Portrait of the week: Sturgeon resigns, inflation falls and a crown for Camilla

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Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, announced her resignation. Jeremy Corbyn will not be a Labour candidate at the next general election, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader said. A boy and girl, both aged 15, were charged with the murder of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl, at Culcheth, Cheshire. A revision of the Northern Ireland Protocol was predicted, under which goods from Britain destined only for Northern Ireland would not face physical customs checks; but bananas would face a tariff lest they be smuggled into the Republic. Six members of a gang, Michael Malik Ahmed, Roshan Clark, Kaijuan Henry, Zakariah Yusuf, Jessy Ouma and Joseph Opoku, who wielded knives and machetes to steal watches in Clapham and Chelsea, were convicted of robbery. Queen Mary’s Crown, made in 1911, will be used to crown Queen Camilla in May, with three Cullinan diamonds restored to it, but not the Koh-i-Noor. The Queen Consort, 75, caught Covid.

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said that Britain had a ‘quick reaction alert force’ of Typhoon jets ready in case a Chinese balloon floated over. Fraser Sampson, the publicly appointed surveillance commissioner, warned that police are open to spying by using Chinese-made cameras. Erkin Tuniyaz, the governor of China’s north-western Xinjiang province, where Uyghur Muslims are persecuted, cancelled a visit to Britain. The Prime Minister said he did not want to ‘prejudge the outcome’ of an inquiry by the independent office for public appointments into the conduct of Richard Sharp, the chairman of the BBC, in arranging a meeting, when he was being considered for his BBC position, between Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and a cousin of Boris Johnson’s who was willing to act as guarantor on a loan for the then prime minister.