Portrait of the year | 10 December 2015

January

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that only electing the Conservatives could ‘save Britain’s economic recovery’. Labour unveiled a poster saying: ‘The Tories want to cut spending on public services back to the levels of the 1930s,’ and Ed Miliband, the party leader, said he would ‘weaponise the NHS’. Two male ‘hedge witches’ were wed under the equal marriage law in a pagan ceremony in Edinburgh. Alexis Tsipras became prime minister of Greece, heading a Syriza coalition. In Paris, gunmen murdered 17 people, 11 at Charlie Hebdo, the magazine that had published cartoons of Mohammed. The price of Brent crude oil dipped below $50 a barrel, down from $107 a year earlier. A French court prevented parents naming their daughter Nutella.

February

Mr Cameron said people who were too fat to work should not be able to claim benefits. Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw were suspended from their parties after being separately secretly filmed apparently offering their services for payment. The Italian coastguard rescued more than 2,000 migrants off the Libyan coast a week after 300 drowned. The Islamic State posted a video of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians captured in Libya. Michele Ferrero, who became a billionaire by inventing Nutella, died aged 89.

March

Mr Cameron told James Landale of the BBC, who was cutting up chicory in his kitchen, that he would not seek a third term as Prime Minister. Rolf Harris, aged 84, had his CBE ‘cancelled and annulled’ after being jailed for assaults on girls. An aeroplane operated by Germanwings crashed in the French Alps, killing all 150 aboard. Boris Nemtsov, a leading opposition politician, was shot dead in a street near the Kremlin. A conference of chemists in Denver, Colorado, discussed ways of recovering gold from human excrement.