Portrait of the week | 23 January 2014

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George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that he was in favour of increasing the minimum wage by an amount greater than that of inflation. The International Monetary Fund raised its expectation of growth for Britain in 2014 to 2.4 per cent, from a forecast of 1.9 per cent last October. Unemployment fell to 7.1 per cent. More than 3.3 million people between the ages of 20 and 34 were living with parents in 2013, 26 per cent of that age group, the Office for National Statistics said, and a number 25 per cent bigger than in 1996. London’s share of national output reached 22.4 per cent in 2012, according to official data. Nicolas Anelka of West Bromwich Albion was charged by the Football Association of making the quenelle gesture invented by the French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala and held by many to be anti-Semitic. Three fans of Tottenham Hotspur were charged with shouting ‘Yid’ in support of their team, nicknamed the Yids. A disease similar to Alabama Rot killed 17 dogs in Britain, mostly in the New Forest.

The Police Federation, according to an independent review that it set up last year under the former Home Office permanent secretary Sir David Normington, needed fundamental reforms. Steve Williams, the chairman of the Police Federation, apologised to Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, about whose behaviour a policeman has admitted lying. David Silvester, a councillor in Oxfordshire, was suspended from Ukip because he repeated the widely held opinion that recent floods were God’s punishment for the legalisation of same-sex marriage. A 15,000-ton heap of tyres caught fire at Sherburn-in-Elmet, North Yorkshire, burning for five days and sending a thick plume of smoke 6,000 feet into the air.