Portrait of the week | 2 July 2015

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At least 30 British people were among 38 shot dead at a beach resort at Sousse in Tunisia by Seifeddine Rezgui, aged 23, a Tunisian acting for the Islamic State and said to have been trained in Libya. Soldiers, emergency services and 1,000 police took part in a two-day exercise in London simulating a terrorist attack. A statutory obligation became binding on public bodies, including schools, to prevent people being drawn towards terrorism. Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, said that schools should look out for ‘homophobia’ as a symptom of Islamist jihadism. James Brokenshire, the Immigration Minister, said the National Barrier Asset (lengths of nine-foot fencing) would be deployed at the French end of the Channel tunnel to keep out illegal immigrants, as striking French ferry workers barricaded the tunnel with burning tyres for the second time in a fortnight. Loud booing greeted a prolonged rape scene in Damiano Michieletto’s production of Guillaume Tell at the Royal Opera House.

The government delayed plans to electrify railway routes from Sheffield to London and from Manchester to Leeds. Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, said that Network Rail’s chairman, Richard Parry-Jones, would leave the group at the end of his three-year term. Network Rail Scotland promised to stop trains dumping sewage on Scotland’s tracks by the end of 2017. The commission headed by Sir Howard Davies recommended an extra runway at Heathrow, a plan hotly opposed by Boris Johnson MP, the Mayor of London, and lukewarmly received by David Cameron, the Prime Minister. John Noakes, aged 81, the former presenter of Blue Peter, who suffers from dementia, was found wandering ten hours after going missing from his house in Majorca.

The population of the United Kingdom was found to have increased in a year by 491,100 (including net immigration of 259,700) to reach 64,596,800; the city of London saw an increase of 5.54