The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 24 September 2015

issue 26 September 2015

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In a speech at the Shanghai stock exchange, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a feasibility study into the trading of Chinese and British shares in both countries. At least half of all British banknotes in circulation are held overseas or used in the black market, a Bank of England report suggested. The political impasse in Northern Ireland continued. Sir David Willcocks, the director of choirs, died, aged 95. Brian Sewell, the art critic, died aged 84. Jackie Collins, the author of titillating blockbusters, died aged 77. An outbreak of highly drug-resistant gonorrhoea was detected in the north of England, from Oldham to Scunthorpe.

Lord Ashcroft, who says he resents not being given a ‘significant’ government job in 2010, wrote a disobliging book about David Cameron which included a claim by an MP that at an event held by the Piers Gaveston society when Mr Cameron was at Oxford, he ‘inserted a private part of his anatomy’ into the mouth of a dead pig’s head resting in the lap of a club member.

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