Portrait of the week: Small boats, stamp price hike and a new job for Sue Gray

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Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, introduced the Illegal Migration Bill, intended to stop people crossing the Channel on small boats. It would ban those who entered Britain illegally from claiming asylum or re-entering in future, and would place a duty on the Home Secretary to deport them ‘as soon as reasonably practicable’. Writing to MPs, the Home Secretary said there was a ‘more than 50 per cent chance’ that it was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. She also said she had ‘pushed the boundaries of international law’. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, rang the President of Rwanda to tell him to expect deliveries. The price of a first-class stamp is to go up from 95p to £1.10 on 3 April.

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Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, offered a post as his chief of staff to Sue Gray, whose independent report into breaches of lockdown rules at Downing Street damned Boris Johnson, the Conservative prime minister at the time. An interim report by the cross-party Privileges Committee that had been asked by parliament to investigate whether Johnson misled parliament over lockdown gatherings in Downing Street said that evidence ‘strongly suggests’ that breaches of guidance ‘would have been obvious to Mr Johnson at the time he was at the gatherings’. Constance Marten and Mark Gordon were charged with the manslaughter of a baby named in court documents as Victoria, whose remains were found in an allotment shed in Brighton after a police search. Emergency coal power-stations contributed to the National Grid to avoid blackouts during a spell of cold nights. Wally Fawkes, the jazz clarinettist and cartoonist ‘Trog’, creator of the Flook strip, died aged 98.

WhatsApp messages taken from the 100,000 sent or received by Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, were published by the Daily Telegraph, exposing the PR-driven dynamics of government during the Covid pandemic and banter from civil servants asking, for example, of Nigel Farage, photographed in a pub: ‘Can we lock him up?’ They showed that face masks were introduced in secondary schools in England despite England’s chief medical officer saying there were ‘no very strong reasons’ to do so.