Portrait of the week: Zelensky at Sandringham, rail fare rise and Duchess of Sussex’s Chinese takeaways

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After the humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Washington, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, quickly convened a meeting at Lancaster House with 17 European leaders, including Mr Zelensky, and Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada. Sir Keir outlined a four-point plan to form a ‘coalition of the willing’ to defend a peace agreement and to keep military aid flowing to Ukraine. Britain gave Ukraine £1.6 billion of export finance to buy 5,000 air defence missiles, to be made by the French-owned company Thales in Belfast. Mr Zelensky requested an audience with the King, which was granted with the government’s approval, and went to Sandringham for tea before a blazing fire.

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In the Commons, Sir Keir spoke of President Donald Trump’s continued commitment to peace ‘which nobody in this House should doubt for a second is sincere’. He later spoke to Mr Trump and to Mr Zelensky on the phone. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, notified the Office for Budget Responsibility of future spending cuts. Anneliese Dodds resigned as international development minister after the increase of British defence spending at the expense of development funding. Tim Davie, the director-general of the BBC, told a committee of MPs that he ‘lost trust’ in a documentary about Gaza and so had withdrawn it from iPlayer; its 13-year-old narrator turned out to be the son of a Hamas official. New leasehold flats in England and Wales will be banned under plans in a government white paper. The government backed a second runway at Gatwick airport.

Regulated rail fares went up by 4.6 per cent, taking an annual season ticket from Southampton to London to £7,477.