Portrait of the week | 24 January 2013

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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, at last delivered his speech on Europe, postponed during the Algerian hostage crisis. He wanted to ‘negotiate a new settlement with our European partners’, and before the end of 2017, ‘when we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice. To stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether. It will be an in/out referendum.’ The government started trying to hurry through a Bill to change succession to the Crown. Blockbuster, the DVD rental firm, went into administration and announced the closure of 160 of its 528 shops. Tom Albanese resigned as the chief executive of Rio Tinto after the company wrote off £8.7 billion of its aluminium and Mozambique coal-mining businesses. Of the 808,000 births in the United Kingdom in 2011, the highest number since 1971, 196,000 were to women not born in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics, with Poland, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nigeria being the top five countries in which those mothers were born.