Portrait of the week | 8 May 2014

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AstraZeneca’s board rejected an increased takeover bid of £63 billion by Pfizer. Commenting on the bid in Parliament, Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Business Secretary, said: ‘We see the future of the UK as a knowledge economy, not as a tax haven.’ A second strike by RMT union members on the London Underground was suspended after talks. Jeremy Paxman is to leave Newsnight next month after 25 years. Jeremy Clarkson was given a warning by the BBC for mumbling the counting-out rhyme, ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. Catch a nigger by his toe’, in footage never broadcast. Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, tweeted: ‘Anybody who uses the N-word in public or private in whatever context has no place in the British Broadcasting Corporation.’ Lord Patten resigned as chairman of the BBC Trust after major heart surgery. A man meant to undergo minor urological surgery at Royal Liverpool Hospital was given a vasectomy by mistake.

Gerry Adams, the president of the Sinn Féin, was questioned for four days by police investigating the murder in 1972 of Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten children abducted in Belfast in front of her family after wrongly being denounced as an informer for the British Army. ‘I do know the names of the people,’ said Michael McConville, one of her sons, who recounted his own abduction and beating by IRA men after his mother was taken away. ‘If I told the police now a thing, me or one of my family members or one of my children would get shot by those people.’

Max Clifford, aged 71, the public relations man, was jailed for eight years for several indecent assaults against girls and young women. Constance Briscoe, a barrister and recorder, was sentenced to 16 months’ jail for perverting the course of justice by lying to police about Chris Huhne, who, like his former wife Vicky Pryce, was given an eight-month sentence.