Portrait of the week | 5 July 2018

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In an attempt to distract the nation from the toothache of Brexit, the government announced a £4.5 million scheme to encourage homosexuals to hold hands; a law would be considered to ban corrective therapy, which Penny Mordaunt, the Equalities Minister, said could involve rape. A man known as Nick, whose true name is withheld for legal reasons, who alleged there was a paedophile ring at Westminster, was charged with perverting the course of justice. Labour restored the whip to Jared O’Mara, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, from whom it had been suspended in October. Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, was interrupted during a statement to the Commons by the voice of Siri on his mobile phone. More than 200 firemen spent days trying to control fires that had been burning for a week at at Saddleworth Moor and Winter Hill in Lancashire. June was found to be the driest recorded in parts of the south.

The cabinet was called to Chequers by Theresa May, the Prime Minister, to discuss Brexit. No. 10 said that it had discovered a plan that offered both frictionless trade with the EU and the scope to strike deals elsewhere. This followed a week of dissension. Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, had physically torn up a government document that claimed his Brexit working group had agreed to a customs partnership with the EU that he thought unworkable. Jacob Rees-Mogg, who chairs the European Research Group of pro-Brexit Conservative MPs, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Mrs May ‘must stand firm for what she herself has promised’. At the same time he introduced the analogy of Sir Robert Peel, who ‘left the Conservatives out of office for 28 years’, though ‘at least he did so for a policy that works’.