Portrait of the week | 28 December 2012

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Banks should erect a protective ring-fence round their high-street operations, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards recommended, and moreover it should be ‘electrified’. The metaphor meant that regulators should have the power to break up banks that misbehaved. The ten members of the commission included the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Revd Justin Welby, and ‘Nigella’s Dad’, as one paper put it, Lord Lawson of Blaby. Mark Carney, the next governor of the Bank of England, suggested that economic growth should be a target, rather than inflation. The government had to borrow £17.5 billion in November, £1.2 billion more than a year earlier, although some economists had predicted borrowing would fall to about £16 billion. Gerry Anderson, the creator of Thunderbirds, died, aged 83. Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, the composer, died, aged 76.