Portrait of the week | 20 July 2017

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Theresa May, the Prime Minister, told MPs before the summer recess: ‘No backbiting, no carping. The choice is me or Jeremy Corbyn. Nobody wants that.’ Her remarks followed a spate of leaks and negative briefings from cabinet ministers. It was said that Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had called public-sector workers ‘overpaid’. He responded by warning cabinet colleagues against leaking, but maintained a 10 per cent pay disparity was a ‘simple fact’. In a presumed response to a poster on the wall of the European Council’s Brexit taskforce meeting room, headed ‘Tintin and the Brexit Plan’ and showing Captain Haddock lighting a fire in a lifeboat, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, went jogging in a T-shirt bearing Haddock expletives in French such as ‘Mille sabords’ (‘Blistering barnacles!’ in the English versions).

The annual rate of inflation unexpectedly fell to 2.6 per cent from 2.9, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index (from 3.7 to 3.5 per cent as measured by the Retail Prices Index).The government outlined a sinister ‘tobacco control plan’ to prevent people from smoking. Sir Michael Marmot, the director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, said that it was ‘entirely possible’ that austerity had played a role in slowing down the increase in life expectancy since 2010. Flash floods damaged dozens of houses in Coverack, Cornwall. The design was unveiled of a slippery plastic £10 note bearing a likeness of Jane Austen.

Five acid attacks in London in one night provoked a frisson of horror and some generalised tough words from Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary. The government set a new minimum funding limit in secondary schools of £4,800 per pupil, partly using money, it said, that had been in the budget for free schools and a ‘healthy pupils’ project.