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Portrait of the week: More Brexit chaos, royal complaints and Syrian fighting

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The Commons voted by 329 to 299 for a Brexit Withdrawal Bill but then stymied progress by defeating a timetable for enacting it by 31 October. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, immediately favoured a delay for Brexit. Downing Street called for a general election. Sir Oliver Letwin had torpedoed the government’s Brexit endeavours by amending a motion that had been intended to secure the Commons’ ‘meaningful vote’ for the withdrawal agreement triumphantly secured from the EU by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, only three days earlier. The Commons, sitting on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War of 1982, voted by 322 to 306 in favour of Sir Oliver’s amendment, which stipulated that the House would not approve the agreement until legislation had been passed to bring it into British law. The government had already lost the support of the DUP, which was angered by provisions in the withdrawal agreement that imposed different customs and VAT arrangements on Northern Ireland from those elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The Letwin vote obliged Boris Johnson to send off a letter to the EU under the terms of the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019 — the Benn Act — requesting a delay of Brexit until 31 January. The letter was sent with a covering letter from the ambassador to the EU but deliberately without the Prime Minister’s signature. Instead he sent a third letter, which declared that ‘a further extension would damage the interests of the UK and our EU partners’. George King-Thompson, from Oxford, who climbed the 1,017ft Shard in July, was detained in a young offender institution for six months after admitting being in contempt of court in making the climb.

While parliament was sitting, hundreds of thousands demonstrated outside in favour of the People’s Vote campaign, ostensibly in favour of another referendum on Brexit, though many demonstrators called for an end to Brexit.

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