Portrait of the Week – 6 October 2016

Home

Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said at the Conservative party conference that hers was now the party of ‘working-class’ people and would occupy the ‘new centre ground’. She announced that Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty would be invoked by next March, beginning the formal process for Britain to leave the European Union. The pound fell to a 31-year low and the FTSE 100 index rose above 7,000 to an 18-month high. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: ‘We will no longer target a surplus at the end of this Parliament,’ as his predecessor George Osborne had promised, but would spend on housing and transport. More than 500 people were stranded on the London Eye big wheel for three hours one evening by a mechanical fault. A No. 26 bus to Hackney Wick burst into flames outside Liverpool Street station.

Diane James resigned as leader of the UK Independence Party 18 days after being elected. Under plans to stop England’s reliance on doctors trained abroad, the number of medical school places will increase by 25 per cent from 6,000 to 7,500 a year from 2018, Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, announced. British servicemen would be protected from ‘spurious’ claims of misconduct by the suspension of parts of the European Convention on Human Rights during future conflicts, Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, said. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, told the Conservative conference: ‘Reducing net migration back down to sustainable levels will not be easy. But I am committed to delivering it.’ Three British-born scientists, David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, won the Nobel prize for physics for their work on very thin layers of matter; all three now work in America. Schools were overtaken by a craze for flipping plastic bottles of water so that they land upright.