Portrait of the week | 30 June 2016

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David Cameron, standing in the middle of Downing Street with his wife Samantha alone near him, announced his resignation as prime minister after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union by 17,410,742 votes (51.9 per cent) to 16,141,241 (48.1), with a turnout of 72.2 per cent. The result surprised the government. Mr Cameron said he’d stay on until a new Conservative party leader and prime minister could be chosen, before the party conference in October. In Scotland, 62 per cent of the vote was to remain and in London 59.9 per cent. The area with the highest Leave percentage was Boston, Lincolnshire, with 75.6, and the highest Remain percentage was in Lambeth, with 78.6 (apart from Gibraltar, which recorded 95.9 per cent in favour of remaining). Many places that had elected Labour MPs, such as Bolsover, Doncaster and Sunderland, voted Leave. An online petition to Parliament calling for a second referendum gathered more than three million signatures, of which 39,411 claimed to be residents of Vatican City, population 800.

The morning after the referendum, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, said that it would ‘not hesitate to take additional measures as required’ to meet market volatility. The pound fell to a level last reached in 1985. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, waited until Monday to make a short speech, saying: ‘We had to fix the roof so we were prepared for whatever the future held.’ He said that there was no need for the emergency Budget that he had threatened before the referendum. Standard & Poor’s reduced Britain’s credit rating by two notches from AAA to AA.

The Parliamentary Labour Party passed a motion of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn, the party leader, by 172 votes to 40.