Portrait of the week: King Charles turns 75, Cameron returns and Gaza fighting continues

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Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister appointed David Cameron, prime minister 2010-16, as Foreign Secretary and sent him to the Lords for the purpose, though there was a delay before the peerage was gazetted. The Speaker of the Commons asked the government how the Foreign Office would be held ‘properly accountable to this House’. There were rumblings in Brexitward quarters. Richard Tice, the leader of the Reform party, said: ‘The champagne will be flowing in the Reform party headquarters tonight.’ Eluned Morgan, Lady Morgan of Ely, a Labour minister in the Welsh Senedd, apologised for saying: ‘What next? Thatcher’s hearse arriving at No. 10?’ The surprise was precipitated by the need to sack Suella Braverman as home secretary, although the post was offered a day before she published an article in the Times that had not been ‘fully cleared’ by Downing Street. She had written that ‘there is a perception that senior police officers play favourites when it comes to protestors’. Three days later, 300,000 people demanding a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas marched through London on Armistice Day in a protest that the Metropolitan Police said they had insufficient grounds to ban. Police arrested 100 right-wingers and held 150 breakaway protestors, some of whom had fired fireworks at police. Anti-Semitic chants and masking of faces were not generally pursued by police. After her sacking, Mrs Braverman wrote a 1,300-word letter to the Prime Minister, saying that he had ‘no personal mandate to be prime minister’, and had betrayed her and the nation; ‘I have become hoarse urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate marches’; ‘I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises.’