Portrait of the week: Queen stays home, Boris rubbishes recycling and pay freeze thaws

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The Queen will not attend the COP26 meeting in Glasgow next week; she had resumed light duties after having spent a night in hospital for ‘preliminary medical checks’. The Queen would address COP26 by means of a recorded video. ‘The recycling thing is a red herring,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told a press conference attended by schoolchildren. ‘You can only recycle plastic a couple of times, really. What you’ve got to do is stop the production of plastic.’ The protestors calling themselves Insulate Britain blocked main roads into London and approaches to the M25. Amazon Web Services was awarded a contract to provide a high-security cloud system for GCHQ, MI5 and MI6. The government took over administration of Slough, which had spent £54 million on a council headquarters where the wifi did not work properly. Ikea is buying the large Oxford Street store that belonged to Topshop for £378 million.