Portrait of the week | 1 June 2017

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The Conservatives grew restive when polls, for what they were worth, indicated a closing gap between their support and Labour’s. In a generally uneventful 90 minutes of television, in which Theresa May, the leader of the Conservative party, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, were questioned, Jeremy Paxman said to Mrs May: ‘If I was sitting in Brussels and I was looking at you as the person I had to negotiate with, I’d think, she’s a blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire.’ Mr Corbyn said in an earlier interview with Andrew Neil: ‘I never met the IRA,’ leaving viewers wondering in what sense this could be true. Andrew Marr questioned Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, about her 1980s statement regarding the IRA that ‘a defeat for the British state would be a great liberation’; she replied: ‘It was 34 years ago. I had a rather splendid afro at the time.