Portrait of the week: Partygate penalties, Oscars drama and Dairy Milk shrinks

Home

Twenty fixed-penalty fines were issued after the police inquiry into Downing Street parties that broke Covid rules, but the Metropolitan Police refused to say who was fined for which events. Peter Hebblethwaite, the chief executive of P&O Ferries, admitted to a parliamentary committee that the company had broken the law by sacking 800 workers without consulting unions. He said that foreign replacements would earn an average of £5.50 per hour, which is below the British minimum wage. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, said he’d change the law to stop that. Lord Grade of Yarmouth, a former BBC chairman, was announced as the preferred candidate to be chairman of the media regulator Ofcom.

Roman Abramovich, the sanctioned owner of Chelsea football club, suffered skin inflammation and piercing pain in the eyes consistent with poisoning, at peace talks in Ukraine on 3 March, a crime said by the Wall Street Journal to have been committed by Russian hardliners. The cabinet couldn’t agree on an energy independence policy. The government planned to take a 20 per cent stake in the £20 billion nuclear plant Sizewell C in Suffolk, equal to the stake by the French company EDF. The schools White Paper proposed raising the 65 per cent of children leaving primary school in 2019 with the expected standards in English and maths to 90 per cent by 2030. The Queen attended a memorial service at Westminster Abbey for the Duke of Edinburgh.

In the seven days up to 28 March, 992 people had died with coronavirus, bringing total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 164,671. In the previous week 806 had died. Numbers with Covid remaining in hospital in the UK rose from about 15,000 to about 18,000. Only 62.6 per cent of people over 12 in Westminster had been vaccinated at all.