Portrait of the Week: Infected blood apologies, falling inflation and XL bully attacks 

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Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said: ‘I want to make a wholehearted and unequivocal apology’ for a ‘decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life’, as described in the report by Sir Brian Langstaff from the Infected Blood Inquiry, which found that successive governments and the NHS had let patients catch HIV and hepatitis. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, apologised too. So far more than 3,000 have died, of the 30,000 infected with HIV or hepatitis C from blood products or transfusions between 1970 and the early 1990s. Interim compensation of £210,000 will be paid to some within 90 days. BT postponed until January 2027 a deadline for forcing customers to switch from copper-based landlines to internet-based services.

Wylfa on Anglesey was earmarked for a new nuclear power station. The High Court ruled as unlawful legislation amended by statutory instrument that had attempted to increase police powers against demonstrators by lowering the threshold for what counted as ‘serious disruption’. After people fell ill with diarrhoea caused by Cryptosporidium parasites, 16,000 households in Brixham, Devon, were told by South West Water to boil drinking water. Water companies in England and Wales want bills to increase by between 24 per cent and 91 per cent in the next five years, according to the Consumer Council for Water. Manchester City became the Premier League champions for the fourth time running, pipping Arsenal to the title. A woman in Hornchurch, Essex, died after being attacked by her two registered XL bully dogs.

Annual inflation fell to 2.3 per cent in April from 3.2 per cent in March. Labour issued a card with six pledges: economic stability, the establishment of Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean energy company, cutting NHS waiting lists, stopping the gangs arranging small boat crossings, providing more neighbourhood police officers and recruiting 6,500 teachers.