Portrait of the week: Biden, bullying and Barry Humphries

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‘China is carrying out the biggest military build-up in peacetime history,’ warned James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, in his Mansion House speech, but said ‘no significant global problem’ could be ‘solved without China’. The government borrowed £139.2 billion last year, £13 billion less than expected, bringing public debt to 99.6 per cent of GDP. In an opinion poll by YouGov for the BBC’s Panorama, 58 per cent of the 4,592 people asked thought that the United Kingdom should continue to have a monarchy and 16 per cent did not know. The Prince of Wales (Prince William) was paid a ‘very large sum’ by the owners of the Sun to settle historical phone-hacking claims, according to a witness statement for a High Court hearing in which Prince Harry is suing News Group Newspapers. A national emergency alert test on 23 April failed to reach one in five compatible smartphones. As relentless rain continued, South West Water extended a hosepipe ban imposed last August.

An independent investigation by Adam Tolley KC found that some behaviour by Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, amounted to bullying (though ‘he did not swear’), so he resigned from the cabinet, but warned that: ‘In setting the threshold for bullying so low, this inquiry has set a dangerous precedent.’ He blamed activist civil servants and complained of ‘systematic leaking of skewed and fabricated claims to the media’. Alex Chalk, a Wykehamist and barrister, was made Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor; Oliver Dowden succeeded Dominic Raab as Deputy Prime Minister, a post with no salary. Prezzo is closing 46 loss-making branches, a third of the Italian restaurant chain.

The CBI said it had ‘tried to find resolution in sexual harassment cases when we should have removed those offenders from our business’; police are dealing with two complaints of rape.