Portrait of the Week

7 November 2009

Mr David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, had to explain why a ‘cast iron guarantee’ by the Conservatives to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty would no longer be possible, now it had been ratified. The Royal Bank of Scotland will sell 318 branches and the Lloyds banking group more than 600 in a move demanded by the European Commission to avoid a breach of competition rules. Lloyds announced a £13.5 billion rights issue, the biggest ever attempted in Britain, in an attempt to free itself from the government’s asset protection scheme. Mr Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said he would put another £30 billion of taxpayers’ money into the banks. The European Commission gave approval to the splitting of Northern Rock, with the sale of a retail banking segment. Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, met Sir Christopher Kelly, two days before the publication of his much-leaked proposals for reforming MPs’ expenses, to tell him that ‘politics must never be allowed to become the preserve of the independently wealthy’, even though, by the time they met, the proposals were already at the printer’s. One leaked proposal was that MPs should no longer employ close relatives. Mrs Harriet Harman, the Leader of the Commons, said it would be unfair immediately to sack wives working for MPs. Mr Tony McNulty, a former minister, apologised to the House after the Standards and Privileges Committee found that he had claimed for the running costs of a house where his parents lived, which were ‘not wholly and exclusively incurred in connection with his parliamentary duties’; he paid back £13,837. An independent inquiry by Mr Charles Haddon-Cave QC, into the crash of a Nimrod aircraft in Afghanistan in 2006 that cost 14 lives, criticised military officers, civil servants and contractors: ‘There was a shift in culture and priorities in the MoD towards “business” and financial targets, at the expense of functional values such as safety,’ it said. In a statement to the Commons, an unhappy-looking Mr Bob Ainsworth, the Secretary of State for Defence, said: ‘I am sorry for the mistakes that have been made and that lives have been lost as a result of our failure.’ Professor David Nutt was sacked as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by Mr Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, after criticising in a lecture last July (published in a pamphlet last week) the government’s reclassification of cannabis from a class C to a class B drug. Two members of the council resigned in protest. A railway enthusiast has discovered that the ordinary first-class return from Newquay to Kyle of Lochalsh has broken the thousand-pound barrier at £1,002.

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