Portrait of the Week – 8 August 2019

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If the government lost a confidence motion when parliament sits again in September, it could call an election for after 31 October, by which time Britain would have left the European Union, according to a briefing attributed to Dominic Cummings, the special adviser to Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister. Opposition MPs plotted to prevent this. Diplomats from the other 27 EU member states were told by EU officials that the United Kingdom wanted to avoid a no-deal Brexit by their agreeing to substantial changes to the draft withdrawal agreement; the officials told them that there was no basis for ‘meaningful discussions’ with Britain. Michael Gove said he was ‘deeply saddened’ by the EU stance. A strike at Heathrow was called off, but British Airways passengers encountered a computer failure instead.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said that Labour would ‘not block’ another Scottish independence referendum. Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipyard, went into administration. Average retail sales in the year to July rose by only 0.5 per cent. McDonald’s told staff to put paper straws (1.8 million of which it uses daily) in with general rubbish instead of recycling them; the paper straws replaced plastic straws which were recyclable, and the makers of the paper straws said they were recyclable too. A 17-year-old boy was charged with attempted murder after a six-year-old French boy fell from the 10th-floor viewing platform at Tate Modern on to a fifth-floor roof, surviving with a broken spine and bleeding on the brain.

The government said it was putting an extra £1.8 billion or so into capital projects in the National Health Service, some of the 20 projects being in predominantly pro-Leave areas of Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Cornwall and Stoke-on-Trent. More than 1,500 people were evacuated from Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire, when water overtopping the Toddbrook reservoir displaced concrete cladding.