Portrait of the week | 11 October 2012

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‘Unless we take difficult, painful decisions,’ David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told the Conservative party conference, ‘Britain may not be in the future what it has been in the past.’ He said that it was ‘an hour of reckoning for countries like ours. Sink or swim, do or decline.’ Earlier he had said that a referendum on the terms of EU membership is the ‘cleanest, neatest and simplest’ solution, though a general election would count as an alternative. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, was feted at the conference, and said in a speech that if he was a mop, Mr Cameron was a ‘broom that is clearing up the mess left by the Labour government’, with ‘George Osborne the dustpan, Michael Gove the J-cloth, William Hague the sponge.’ George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said the government was determined to press ahead with a further £10 billion of cuts from the benefits budget.