The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 April 2016

Plus: Hillsborough verdicts, deaths of Victoria Wood and Prince, BHS and Austin Reed go into administration

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Junior doctors went on strike for two days, refusing to provide even emergency treatment. The 96 Liverpool fans who died in the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in 1989 were unlawfully killed, an inquest jury found. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, contemplated British forces being sent to Libya, but said ‘if there were ever any question of a British combat role in any form — ground, sea or air — that would go to the House of Commons’. Big Ben is to be silenced for months while its clock and tower are restored.

‘The UK is going to be in the back of the queue’ to make a trade agreement with the United States if the British vote to leave the European Union, President Barack Obama of the United States said while standing next to David Cameron, the Prime Minister, at a press conference at the Foreign Office. Mr Obama had lunch with the Queen and watched Prince George of Cambridge ride a rocking horse in pyjamas and dressing-gown. Boris Johnson MP, the Mayor of London, said that Mr Obama’s removal of a bust of Churchill from show in the White House was ‘a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire’. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, called for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, but stay in the EU, even though she did not ‘believe those that say the sky will fall in if we vote to leave’. A weight limit of 23 stone was placed on customers for a new 250ft helter-skelter slide attached to the Orbit tower at the Olympic Park in London.

British Home Stores went into administration; the retail chain, sold for £1 last year by Sir Philip Green, has a pension scheme deficit of £571 million.

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