Portrait of the week | 26 November 2015

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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, announced, as part of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, plans for two 5,000-strong ‘strike brigades’ that could respond to terrorist attacks on Britain. Spending on defence would go up by £12 billion, keeping it above 2 per cent of GDP. The estimate for replacing Britain’s four Trident ballistic missile submarines rose from £25 billion to £31 billion. The Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft, scrapped in 2010, would be replaced with nine Boeing P-8s. Aircraft for the Navy’s two new aircraft carriers would be ready by 2023. The government made preparations for a vote in the Commons in favour of Britain bombing Islamic State targets in Syria.

George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, tried to take people’s minds off departmental spending cuts in his Autumn Statement by announcing that he would not after all introduce the changes to tax credits thrown out by the House of Lords. He also announced a £6.9 billion scheme to help people buy houses, with £2.3 billion of it going to developers to get them to build 200,000 starter homes. Northern railways saw some investment. In England alone, the National Health Service front-line budget of £101 billion would rise by £3.8 billion next year. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, told the Commons Treasury Committee that British interest rates were likely to remain low ‘for some time’. More than 900 trains in East Anglia were cancelled because of damage from burning leaves to the wheels of rolling stock too light to properly mash them up.

British Airways and easyJet cancelled all flights to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt until next year. A Libyan man was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder PC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984.