Portrait of the Week – 30 August 2018

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Theresa May, the Prime Minister, flew off to South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria accompanied by a trade delegation. In a speech in Cape Town she promised an extra £4 billion in British investment in Africa. ‘True partnerships are not about one party doing unto another,’ she said, but the achievement of ‘common goals’. The government announced plans for Britain’s own satellite navigation system if Brexit meant it was expelled from the European Union’s Galileo project. A gang flew men from Chile to burgle houses around London, said police who arrested 36 men in the past eight months, 16 of them being convicted and eight deported, with 12 leaving the country while still under investigation. Lindsay Kemp, the choreographer who advised Kate Bush, died aged 80. British and French fishing boats clashed in the Channel over scallops.

Labour continued to be accused of anti-Semitism. Footage showed Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, talking in 2013 about ‘Zionists’ in the audience at a conference who had a problem that, ‘having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony’. The pro-Corbyn Skwawkbox blog predicted that the Labour National Executive Committee would adopt a code of practice that would put a stop to accusations of anti-Semitism being made ‘as part of a factional agenda’. Alex Salmond was revealed to have been under investigation since January over allegations of sexual harassment relating to his time in office as first minister. He blamed someone in the Scottish government of ‘sustained leaking’ of the most unfair kind’.The Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action called upon Karen Bradley, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to restore the Stormont executive, which has been suspended since January 2017. The Primark store in Belfast was engulfed by fire.