Portrait of the Week – 3 November 2016

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Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, said he would stay on for another year when his initial five-year term ends in 2018, to ‘contribute to securing an orderly transition to the UK’s new relationship with Europe’. More than 150 Conservative MPs, including cabinet ministers, voted to appoint Keith Vaz, a Labour MP, to the Commons Justice Select Committee, even though he had left the Home Affairs Select Committee when a newspaper revealed an alleged scandal involving rent boys. Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, told the Commons that he had assured Nissan, which decided to continue operations in Sunderland, that Britain would seek trade for the motor industry that was ‘free and unencumbered by impediments’ after Brexit. The Royal Clarence Hotel in Exeter, founded in 1769, which looked over Cathedral Green, was destroyed by fire.

Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, told the Commons that there would be no inquiry into the clash between police and striking miners illegally blockading lorries carrying coke at Orgeave in 1984. Karen Bradley, the Culture Secretary, said that ministers would consult the public before deciding if there was any point in going ahead with the second part of the Leveson inquiry. NHS hospitals were found to be planning to reduce numbers of beds and close accident-and-emergency departments to try to make ends meet. Fifa, which prohibits ‘political, religious or commercial messages’ on team shirts, turned down a request from England and Scotland for players to wear armbands featuring poppies on Armistice Day.

The British Infrastructure Group of MPs urged mobile phone companies to allow subscribers to make use of rival networks in areas of Britain where reception is bad. Lord Heseltine told Tatler he had strangled his mother’s alsatian: ‘I went to stroke him and he started biting me,’ he said.