Portrait of the week: Boris on the brink, petrol price protests and a £3,000 swear word

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Rishi Sunak resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Sajid Javid as Health Secretary. (Nadhim Zahawi accepted the post of Chancellor and Steve Barclay, the PM’s chief of staff, Health Secretary.) The resignations came five days after Chris Pincher, aged 52, the MP for Tamworth, resigned as deputy chief whip the morning after he ‘drank far too much’ at the Carlton Club where he was alleged to have groped two men. Then began questions of what Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, knew and when. Mr Pincher had the whip removed as a member of the parliamentary Conservative party, and said: ‘I will benefit from professional medical support.’ He had previously stood down from the whips’ office in 2017, after being accused of making an unwanted pass at the former Olympic rower and Conservative activist Alex Story, but he was cleared of any breach of the Tory party’s code of conduct. No. 10 now admitted that Mr Johnson had been aware of ‘reports and speculation’ about the alleged sexual misconduct of Mr Pincher, before his new appointment in February. The official spokesman would not comment on whether Mr Johnson had said: ‘Pincher by name, pincher by nature.’ On Tuesday Lord McDonald of Salford, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office when Mr Pincher was a minister there in 2019, said that Mr Johnson had in fact been briefed in person about a complaint then. Before the day was out, Mr Johnson said he was ‘aware back in 2019, of a specific allegation’ and ‘I bitterly regret the decision not to … intervene’. On BBC Radio 4, Diane Abbott, the Labour MP, said, without giving any evidence: ‘Boris has been rumoured to be the one who likes assaulting women.’