Portrait of the Week: Natalie Elphicke defects, wages rise and Switzerland takes Eurovision

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The parliamentary Labour party shook itself uneasily after Natalie Elphicke, the MP for Dover, crossed the floor of the Commons and joined it, because she found the Conservatives too left wing. Monty Panesar, the former England cricketer, left George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain a week after being announced as a parliamentary candidate. Some Liberal Democrat party members complained to the Equality and Human Rights Commission about the deselection as a candidate for Sutton and Cheam of David Campanale, an Anglican. The Commons voted by 170 to 169 for MPs arrested for serious sexual or violent offences to be banned from attending parliament. The government bruited plans to stop sex education for under-nines and restrict teaching about gender.

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said in a speech that ‘the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet most transformational our country has ever known’, so Britain would be safer under the Conservatives.