men in Birmingham, knocked down by a car. Tariq Jahan, the father of one of them, had appealed for calm after the murder: ‘I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, whites — we all live in the same community. Why do we have to kill one another?’ A 16-year-old boy was charged with the murder of Richard Bowes, aged 68, who had been attacked as he had tried to put out a fire in Ealing. A man was charged over the robbery seen on television of a Malaysian student with a jaw broken in an earlier assault, under the guise of helping him.

This week's Portrait of the week HOME William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said there was ‘not a remote possibility’ of using force against Syria, even with United Nations backing. The Commons defence committee said that cuts to the Armed Forces might prevent their doing whatever was needed after 2015. Mike Clasper, the chairman of HM Revenue & Customs, apologised for its poor performance last year in answering telephone calls and replying to letters. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said the government saved £3.75 billion from May 2010 to March 2011 by cutting the Civil Service and renegotiating contracts with suppliers.

This week's Portrait of the week Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, cut short a trade mission to South Africa, returning to give a statement on the phone hacking scandal to the Commons, which delayed its summer recess. Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, appeared before a select committee of the Commons investigating the scandal, with his son James, the chief of News Corporation Europe and Asia. ‘I was absolutely shocked, appalled and ashamed when I heard about the Milly Dowler case two weeks ago,’ Mr Murdoch Senior told the committee, but the responsibility for what went on at the News of the World was that of ‘the people I trusted to run it and maybe the people they trusted’.