Portrait of the week | 14 August 2014

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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, resisted calls for Parliament to be recalled to debate the crisis in Iraq. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said that the government was not considering military intervention ‘at the present time’. Mark Simmonds resigned as a Foreign Office minister, but Downing Street hastened to say that his resignation, unlike Lady Warsi’s a week earlier, had nothing to do with government policy on Gaza, since he was complaining he could not afford to rent a flat in London for his family with the £27,000 allowance. A man sought by police investigating the theft of a fish tank from a furniture shop in Leeds hid in a bush and was attacked by a swarm of wasps.

Unemployment fell 132,000 to 2.08 million and average wages fell 0.2 per cent over a year. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain had breached the rights of ten prisoners in Scottish jails by preventing them from voting in the 2009 European election, but it refused to award damages, saying the ruling in the inmates’ favour was enough. Leicestershire police killed a dog with a taser after it attacked an alsatian. Ladbrokes, the bookmakers, saw a fall in profits of 49.7 per cent in the first half of 2014, during which it changed its gaming software. London Underground posted a video of a little child in a pushchair being blown on to the tracks at Goodge Street station and rescued by his mother.

The Royal Mail planned to bring forward last collections from postboxes to as early as nine o’clock in the morning, so that they could be made by postmen making deliveries. The British education system was ranked sixth in the developed world by Pearson, the educational firm, with Finland and South Korea taking the top places.