Portrait of the week | 2 May 2019

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Of those who voted Conservative in 2017, 53 per cent intend to vote for the Brexit party in the EU elections on 23 May, according to a YouGov poll. Brandon Lewis, the Conservative party chairman, said: ‘As a government, our first priority is not to have to fight the EU elections,’ adding that there was still time to cancel them if parliament approved the Brexit withdrawal agreement reached by Theresa May, the Prime Minister. Labour’s National Executive Committee agreed party policy should be to hold a referendum (with a question yet to be decided) if it could not get changes to the government’s deal or precipitate a general election. The Conservatives said they always expected to do badly in this week’s local elections. Natural England, the conservation authority, suddenly revoked three general licences for controlling wild birds after a legal challenge by the campaigning group Wild Justice, co-founded by the BBC’s Chris Packham. Police reopened investigations into 450 patients who died after being given opiate drugs at Gosport War Memorial Hospital between 1989 and 2000.

Cabinet ministers were told to hand over their mobile phones as part of an inquiry by Sir Mark Sedwill into a leak from a meeting of the National Security Council that revealed opposition to the Prime Minister’s determination to consider a role for the Chinese company Huawei in the development of 5G communications. America would have to re-evaluate intelligence sharing with any country that took the ‘unacceptable risk’ of allowing Huawei any such role, according to Rob Strayer, of the US State Department. Police in England and Wales began to use forms giving consent for the investigation of the mobile phones of those complaining of some serious offences, including rape.