Portrait of the week: Vaccine shots, Brexit stutters and a frosty reception for the royals

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The Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine began, rather slowly, to be given to some old people in hospital and health workers. Margaret Keenan, 90, was the first outside clinical trials to receive it. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 6 December, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 61,014, including 2,771 in the past week; the number for the week before was 3,617. Rita Ora, the singer, a week after apologising for entertaining 30 people at a birthday party on the ‘spur of the moment’, remembered to apologise for not having gone into quarantine at the time, after returning from Egypt. England’s cricket tour of South Africa was abandoned after a South Africa player and two hotel staff tested positive for coronavirus. A ton of cocaine was found hidden at the London Gateway port at Thurrock, on the Thames, in banana pulp from Colombia bound for Antwerp.

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, booked a ticket for Brussels to have dinner with Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, after talks on trading relations with the European Union dragged on with a special kind of tedium bestowed by lack of information combined with unreliable briefing. Suddenly Britain and the EU said they agreed in principle over the trading position of Northern Ireland, so parts of the Internal Market Bill that would break international law were being dropped. Nando’s, the popular chicken restaurant, spent £20 million on anti-coronavirus measures at its 434 branches. Police broke up a nocturnal house party with 150 guests in Nottingham. Peter Alliss, the golfer and commentator, died aged 89. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge introduced three reindeer to children in Berwick during a three-day 1,250-mile tour of England, Scotland and Wales on the royal train.