Portrait of the Week – 26 April 2018

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No. 10 insisted: ‘We will not be staying in the customs union or joining a customs union.’ The undertaking came after a defeat for the government on the matter in the House of Lords and before a vote in the House of Commons. The government proposed two alternatives: one being a ‘customs partnership’ in which the UK would collect tariffs on the EU’s behalf on goods coming from other countries, and the other being a ‘highly streamlined customs arrangement’. Jacob Rees-Mogg called the notion of a customs partnership with the EU after Brexit ‘completely cretinous’ and remarked that Theresa May, the Prime Minister, ‘is carrying out the will of the British people but it’s hard to read what level of enthusiasm she has for it’. In unseasonal heat, Britain managed to go for three days without using coal to generate electricity.

The Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a boy weighing 8lb 7oz at St Mary’s Hospital, London; he is fifth in line to the throne behind his elder sister, Charlotte, under the Succession to the Crown Act, 2013. The Queen was obliged to celebrate her 92nd birthday by listening to Shaggy, Sting and Craig David at the Albert Hall. A statue by Gillian Wearing of Millicent Fawcett the suffragist holding a tea towel bearing the words ‘Courage calls to courage everywhere’ was unveiled in Parliament Square, 59 years after a statue of her husband Henry in Vauxhall was destroyed by Lambeth council.

Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, kept on apologising over the mistreatment of Commonwealth immigrants who had come to live in Britain before 1973. ‘Anyone from the Windrush generation,’ she said, ‘who now wants to become a British citizen will be able to do so’, without having to pay fees.