Portrait of the week

  HOME Parliament was recalled as rioting spread across London and to other cities. It began in Tottenham on Saturday night, two days after a black man, Mark Duggan, was shot dead by police during an attempted arrest. Friends gathered at Tottenham police station asking the truth of the incident. The Independent Police Complaints Commission later announced that ‘speculation that Mark Duggan was "assassinated" in an execution style involving a number of shots to the head are categorically untrue’. (Two days later the commission confirmed that Duggan had a loaded gun, but there was no evidence it was fired.

Home Gross Domestic Product grew by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2011, after a quarter in which growth was 0.5 per cent, according to the Office for National Statistics, which took the trouble to mention extenuating circumstances such as the Japanese tsunami and the royal wedding. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, urged George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to cut taxes, including the top rate of 50 per cent. BP made profits of £3.2 billion in the second quarter, less than expected. Sales of beer fell in the second quarter by 15 per cent in supermarkets and 4.5 per cent in pubs. Amy Winehouse, the singer, was found dead at home; she was 27. Lucian Freud, the painter, died, aged 88. Fran Landesman, the poet and performer, died, aged 83.

Home The newspaper the News of the World was closed by Rupert Murdoch after 168 years as a response to revelations of phone hacking — breaking into telephone voicemail messages. Police were said to have 4,000 names that might have been targeted. There was public outcry after it was said that the phones of Milly Dowler, the murdered teenager; and of relatives of the Soham murder victims as well as of dead British soldiers and of those who died in the bombings on 7 July 2005, had been hacked. Police were also said to have been paid by journalists for telephone numbers of members of the royal family.

Home A private investigator working for the News of the World allegedly hacked into the voicemail of the murdered girl Milly Dowler while she was missing, deleting messages when the box was full to make room for new messages; this might have given the impression that the girl was still alive. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said he found it was ‘quite shocking — that someone could do this’. An emergency debate was held on the matter in the Commons. There were questions about hacking into the telephones of the families of the girls murdered at Soham in 2002, and those killed in the bombings of 7 July 2005. A bronze statue of Ronald Reagan was erected in Grosvenor Square, London, on the centenary of his birth.

Home Teachers went on strike for a day. The National Association of Head Teachers strongly advised heads not to allow parent volunteers to keep schools open. Public-sector workers chose the same day to strike, also in a dispute over pensions. The UK Border Agency advised against flying that day. Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, said he wanted to choose members of the shadow cabinet instead of being bound by elections by the party conference. All but Habitat’s three central London shops went into administration. Thorntons decided to close at least 120 of its sweet shops, transferring many to franchisees. The average person has to use ten personal identification numbers or computer passwords every day, researchers found.

Home The government accepted the recommendations of the NHS Future Forum, which had spent two months reviewing the government’s plans for reforming the National Health Service. The Health Secretary is to remain responsible for the service; private companies are to be prevented from cherry-picking; the regulator, Monitor, will not be required to promote competition; hospital doctors and nurses will be included in the task of commissioning and the 2013 deadline for GPs to form consortiums will be dropped. Southern Cross, the financially beleaguered company that runs homes for 31,000 old people, met the many landlords of the properties it leases in an attempt to carry on.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, gave five ‘guarantees’ about the National Health Service, including a pledge not to endanger universal coverage and to increase spending on the NHS. He also said that hospital doctors and nurses would be involved in new consortiums to plan and buy care, not just GPs. Wayne Rooney, the 25-year-old footballer, had a hair transplant. Ryan Giggs, the 37-year-old footballer, was said to have spent £30,000 on hair replacement. A man, part of whose skull was blown off when he tried to steal some live cabling, was given a 12-month community order by Leeds magistrates. Energy prices rose again. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are to make their home at Kensington Palace when they are in London.

Home President Barack Obama arrived in Britain for a state visit, having fled Ireland a day early lest the ash cloud from the Grimsvötn volcano in Iceland engulf his aeroplane. In Ireland he met his eighth cousin at Moneygall, where he drank a pint of Guinness, said ‘I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere’, and got his armour-plated car stuck on a bump in the road. In London he stayed at Buckingham Palace, attended a state banquet and addressed Parliament. In a joint newspaper article with David Cameron, the Prime Minister, he wrote: ‘Ours is not just a special relationship, it is an essential relationship — for us and for the world.’ Hundreds of flights were cancelled in Scotland as the ash cloud blew into its airspace.

Home Police decided to investigate an allegation that Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, had persuaded someone else to take penalty points for speeding that he should have incurred. In parliament, Mr Huhne outlined plans for Britain to halve carbon emissions by 2027. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, outlined plans for a new House of Lords to contain 300 members, 80 per cent of them elected. Two teenagers were convicted of murder and three of manslaughter for the killing of Sofyen Belamouadden, aged 15, at Victoria Station in London last year. Mothercare announced the closure of a quarter of its shops. Catholics in England and Wales were told by their bishops to abstain once more from eating meat on Fridays from 16 September.

Home Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy Prime Minister, said: ‘People want a louder Liberal Democrat voice in government,’ after his party did very badly in local elections and saw its proposal of the alternative vote defeated in a national referendum. Mr Clegg said there would be ‘substantial and significant changes’ to the stalled NHS reform Bill. Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Business Secretary said that the Conservatives had emerged as ‘ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal’. The Conservatives were left controlling 157 councils of the 279 contested (an increase of four), Labour 57 (an increase of 26) and the Liberal Democrats ten (a decrease of nine). In the AV referendum, 13,013,123 voted no and 6,152,607 yes.

Home Prince William was created Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathhearn and Baron Carrickfergus on the morning of his wedding to Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey. The Duchess’s dress was designed by Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen. It did not rain and a million or so people cheered in the streets, with 25 million in Britain watching on television. During the wedding a Union flag was burnt by republicans in Chetwynd Court in King’s College Cambridge. The Duke and Duchess returned two days later to their house on Anglesey. April was found to have been the warmest for 350 years. Wildfires broke out on heathland in England and Scotland, sweeping through the estate at Balmoral.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, made a joint statement on Libya with President Barack Obama of the United States and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, saying that ‘so long as Gaddafi is in power, Nato and its coalition partners must maintain their operations’. British and French military officers were being sent to Libya to train opposition forces. The frigate Cumberland, which had evacuated hundreds of people from Libya, arrived at Devonport to be decommissioned. The Ministry of Defence posted on the internet secret information about Britain’s nuclear submarines, by not properly blanking out sections of the documents. The Commons Education Committee recommended that Ofsted should be split into two inspectorates, for education and children’s care.

Home Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, told the Commons that the government was delaying plans to reform the National Health Service that would give GPs responsibility for commissioning health services. ‘It is not just a question of presentation,’ said Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister. ‘This is also a question of making substantive changes to the legislation.’ After announcing government policy on social mobility, Clegg mentioned that informal internships for young people in Whitehall would be banned because it should not be a matter of ‘someone who’s met somebody at the tennis club or the golf club’, even though he had once benefited from a intern placement. The government announced that the full state pension of £97.