Portrait of the week | 3 December 2015

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The House of Commons voted on air strikes in Syria. Labour MPs had been allowed a free vote by their party amid much ill-feeling. Members of the shadow cabinet shouted at Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition, when he tried to insist that the formal Labour party policy should be to oppose air strikes. Mr Corbyn said: ‘We’re going to kill people in their homes by our bombs.’ Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, said: ‘Inaction has a cost in lives, too.’ Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered 13 women, was said to have been successfully treated for schizophrenia and was being considered for transfer from Broadmoor hospital to prison. Justice Lowell Goddard said her inquiry into child sexual abuse would entail 12 simultaneous investigations into a list of institutions and topics, taking at least five years. An album called 25 by the singer Adele broke sales records in Britain and America. A group claiming to hate people who are overweight handed out cards reading: ‘You’re fat’ to suitable victims on the London Underground.

A strike by junior doctors was called off at the last moment after the British Medical Association and the Department of Health agreed to discuss a settlement. Grant Shapps resigned as international development minister after allegations that he knew when he was co-chairman of the Conservative party about bullying in its youth wing, said to have contributed to the death of a 21-year-old activist called Elliott Johnson, who died in September, it is believed by suicide. Mark Clarke, who had been the director of a youth organisation, RoadTrip2015, was banned from party membership for life. Daventry District Council imposed £100 fines on people found with a dog but no bag to carry its excrement in, if the need arose.