Portrait of the week | 11 June 2011

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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, gave five ‘guarantees’ about the National Health Service, including a pledge not to endanger universal coverage and to increase spending on the NHS. He also said that hospital doctors and nurses would be involved in new consortiums to plan and buy care, not just GPs. Wayne Rooney, the 25-year-old footballer, had a hair transplant. Ryan Giggs, the 37-year-old footballer, was said to have spent £30,000 on hair replacement. A man, part of whose skull was blown off when he tried to steal some live cabling, was given a 12-month community order by Leeds magistrates. Energy prices rose again. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are to make their home at Kensington Palace when they are in London.

The International Monetary Fund said the British economy was on the right path. A day earlier, a group of left-wing economists had written to the Observer describing the government’s ‘breakneck deficit-reduction plan’ as ‘self-defeating’. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, visited Benghazi and held talks with the leader of Libya’s National Transitional Council. For the first time British helicopters attacked government positions in Libya. An explosion at Chevron’s oil refinery at Pembroke Dock killed four. A large fire took hold in a waste oil depot at Kingsnorth industrial estate, Hoo, Kent. Pour Moi won the Derby by a head from Treasure Beach, with Carlton House, the Queen’s tenth attempt in the race, half a length behind.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said some of the £63 million annual budget of the government’s anti-terrorism programme, called Prevent, had reached the extremist organisations that it should have been confronting; a revised strategy would insist on ‘fundamental British values’ and cost £36 million. The Commons Public Accounts Committee said that there could be a gap of hundreds of millions of pounds in the funding of universities because more than expected were to charge close to the maximum of £9,000 a year.