Portrait of the week: grooming gangs, wildfires and a Littler victory

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Responding to a rejection by Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, of calls for a government inquiry into historical child abuse in Oldham, Elon Musk tweeted that she was a ‘rape genocide apologist’ and ‘deserves to be in prison’. After a day or two of tweets suggesting such things as the dissolution of parliament by the King, Mr Musk tweeted: ‘The Reform party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.’ Nigel Farage had dissociated himself from the far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson, who is serving 18 months for contempt of court. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, tweeted: ‘Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here.’ Professor Alexis Jay, the chairman of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which published 19 reports over seven years, the last in October 2022 (none of the recommendations from which had been implemented), said: ‘I am pleased that the subject matter and the inquiry recommendations are finally getting the attention they deserve but this is definitely not the way I would have chosen for it to happen.’ In the first week of 2025 only 61 migrants arrived across the Channel by small boat; for 2024 the total was 36,816.

Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said in a speech that he meant ‘to expand the relationship between the NHS and the private healthcare sector’, to reduce by more than 450,000, by March 2026, the three million who were waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment. Wes Streeting, the Health and Social Care Secretary, said that the government would sort out adult social care only after an independent commission, chaired by Baroness Casey of Blackstock, which begins work in April, publishes its final report in 2028.