Portrait of the week

Home Justin Welby resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury, after not reporting to the authorities what he knew in 2013 of the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth QC (who ran Christian summer camps in the 1970s and 1980s and died in 2018). An independent review by Keith Makin found last week that Smyth abused more than

Home Sue Gray resigned as chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister. She will become Sir Keir’s envoy for the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. She was replaced by Morgan McSweeney, 47. James Lyons, a former political journalist who has more recently worked for the NHS and TikTok, was brought in

Home The Conservatives at their party conference examined the four surviving candidates for leader – Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat – with the prospect of two being thrown out of the ballot by MPs next week and the other two being put to the party membership on 2 November. Rishi Sunak,

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, in his speech to the Labour party conference in Liverpool, said that ‘if we take tough long-term decisions now’ Britain would much more quickly reach the ‘light at the end of this tunnel’. He was cheered when he promised to return the railways to public ownership and restore

Home Sir Keir Starmer met Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, in Rome and said that sending funds to Tunisia and Libya ‘appears to have had quite a profound effect’ in cutting the number of migrants arriving in Italy. In the seven days to 16 September, 1,158 migrants arrived in England in small boats;

Home The government won by 348 to 228 a Commons vote on limiting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners to those who qualified by poverty: 52 Labour MPs didn’t vote, one voted with the opposition; five MPs suspended from the Labour party also voted with the opposition. Three million people who began receiving the ‘new’ state

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, speaking in the garden of 10 Downing Street, warned that the Budget in October is ‘going to be painful’, and that ‘things will get worse before they get better’. ‘I didn’t want to means-test the winter fuel payment, but it was a choice we had to make,’ he

Home Riots subsided after 7 August, a night when many were expected but only empty streets or demonstrations against riots eventuated. By 12 August there had been 975 arrests and 546 charges in 36 of the 43 police force areas in England and Wales. Rioters could be released from jail after serving 40 per cent

Home A week of riots, with violence against the police, threats to Muslims, burning of vehicles and looting (Greggs, Shoezone, Sainsbury’s Local) broke out in Liverpool, Sunderland, London, Hartlepool, Manchester, Hull, Aldershot, Stoke-on-Trent, Bristol, Bolton, Tamworth, Portsmouth, Weymouth, Leeds, Rotherham, Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Blackpool, Plymouth and Belfast. The Northern Ireland Assembly was recalled. Rioters attacked hotels

Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said she had found a £21.9 billion hole, and a black one at that, ‘covered up’ by the Tories in the finances Labour inherited. ‘The biggest single cause of the £22 billion fiscal hole was Reeves’s decision to give inflation-busting pay rises to public sector workers,’ the

Home Britain enjoyed its share of the worldwide failure of 8.5 million computers reliant on Microsoft, through a faulty update of the CrowdStrike antivirus software. On the first day, 167 air departures were cancelled in the United Kingdom – 5.4 per cent of those scheduled. (Worldwide it was 5,078 – 4.6 per cent of those

Home The government funnelled three dozen bills into the King’s Speech, highlighting one to make a specific offence of spiking a drink, which is already illegal. But backbenchers and Labour in Scotland failed in efforts to remove the cap of two children for the payment of child benefit. A new state-owned energy company would be