Portrait of the week | 7 July 2016

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Conservative MPs set about finding two candidates for the party leadership to be put to party members as rival choices. Theresa May proved the frontrunner, gaining 165 votes in the first round, with Liam Fox least fancied, being eliminated in the first round with 16 votes, and Stephen Crabb gaining 34 and throwing in the towel. Boris Johnson, having been forced out of the contest by the sudden entry of his presumed supporter Michael Gove (who attracted 48 votes in the first round), gave his backing to the next most popular woman candidate among MPs, Andrea Leadsom, who polled 66. Mrs May said that the position of British citizens in the EU and those from the EU in Britain would be an issue in the negotiations with the EU. Mrs Leadsom undertook to guarantee the rights of EU citizens already living and working in Britain. Mrs May urged a Commons vote on replacing Trident before the summer recess on 21 July. An outbreak of Escherichia coli O157 infection hit 109 people in England and was blamed on salad.

Nigel Farage said he was to resign as leader of the UK Independence Party, because his ‘political ambition has been achieved’. The party’s sole MP, Douglas Carswell, tweeted a smiley face at the news. Jeremy Corbyn continued to resist advice from Labour MPs and bigwigs to resign as party leader. At a press conference attended by Mr Corbyn for a report into anti-Semitism in the Labour party, a Jewish Labour MP, Ruth Smeeth, was accused from the floor by a supporter of the Momentum movement, Marc Wadsworth, of working ‘hand in hand’ with the Daily Telegraph, provoking her into walking out. Labour’s National Constitutional Committee is to consider charges against Ken Livingstone of bringing the party into disrepute.