Portrait of the week | 1 March 2018

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Crisis loomed over Brexit negotiations as Theresa May, the Prime Minister, travelled to the north-east to explain ‘this Government’s vision of what our future economic partnership with the European Union should look like’. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, had announced that its Brexit policy was now ‘to negotiate a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union’ that would still (somehow) ‘ensure the UK has a say in future trade deals’. Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit spokesman, had said earlier that the party would back an amendment to the Government’s delayed Trade Bill hatched by the Conservative Remainer Anna Soubry, to keep Britain in a customs union. The European Union then published its draft withdrawal agreement for Brexit, in which it called for Northern Ireland to continue to be bound by Brussels rules and regulations if Britain wished to leave the customs union and single market. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, lobbed a grenade into the mix after a letter by him to Mrs May was leaked; he said: ‘The issue of the Northern Irish border is being used quite a lot politically to try to keep the UK in the customs union.’ Separately, Guy Verhofstadt, the Brexit coordinator for the European Parliament, said: ‘There will be in future, whatever the outcome of negotiations… no divergence in norms, rules or standards between the North and Republic of Ireland.’ Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator of the European Commission, rejected any extension of Britain’s transitional period beyond 2020 and summoned Brexit Secretary David Davis to Brussels for talks. Aberdeenshire Council objected to a scheme by the Balmoral estate to build a hydroelectric system as it would be too noisy for nearby red squirrels.

Comcast, an American cable television company that owns NBC and Universal Pictures, made a higher bid to buy Sky than Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.