Portrait of the week | 30 January 2014

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Britain’s gross domestic product grew by 1.9 per cent last year, the most since 2007, according to the Office for National Statistics. The last quarter’s growth was 0.7 per cent, a little less than the 0.8 per cent of the previous quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2013, construction actually declined by 0.3 per cent, and economic output was still 1.3 per cent less than in the first quarter of 2008. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, promised in a speech that Labour would restore the 50 per cent rate of tax on higher earnings. Daniel Evans, a former Sunday Mirror journalist, told the Old Bailey that he had intercepted voicemails ‘on a fairly grand scale’ at the paper between 2003 and 2005; he had also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to intercept voicemails at the News of the World between 2004 and 2010. Google spent £400 million to buy DeepMind, a London-based company that specialises in machine-learning algorithms.