Portrait of the week | 2 June 2016

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Two British men were charged with immigration offences after the rescue by night of 18 Albanian migrants, two of them children, from an inflatable boat off Dymchurch, Kent. ‘We don’t want the English Channel turning into the Mediterranean with fleets of small boats coming over,’ said Chris Grayling, the Leader of the House of Commons and a campaigner for Britain to leave the EU. Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary, Boris Johnson MP and Gisela Stuart, a Labour backbencher, said in an open letter to David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that the Conservative manifesto promise to reduce net immigration to ‘the tens of thousands’ was ‘plainly not achievable as long as the UK is a member of the EU, and the failure to keep it is corrosive of public trust in politics’. At the G7 summit in Japan, Mr Cameron repeated the scheme he had mooted in March of sending a British warship to waters off Libya to deter migrants and seize boats taking arms to the Islamic State. Lord Neill of Bladen, Patrick Neill, for some years Warden of All Souls, died aged 89. Peter Owen, the publisher, died aged 89.

Mr Cameron, launching a Britain Stronger In Europe ‘battle bus’, appeared on a platform with Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, describing him as ‘someone who is a proud Muslim, a proud Brit and a proud Londoner’. During the mayoral election campaign the Prime Minister had accused Mr Khan of ‘sharing platform after platform with extremists and anti-Semites’. Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, the Provost of Eton, told the government’s Chief Whip that he would stop sitting as a Tory peer if the government persisted in its plans to make employers ask job applicants whether they had been to private schools.