Portrait of the week | 6 July 2017

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Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged colleagues to make the case for ‘sound money’; he said, ‘We must hold our nerve,’ as he came under pressure to end the public-sector pay cap of a 1 per cent rise a year. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, thought that pay rises could be awarded in ‘a responsible way’; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, did not think that taxes would need to increase to accommodate pay rises. Firemen boasted of a 2 per cent pay rise. The government won the vote on the Queen’s Speech by 323 to 309 after heading off an amendment by the Labour MP Stella Creasy, by suddenly announcing that women in Northern Ireland (where abortion is illegal) would be able to have free abortions on the NHS in England. Talks with the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein failed to restore a power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland.