Portrait of the week | 9 August 2018

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Brandon Lewis, the chairman of the Conservative party, demanded that Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, should apologise for saying, in an article defending the right of women in Britain to wear the burka or the niqab, that it was at the same time ‘absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes’. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘The language that Boris used has offended people.’ Jennie Formby, the general secretary of the Labour party, wrote to Dame Margaret Hodge saying that no further action would be taken against her. Dame Margaret was said to have called Jeremy Corbyn, the party leader, an ‘anti-Semite’. Dame Margaret denied that she had expressed regret, and her lawyers said she would ‘not apologise for her conduct and words, as she did nothing wrong’. The words ‘Posh scum’ were sprayed on windows at the Somerset home of Jacob Rees-Mogg MP while he was on a family holiday in New York.