The Spectator

Portrait of the week: EU negotiations, genderless babies and Brexit in court

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‘I will uphold the constitution, I will obey the law, but we will come out on 31 October,’ Boris Johnson told the BBC, adding that the EU ‘have had a bellyful of all this stuff’. After a lunch of chicken and pollock at the Bouquet Garni in Luxembourg with Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, he found noise from British protesters made it impossible for him to join Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, in an open-air press conference, so Mr Bettel continued on his own, gesturing angrily to an empty podium and saying what a ‘nightmare’ of uncertainty Britain had left Europe in. A couple who belong to Extinction Rebellion have been bringing up their baby without disclosing its sex, calling it ‘them’; ‘Once our baby is old enough, they can obviously decide for themselves what gender they want to be,’ said one.

Eleven of 12 judges of the Supreme Court heard two cases on the prorogation of parliament: the first an appeal from a judgment of the High Court, in a case brought by Gina Miller, that the prorogation was a ‘purely political’ decision and was ‘not a matter for the courts’; the second an appeal from a judgment in the inner Court of Session in Scotland, which said that the prorogation was null because of its ‘improper purpose of stymieing parliament’. The Business Secretary referred the sale of the defence company Cobham to the Competition and Markets Authority on security grounds. Sirius Minerals cancelled a £400 million bond sale to finance a big potash mine in North Yorkshire.

British border officials intercepted 41 people in three small boats and a kayak in the Channel. French authorities then cleared a sports hall and an encampment in Dunkirk where 1,000 migrants had been living.

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