The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 April 2018

issue 14 April 2018

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Parliament was in recess when Theresa May, the Prime Minister, agreed with America and France that the international community should respond to the chemical attack reported from Syria. It was not certain in any case that Parliament would back direct action by Britain. Yulia Skripal, who with her father Sergei was poisoned in Salisbury on 4 March, was discharged from hospital and taken to a safe place. Richard Osborn-Brooks, 78, who killed a burglar with a screwdriver with which he had been threatened, learnt that he would not be charged. He and his disabled wife had to leave their house for fear of revenge by associates of Henry Vincent, the dead man. People removed from a fence bouquets of flowers commemorating the burglar. Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, deployed 300 extra officers a day at the weekend to counter knife crime as the number of fatal stabbings in London this year rose to at least 35.

Israel’s Labor Party announced a ‘temporary suspension of all formal relations’ with the British Labour Party, while its leader Jeremy Corbyn failed adequately to ‘address the anti-Semitism in the Labour Party’; Mr Corbyn responded: ‘I wish they would read Shami Chakrabarti’s report.’

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