Portrait of the week | 20 February 2010

UK Financial Investments, which oversees the British government’s stake in RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock, said it might be 2015 before taxpayers got back the £40 billion used to prop up failing banks.

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UK Financial Investments, which oversees the British government’s stake in RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock, said it might be 2015 before taxpayers got back the £40 billion used to prop up failing banks. Barclays’ profits increased to £11.6 billion in 2009, a rise of 92 per cent over the year before. Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, said that the world’s leading economies were close to agreeing an international levy on banks. Twenty economists, including four former members of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, said in a letter to the Sunday Times that there should be action to reduce ‘the structural budget deficit more quickly than set out in the 2009 Pre-Budget Report’. The rate of inflation rose to 3.5 per cent in January from 2.9 per cent the month before, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index. The Retail Prices Index, which includes housing costs, put inflation at 3.7 per cent, up from 2.4 per cent. Unemployment for the last quarter of 2009 remained little changed at 2.46 million, but the number claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance in January rose to 1.64 million, the highest since April 1997. A repair man from Cirencester won a £56 million lottery prize, which he said he intended to share with the woman he has lived with for eight years, their three children from previous marriages, and a spaniel. The General Synod of the Church of England voted to extend equal pension rights to the homosexual civil partners of deceased clergy. Mr Andy Powell was dropped from the Welsh Six Nations squad after being arrested in a golf buggy on the M4 at six o’clock on the morning following his team’s victory against Scotland, and charged with drink driving.