Portrait of the week: Taxing times for the Tories, tanks for Ukraine and a giant Antarctic iceberg

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Nadhim Zahawi, minister without portfolio and chairman of the Conservative party, was asked to explain how a penalty formed part of a £5 million tax payment he had made. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, asked Sir Laurie Magnus, his newly appointed ethics adviser, to examine whether Mr Zahawi had broken the code of conduct on ministerial behaviour. The appointment of Richard Sharp as chairman of the BBC was under review by William Shawcross, the Commissioner of Public Appointments, after it became known that in 2020, before his appointment, he had contacted Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, about an offer of a loan of £800,000 by Sam Blyth, an old friend of Mr Sharp’s, to Boris Johnson, then PM.

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The government borrowed £27.4 billion last month, the highest sum for December since 1993. Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, an Afghan asylum seeker convicted this week of murdering a man in the street in Bournemouth, turned out to have entered Britain giving his age as 14 when he was 18, having been convicted of drug-dealing in Italy and having shot dead two people in Serbia. About 200 children, mostly Albanian teenage boys, remain missing from hotels housing asylum seekers, Robert Jenrick, the minister for immigration, told MPs; of 4,600 child asylum seekers who had arrived in the UK since 2021, 440 had gone missing and only half had returned. Isla Bryson, 31, a transgender woman, was found guilty in Glasgow of raping two women in 2016 and 2019, before she changed gender; she was sent to a women’s prison in Stirling. Ambulance staff went on strike again. A fireman was injured in a fire at the former Jenners department store in Edinburgh.

The House of Bishops of the Church of England is to present to the General Synod in February a proposal for prayers of blessing in church for civil marriages between couples of the same sex; the C of E is prohibited by law from marrying people of the same sex in church.