Portrait of the week | 7 February 2019

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Theresa May, the Prime Minister, went off to Brussels again to talk about ‘alternative arrangements’, for which parliament had voted, to the Irish backstop in her EU withdrawal agreement, which parliament had rejected. First she gave a speech in Northern Ireland, saying: ‘There is no suggestion that we are not going to ensure in the future there is provision for this insurance policy… the backstop.’ Lord Trimble (once an Ulster Unionist, now Conservative), the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, said he was ‘exploring’ the possibility of a legal challenge to May’s deal on the grounds that it undermines the Belfast Agreement of 1998. The coroner for Northern Ireland said deaths from counterfeit versions of Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug not prescribed in the NHS, had doubled from 26 in 2017; in Scotland deaths had risen from 24 in 2016 to 99 in 2017. The actor Liam Neeson, from Ballymena, said that, after a friend told him she had been raped by a black man, he went round with a cosh ‘hoping some “black bastard” would come out of a pub and have a go at me… so I could kill him.’