Portrait of the week | 28 March 2018

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‘We recognise that anti-Semitism has occurred in pockets within the Labour Party,’ Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said. ‘I am sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused.’ His remarks were released before the publication of an open letter to Labour MPs from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council which said Mr Corbyn was incapable of contemplating anti-Semitism seriously ‘because he is so ideologically fixed within a far-left worldview that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities’. Earlier, Mr Corbyn had said: ‘I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely’ at a mural satirising Jewish financiers when he posted remarks on Facebook in 2012 opposing its removal by Tower Hamlets council, although he now realised it was ‘deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic’. Mr Corbyn sacked Owen Smith as the shadow Northern Ireland secretary for calling for a second referendum on the EU. Cambridge beat Oxford by three lengths in the 164th Boat Race.

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Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, took out advertisements in British and American newspapers saying that ‘a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014’ was ‘a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time’. After five days, the Information Commissioner obtained a warrant to search the computers at Cambridge Analytica, the company that dealt with the data. The restaurant group Prezzo is closing 94 outlets, a third of the chain, under a company voluntary arrangement.

David Davis, the Brexit secretary, said that a final agreement with the EU was ‘incredibly probable, very, very highly probable’. A great deal of outrage met the news that, under EU competition rules, the new blue British passports would be made by Gemalto, a Franco-Dutch company, not by the current suppliers, De La Rue, at Gateshead.