Portrait of the week | 13 September 2012

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George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the autumn statement would be on 5 December, and commentators said he would confront the dwindling chance of meeting debt targets set for 2015. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, said the government would set up a ‘business bank’ to lend to companies. The Commons Public Accounts Committee said a £1.4 billion Regional Growth Fund set up in April last year had created only 2,442 jobs. Delegates to the Trades Union Congress voted to support co-ordinated strikes against a public sector pay freeze. Tories from the right of the party started a group called Conservative Voice. The nation took a keen interest in a quadruple murder near Annecy in France in which Saad al-Hilli, a British man of Iraqi background, from Claygate in Surrey, was shot dead in his car, together with his wife and mother-in-law, and a local cyclist; a seven-year-old daughter was wounded and a four-year-old was found by French police hiding beneath her mother’s body eight hours after the incident.