Portrait of the week | 23 April 2015

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The prospect of a parliamentary alliance between Labour and the Scottish National Party injected an element of fear into the election campaign. The SNP manifesto promised to increase spending and to find a way to stop the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said she wanted to make Labour in government ‘bolder and better’. Lord Forsyth, a former Conservative Scottish secretary, said that the building up of the SNP, to take seats in Scotland, was a ‘dangerous view which threatens the integrity of our country’. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said the Tories should not be ‘talking up’ the SNP. Even the Democratic Unionists began to eye prospects for advantage in a hung parliament. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, was praised on Twitter for wearing a North Face jacket, popular among northern youths who affect a gangsta style. Nigel Farage took part in a televised debate wearing a brown suit.

Unemployment fell by 76,000 to 1.84 million (5.6 per cent), the lowest since 2008, although in Scotland it rose by 9,000 to 6 per cent. Wonga, the short-term lender, made a pre-tax loss of £37.3 million in 2014. Tesco reported the worst results in its history, a pre-tax loss of £6.4 billion. The United States authorities alleged that Navinder Singh Sarao from Hounslow had illegally contributed to the so-called ‘flash crash’ of the Dow Jones index in 2010. Which? compelled the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate confusing pricing in supermarkets. The number of drivers in England and Wales given penalty points for using mobile phones at the wheel fell by 24 per cent last year to 72,753; in 2010 it had been 122,752.

Six people from Rochdale, sent back to Britain after being stopped at the border between Turkey and Syria, were released without charge.