Portrait of the week | 10 April 2014

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Maria Miller resigned as Culture Secretary after a week of being the centre of a game of hunt-the-issue. She had paid back expenses, but only the £5,800 requested by the Commons standards committee, not the £45,000 suggested by the parliamentary commissioner for standards; she had apologised in the Commons, but her apology lasted only 32 seconds; her special advisers were accused of putting pressure on the Daily Telegraph not to report on her expenses embarrassment because she had power over newspaper regulation; the chairman of the 1922 Committee called the scandal ‘toxic’. Mrs Miller told her constituents: ‘I am devastated.’ Teesside Crown Court heard that John Darwin, who faked his own death in 2002, has paid only £121 of a £679,000 proceeds-of-crime order.

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