Portrait of the week: Coronavirus plans, Boris’s baby and Priti Patel under fire

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After a Cobra emergency meeting about the coronavirus Covid-19, when the number of cases in the United Kingdom had reached 40, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said that they had ‘agreed a plan so that as and when it starts to spread — as I’m afraid it looks likely that it will — we are in a position to take the steps that will be necessary’. The plan expects up to a fifth of the workforce to be off sick during the peak of an epidemic. After a week in which shares lost 12 per cent of their value, the Bank of England said that it was working ‘to ensure all necessary steps are taken to protect financial and monetary stability’. The Budget had to be adjusted. Anglo American’s £405 million bid for Sirius Minerals, the Yorkshire polyhalite mining enterprise, was approved by shareholders. Carrie Symonds, aged 31, the girlfriend of Boris Johnson, aged 55, announced that she would have a baby in the early summer and that at the end of last year they had become engaged to be married.