Portrait of the week | 30 October 2014

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The last British combat troops turned over Camp Bastion in Helmand to Afghan forces and withdrew from Afghanistan after 13 years and 453 deaths. Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, spoke of ‘whole towns and communities being swamped by huge numbers of migrants’. He later withdrew the word ‘swamped’, but David Blunkett, a former Labour home secretary who used the word 12 years ago, said: ‘I believe that both Michael Fallon and I were right to speak out.’ This came after Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, responded to an idea of David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that European Union migration could be renegotiated; she said: ‘Germany will not tamper with the fundamental principles of free movement in the EU.’ The Home Office has a backlog of 29,000 asylum applications dating back at least seven years, the Public Accounts Committee said, and contact had been lost with 50,000 people who had been refused the right to stay. In response to a demand from the European Commission for an extra £1.7 billion contribution from Britain, because its economy has done better than other countries’, Mr Cameron had expostulated: ‘I’m not paying that bill on 1 December. It is not going to happen.’ But Jacek Dominik, the European Commissioner for Budgets, said that any negotiation would ‘open up a Pandora’s box’. Dean Farley, aged 28, a jogger wearing a Tintagel T-shirt, bumped into Mr Cameron in Leeds, and was arrested by police, only to be ‘de-arrested’ a few minutes later.

The National Grid warned that spare generating capacity would fall to 4 per cent this winter, perilously close to unwanted power cuts. Lloyds Bank, a quarter of which is owned by the taxpayer, is to cut 9,000 jobs (about 10 per cent) and close 150 branches; it was the only British bank to come close to failing the European Banking Authority’s ‘stress test’ last week.