Portrait of the week: Gorbachev dies, Gibraltar becomes a city (again) and Meghan’s Mandela moment

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Liz Truss, the contender for the Conservative party leadership who is expected to become prime minister next Tuesday, resisted temptations to say what she would do about the national energy price crisis. But she was said to have in her pocket licences for new drilling in the North Sea. Nadhim Zahawi, the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the time being, said that even people earning £45,000 a year would need help with their energy bills this winter. The price cap for energy set by the regulator Ofgem will rise by 80 per cent in October, with electricity going up from 28p per kilowatt hour to 52p and gas from 7p to 15p, making a typical annual energy bill currently £1,971 rise to £3,549. Cornwall Insight the market analysts predicted January’s rise would be to £5,386. Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, once more said, ‘You’ve got a government that is missing in action,’ as though it had been killed on active service.

Ms Truss, who is the Foreign Secretary, said the jury was still out on whether Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, was ‘friend or foe’. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said that he was ‘un tres bon buddy de notre pays’. The aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales set for exercises off America but only got as far as the Isle of Wight before its starboard propeller broke down. Edinburgh dustmen resumed work after a 12-day strike but planned another from 6 September. A rail strike was called to coincide with the Labour party conference.

The whole of England was declared to be in drought apart from the north-east, Cumbria, Lancashire and Manchester. In England, the number of people testing positive for Covid fell to one in 45 and in Scotland to one in 40 by mid-August (from one in 40 and one in 30 a week earlier) according to a regular survey by the Office for National Statistics.