Portrait of the week | 13 July 2017

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In her first big speech since the general election, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘I say to the other parties in the House of Commons… come forward with your own views and ideas.’ She was responding to a government-commissioned review of modern working practices by Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, and a former adviser to Tony Blair. The report was hostile to payment in cash and suggested that immigrant visas might insist on non-cash payment for work. Unemployment fell by 64,000 to 1.49 million. A leading article in the Evening Standard, edited by one of Mrs May’s enemies, George Osborne, commented on the position of David Davis: ‘For the first time in his political career he is trying to be loyal. But now the prospect of the premiership looms, and he has to decide whether to reach for the prize he has coveted for so long.’ Jacob and Helena Rees-Mogg announced the birth of their sixth child, Sixtus, named after a saintly pope. Scientists suggested that a cup of coffee prolongs life by nine minutes.

Mrs May withdrew the Conservative whip from Anne Marie Morris, the MP for Newton Abbot, for describing a Brexit without a deal as the ‘real nigger in the woodpile’. Viscount St Davids was found guilty of two charges of malicious communications regarding Gina Miller, the anti-Brexit campaigner, by posting a message on Facebook: ‘£5,000 for the first person to “accidentally” run over this bloody troublesome first generation immigrant.’ Asked in the Commons whether the EU should be told to ‘go whistle’ for payments from Britain for leaving, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, said: ‘The sums that I have seen that they propose to demand from this country seem to me to be extortionate and I think to “go whistle” is an entirely appropriate expression.’