Portrait of the week | 8 January 2011

Home

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said that the rise in VAT from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent would cost the average family £7.50 a week. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: ‘If you look at the population and how much they spend, then VAT is progressive.’ The average price of a pint of lager rose to more than £3. A railway season ticket to Sidcup rose by 12.5 per cent, among many others higher than the average of 5.8 per cent. In some places domestic rubbish went uncollected for a month because of bad weather and holidays. A fox weighing 28lb was trapped at Maidstone in Kent, suspected of having killed a cat.

Prisoners at Ford open prison, West Sussex, rioted and set buildings on fire, causing perhaps £3 million of damage, when the two prison officers on duty on new Year’s Eve tried to breathalyse some of the 500 held there. Two men died when their hot-air balloon plummeted on to a bowling green in Midsomer Norton, Somerset, narrowly missing houses. The average cost of houses in 20 streets in England was found to be more than £1 million, with those in the road called Parkside in Wimbledon averaging more than £5 million. Supplies of water to 40,000 people in Northern Ireland were cut off at night as efforts were made to restore connections broken by freezing weather; the chief executive of the state-owned Northern Ireland Water was expected to leave his post.

The Queen became a great-grandmother with the birth of a girl to Autumn and Peter Phillips. Lady Antonia Fraser became a Dame in the New Year’s honours, as did the actress Harriet Walter. Peter Bottomley was knighted, as was Lord Weidenfeld, but William Shawcross was only appointed CBE.