Portrait of the Week – 25 October 2018

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Theresa May, the Prime Minister, found herself in another crisis over Brexit. Backbenchers whispered that 48 letters were being collected to present to the chairman of the 1922 Committee to trigger a vote of confidence. What annoyed some of her own MPs was a scheme (intended to make less likely the imposition of a backstop agreement over the Irish border) to extend by up to a year the Brexit implementation period that was supposed to end on 31 December 2020. During an emergency cabinet conference-call, Esther McVey, the Work and Pensions Secretary, was said to have told Mrs May that she was ‘devastated’ by the provision. An unnamed Conservative former minister told the Sunday Times: ‘The moment is coming when the knife gets heated, stuck in her front and twisted. She’ll be dead soon.’ It was unclear what the heating signified, but the formulation was criticised; Yvette Cooper called it ‘vile and dehumanising language towards a woman MP’.

Mrs May told the Commons that ‘95 per cent of the withdrawal agreement and its protocols are now settled’. Organisers of a march through London calling for a People’s Vote (a referendum on Brexit) said that 700,000 people had turned out. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, was not able to join them, as he was in Geneva exercising solidarity with Chileans. Sir Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, got a job as vice-president of global affairs and communications at Facebook with a seven-figure salary. Britain’s annual deficit was reduced by an annual £13 billion through revisions to the independent Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts, giving Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, leeway in his Budget on 29 October.