Portrait of the Week: Natalie Elphicke defects, wages rise and Switzerland takes Eurovision

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The parliamentary Labour party shook itself uneasily after Natalie Elphicke, the MP for Dover, crossed the floor of the Commons and joined it, because she found the Conservatives too left wing. Monty Panesar, the former England cricketer, left George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain a week after being announced as a parliamentary candidate. Some Liberal Democrat party members complained to the Equality and Human Rights Commission about the deselection as a candidate for Sutton and Cheam of David Campanale, an Anglican. The Commons voted by 170 to 169 for MPs arrested for serious sexual or violent offences to be banned from attending parliament. The government bruited plans to stop sex education for under-nines and restrict teaching about gender.

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said in a speech that ‘the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet most transformational our country has ever known’, so Britain would be safer under the Conservatives. Three people – a Border Force officer, a former Royal Marine and a former Hong Kong policeman – appeared in court charged with ‘foreign interference’ and assisting the intelligence service of Hong Kong. Walid Saadaoui, 36, and Amar Hussein, 50, who had been arrested in Wigan and Bolton, appeared in Westminster magistrates’ court, charged with planning a gun attack against the Jewish community in the north-west. Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in the British Antarctic Territory, with reserves of 511 billion barrels of oil – ten times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – the Commons Environment Audit Committee heard. Asda announced plans to build 1,500 flats above a supermarket between Park Royal and Harlesden in north-west London.