The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 March 2012

issue 10 March 2012

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Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, said in a leaked letter that the coalition lacks a ‘compelling vision’. He proposed that RBS be split up and half turned into ‘British business bank’. Earlier he had said that there was a ‘broad understanding’ in the coalition that, if the 50p tax rate was removed, it should be replaced by a tax on wealth such as a ‘mansion tax’. House prices fell by 0.5 per cent in February compared with January, according to a survey by the Halifax. Engelbert Humperdinck, aged 75, was chosen to represent the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Azerbaijan. Lord St John of Fawsley, the former Conservative MP sacked by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 after two years in the Cabinet, died, aged 82. The Duke of Sutherland sold Titian’s ‘Diana and Callisto’ to the nation for the knock-down price of £45 million.

A government proposal to make marriage open to two people of the same sex was ‘a grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right’, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, said.

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