Portrait of the week | 15 October 2015

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Two groups were launched, one in favour of remaining in the European Union and the other in favour of leaving. Vote Leave drew support from Conservatives for Britain, from Labour Leave and from Business for Britain. Lord Rose, chairman of the new group Britain Stronger in Europe, said: ‘To claim that the patriotic course for Britain is to retreat, withdraw and become inward-looking is to misunderstand who we are as a nation.’ The Metropolitan Police withdrew officers stationed outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London where Julian Assange sought refuge in 2012, a watch that had cost £12.6 million. Marlon James from Jamaica won the Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, based on an attempt to assassinate Bob Marley in the 1970s.

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John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, infuriated some Labour MPs by reversing the party’s policy of supporting the government’s fiscal charter, which purports to prevent future administrations from maintaining a budget deficit. The meeting at which the U-turn was announced was characterised by Ben Bradshaw MP as ‘a total fucking shambles’. Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour party, told the Commons that he would not apologise for demanding that police investigate sex abuse claims against the late Lord Brittan, who died in January without being told by police that there was no case for him to answer over an alleged rape in 1967. Because of an urgent engagement to eat fish and chips in a pub in Fort William, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, missed a meeting of the Privy Council and was found still not to have been appointed one of its 650 members. Lord Howe of Aberavon, who as Geoffrey Howe served as chancellor from 1979 to 1983 and as foreign secretary from 1983 to 1989, before helping, with a resignation speech in 1990, to precipitate the fall of Margaret Thatcher, died, aged 88.