Portrait of the week: Tory party conference, gas supply warning and Denmark’s royals stripped of titles

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Liz Truss, the Prime Minister, came up with a message for the Conservative party conference: ‘Whenever there is change, there is disruption… Everyone will benefit from the result.’ Her words followed a decision not to abolish, after all, the 45p rate of tax, paid by people who earn more than £150,000 a year. Backbench Conservative MPs had let it be known they would not vote for it. ‘The difference this makes really is trivial,’ said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank. But the pound rose and the government was able to borrow a little more cheaply. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the conference: ‘I know the plan put forward only ten days ago has caused a little turbulence. I get it. I get it.’ Michael Gove had prowled around the conference stirring up apathy for government plans. Britain’s economic output rose by 0.2 per cent between April and June, the Office for National Statistics said, and had not shrunk by 0.1 per cent, meaning that the country was not in recession as the Bank of England had warned it might be.

‘Britain could enter into a gas supply emergency’ this winter, according to the energy regulator Ofgem; supplies could be cut to ‘the largest gas users’, likely to be ‘large gas-fired power stations’. The West Burton-A power plant in Nottinghamshire was chosen as the site of the first prototype commercial nuclear fusion reactor, to be operational by the early 2040s, according to the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland Minister, said that during the Brexit process he and others did not ‘always behave in a way which encouraged Ireland and the European Union to trust us to accept that they have legitimate interests’.

Trains were stopped by strikes on Wednesday and Saturday.