Portrait of the week

HomeEd Balls, the shadow chancellor, commenting on the public sector wage freeze, said: ‘I can’t promise to reverse that now.’ Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said it was ‘absolutely right’ to place employment before pay rises. But Len McCluskey of the Unite union called it a ‘Blairite coup’ and Mark Serwotka of the Public and Commercial Services Union, called it ‘hugely disappointing’. Inflation fell in December to 4.2 per cent from 4.8 per cent (by CPI) or to 4.8 per cent from 5.2 per cent (by RPI). Thieves dug a 100ft tunnel to a video shop in Manchester over the New Year, and got away with £6,000; a similar tunnel had been discovered at the same place in 2007.

HomeThe High Speed 2 rail link between London and Birmingham is to go ahead, Justine Greening, the Secretary of State for Transport, announced. The stretch to Birmingham would be completed by 2026, but a connection to Heathrow not until 2033, when the extensions to Manchester and Leeds would be finished. The cost of the project would be £32.7 billion. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in a separate initiative that shareholders would be empowered to limit the pay of company executives. Bob Holness, one of the first presenters on Radio 2 from 1967 and later the presenter of the television game Blockbusters, died, aged 83. ••• Mr Cameron said he wanted Scotland to hold a binding referendum on independence earlier than 2014.

HomeGary Dobson and David Norris were found guilty, on the evidence of blood and fibre traces, of the murder of Stephen Lawrence at Eltham in 1993. Dobson had been acquitted of the crime in 1996, but the law changed to allow a new trial to consider new evidence. A 20-year-old man charged with murdering Anuj Bidve, an Indian student, by shooting him dead in Salford on Boxing Day, when asked to confirm his name in court, said that it was ‘Psycho Stapleton’. A man shot a woman, her sister and niece in a house in Peterlee, Co Durham, and then shot himself. One policeman was sacked and 154 faced disciplinary action over their use of Facebook between 2008 and 2010.

HomeThe Duke of Edinburgh, aged 90, left Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire four days after arriving by helicopter for an emergency operation to fit a stent in a blocked coronary artery. ‘It is tragedy that often draws out the most and the best from the human spirit,’ the Queen said in her Christmas broadcast, recorded earlier. In an interview with RTE, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that the Queen’s visit to Ireland in May had been a ‘game-changer’ in Anglo-Irish relations. The body of Christopher Hitchens, who died aged 62, was donated for medical research. Kauto Star won an unprecedented fifth King George VI Chase at Kempton. ••• Mr Cameron said that he supported minimum pricing for alcohol.

JanuaryThe government introduced a Health Bill to give control of the NHS budget to GPs. Andy Coulson resigned as head of communications at Downing Street. Prisoners set Ford open prison on fire. Gerry Rafferty, the singer, died, aged 63. Nigel Pargetter fell to his death from the roof at Lower Loxley. A fox weighing 26.5lb, suspected of having killed a cat, was trapped at Maidstone. President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia in the face of a popular uprising. Crowds rioted in Cairo. Floods drove people from their homes in Sri Lanka, Brazil and Australia. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic congresswoman, was wounded by a shot to the head at Tucson, Arizona. Three thousand dead blackbirds fell on the city of Beebe, Arkansas. FebruaryThe government dropped plans to sell off woodland.

HomeDavid Cameron, the Prime Minister, said before an EU summit on the eurozone debt crisis that he would not agree to any treaty change ‘that fails to protect our interests’. Downing Street rejected suggestions by Iain Duncan Smith that a referendum on the EU would be made necessary by the changes proposed. Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, said that the crisis posed an ‘exceptionally threatening environment’ for British banks and that they should increase their capital reserves in preference to paying dividends or bonuses.

HomePublic borrowing will exceed previous forecasts by £5 billion this year, £19 billion next year and £30 billion in 2013-14, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in an Autumn Statement delivered under dark clouds. The ratio of debt to GDP would rise to a peak of 78 per cent in 2014-15. He noted that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had revised forecasts for growth this year to 0.9 per cent (from the 1.7 per cent predicted in March), and for next year to 0.7 per cent. There would be a 1 per cent cap on public sector pay rises, he said. The 3p rise in fuel duty due in January was cancelled, but a 3p rise would come in next August.

HomeDavid Cameron, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Getting debt under control is proving harder than anyone envisaged.’ In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry he blamed in part ‘paralysis in the eurozone’. His words came a week before the Chancellor was due to make his autumn statement, and the Office for Budget Responsibility to publish projections for the public deficit, which looked most unlikely to be expunged by the end of this parliament. Mr Cameron had earlier held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and was thought to have discussed a ‘narrow’ amendment to the Lisbon Treaty that would not be subject to a referendum in Britain.

•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.