The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 14 August 2014

issue 16 August 2014

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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, resisted calls for Parliament to be recalled to debate the crisis in Iraq. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said that the government was not considering military intervention ‘at the present time’. Mark Simmonds resigned as a Foreign Office minister, but Downing Street hastened to say that his resignation, unlike Lady Warsi’s a week earlier, had nothing to do with government policy on Gaza, since he was complaining he could not afford to rent a flat in London for his family with the £27,000 allowance. A man sought by police investigating the theft of a fish tank from a furniture shop in Leeds hid in a bush and was attacked by a swarm of wasps.

Unemployment fell 132,000 to 2.08 million and average wages fell 0.2 per cent over a year. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain had breached the rights of ten prisoners in Scottish jails by preventing them from voting in the 2009 European election, but it refused to award damages, saying the ruling in the inmates’ favour was enough.

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