Portrait of the week | 1 August 2013

Home

Barclays decided to issue £5.8 billion in shares to meet capital reserve requirements from the Bank of England. Lord Howell of Guildford, a former energy secretary, who does not speak for the government but happens to be George Osborne’s father in law, asking a question in the Lords about fracking for shale gas, said: ‘There are large and uninhabited and desolate areas. Certainly in part of the north-east.’ He later apologised. Vicky Pryce, the disgraced former wife of Chris Huhne, the disgraced former Cabinet minister, had her companionship of the Order of the Bath ‘cancelled and annulled’. A third Army reservist who took part in an SAS selection training exercise in the Brecon Beacons died. A £1.2 million Stradivarius stolen from a violinist at a sandwich shop at Euston station two years ago was recovered in the West Midlands.

The High Court ruled that families with disabled people were not discriminated against by new government rules reducing benefits for people living in houses deemed to have spare rooms. Official figures for net migration were ‘little better than a guess’, according to the Public Administration Select Committee, because they were based on interviews with only 5,000 migrants. The Home Office said that since January last year, it had identified 99 suspected war criminals who had made immigration applications, of whom three were deported, 20 were refused asylum and 46 had their citizenship applications turned down but were likely to have remained in Britain. The nation’s happiness had risen by 1.1 per cent since last year, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The NHS Direct company said it wanted to pull out of its contracts to provide the non-emergency 111 telephone service because they were financially unsustainable. Questionnaires, asking patients whether they would recommend their hospital to family and friends, had given the thumbs down to 36 wards in June, out of 4,500 covered.