The Spectator

Portrait of the week: power failures, toy shortages and Boris’s Marbella mountain villa

issue 16 October 2021

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In an extraordinary wrangle between government departments, the Treasury accused Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, of ‘making things up’ by saying he had held talks with the Treasury about helping companies badly hit by soaring energy prices. With the price of wholesale gas having risen fourfold in a year, businesses expected to close factories. To stir the pot of government discord, some demanded that Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, should ‘knock heads together’, though he was on holiday in the mountains above Marbella at a villa belonging to Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park. There were signs that prime-ministerial favour rested upon Mr Kwarteng. The Queen, aged 95, used a walking stick when she attended Westminster Abbey to mark the centenary of the Royal British Legion.

There were a record 1.2 million job vacancies in September; the number of workers employed, at 29.2

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