Portrait of the week | 21 August 2010

Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister, got no further than Buckingham-shire on his summer holiday before Mr Nick Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister, cast doubts on replacing Trident. ‘It’s going to be difficult for someone who is going to receive less housing benefit,’ he said, if the government spent ‘huge, huge amounts of money in a hurry on replacing Trident in full’. Dr Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for Defence, had suggested that the numbers of civil servants and senior officers in the armed forces would be notably reduced. Mr Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was said to have had a ‘blazing, shouting, grade-A row’ with Mr George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, over the funding of his welfare reforms. The Treasury confirmed that universal benefits such as winter fuel payments and child benefit were being reconsidered in the October spending review.