Portrait of the week | 25 January 2018

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Boris Johnson went on manoeuvres again. The media were briefed that, in a meeting of the cabinet, he would call for the National Health Service to be given another £100 million a week. ‘Mr Johnson is the Foreign Secretary,’ Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said. ‘I gave the Health Secretary an extra £6 billion at the recent Budget and we’ll look at departmental allocations again at the spending review when that takes place.’ No. 10 also slapped him down. ‘The Prime Minister and a large number of ministers made the point that cabinet discussions should remain private,’ said the official spokesman for Theresa May, the Prime Minister. The BBC turned over most of one day’s 10 o’clock bulletin to a documentary on NHS difficulties. Simon Shelton, best known for his role as the purple Teletubby, Tinky Winky, died aged 52.

Henry Bolton refused to resign as leader of the UK Independence Party after its national executive committee passed a vote of no confidence in him. Public-sector borrowing in December fell more than expected to £2.6 billion, which was £2.5 billion less than in December 2016. The Competition and Markets Authority said that the bid by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox to take control of Sky was not in the public interest because it would give ‘too much influence over public opinion’. Tesco said it was cutting 1,700 shop-floor management jobs and Sainsbury’s said that its own management changes would affect thousands. Police gave a fixed penalty to a man stopped in Newton Abbot with a shed fastened to the top of his car by a single rope. Demolition of a multi-storey car park in Edinburgh, opened in 2001 and closed in 2003 and designed to put cars into spaces robotically, revealed eight cars still in situ.