Portrait of the week | 13 September 2018

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Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, was said to want to throw a lifeline to Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, but he insisted: ‘It is not possible to get freedom for goods without freedom for services, in particular for the movement of people.’ Up to 80 Tory MPs would vote against the government’s plan hatched at Chequers in July, Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, said. A few dozen members of the European Research Group met to see how they might make best use of rules on Conservative leadership election. The Trades Union Congress said it could throw its ‘full weight’ behind a referendum on the final Brexit deal. Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, wrote in the Mail on Sunday that ‘under the Chequers proposal… We have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution — and handed the detonator to Michel Barnier.’ Political opponents picked on Mr Johnson’s use of language.