Portrait of the week | 9 July 2011

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A private investigator working for the News of the World allegedly hacked into the voicemail of the murdered girl Milly Dowler while she was missing, deleting messages when the box was full to make room for new messages; this might have given the impression that the girl was still alive. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said he found it was ‘quite shocking — that someone could do this’. An emergency debate was held on the matter in the Commons. There were questions about hacking into the telephones of the families of the girls murdered at Soham in 2002, and those killed in the bombings of 7 July 2005. A bronze statue of Ronald Reagan was erected in Grosvenor Square, London, on the centenary of his birth.

In a speech in Madrid, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said: ‘As we work hard to break welfare dependency and get young people ready for the labour market, we need businesses to give them a chance, and not just fall back on labour from abroad.’ Bombardier said it would cut 1,400 jobs after losing a £1.4 billion contract bidder to build 1,200 carriages for the route between Bedford and Brighton to the German group Siemens. Shropshire dismissed all 6,500 council staff, who would be rehired if they agreed to a 5.4 per cent pay cut. The Serb Novak Djokovic beat the Spaniard Rafael Nadal to win the men’s title at Wimbledon; the Czech Petra Kvitova beat the Russian Maria Sharapova in the women’s final.

In a report on social care, principally for the old, Andrew Dilnot suggested that a maximum of £35,000 should be payable by beneficiaries and that the maximum level of assets allowed before social care is given free should rise from £23,250 to £100,000.