Portrait of the week

Home The UK terror threat level was raised to severe after a taxi exploded and burst into flames just before 11 a.m. on Remembrance Sunday outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital, killing the passenger. He was Emad Al Swealmeen, 32, a failed asylum-seeker from the Middle East, who had converted from Islam, and was confirmed in 2017

Home NHS staff in England will have to be fully vaccinated against Covid by the spring. Britain had ordered 250,000 courses of a Pfizer antiviral pill available from early 2022 shown to cut the risk of hospitalisation or death from Covid by 89 per cent. Britain approved another antiviral pill, developed by Merck, and ordered

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told delegates to the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) in Glasgow: ‘It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now.’ He left the conference the next day. British companies would have to publish

Home The Queen will not attend the COP26 meeting in Glasgow next week; she had resumed light duties after having spent a night in hospital for ‘preliminary medical checks’. The Queen would address COP26 by means of a recorded video. ‘The recycling thing is a red herring,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told a press

Home Sir David Amess, aged 69, the Conservative MP for Southend West, was stabbed to death while taking a constituency surgery at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Police stopped a priest reaching him to administer the last rites. They arrested Ali Harbi Ali, 25, a British man of Somali heritage, who was detained under the Terrorism Act. The

Home In an extraordinary wrangle between government departments, the Treasury accused Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, of ‘making things up’ by saying he had held talks with the Treasury about helping companies badly hit by soaring energy prices. With the price of wholesale gas having risen fourfold in a year, businesses expected to close factories.

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he did not think Britain was in a crisis; he wanted it to move towards ‘a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy’ that was not addicted to cheap foreign labour. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Conservative party conference in Manchester that he had committed £500 million

Home The crisis of the week was a shortage of fuel at garages. ‘There is no need for people to go out and panic buy,’ said Paul Scully, the small-business minister. That set motorists queueing. BP had shut some petrol stations and blamed a shortage of heavy goods vehicle drivers. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary,

Home To prevent a shortage of meat, which relies on carbon dioxide in its packaging, the government gave millions of taxpayers’ money to an American company to reopen a fertiliser works at Stockton, Co. Durham, that produces the gas as a by-product. The plant had been shut down because of a rise in wholesale gas

Home The government decided to offer booster vaccinations to those over 50. Children aged 12 to 15 would be offered one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination. This followed a declaration by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation that it could not recommend vaccination for these children for their own health benefit alone; the chief

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced a new tax in the Commons branded a ‘health and social care levy’. It would increase National Insurance paid by employees and employers by 1.25 percentage points from April 2022. A year later it would become a separate tax that even pensioners still earning would have to pay.

Home Britain brought its last troops home from Afghanistan, having flown out more than 15,000 people since 14 August; but the operation failed to evacuate perhaps 1,000 eligible Afghans, some of whom had worked for the government, and 100 to 150 British nationals. Pen Farthing, who runs an animal charity in Afghanistan, returned in an

Home At the virtual G7 emergency summit that he was chairing, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, urged President Joe Biden of the United States to prolong the evacuation from Kabul of Nato forces, nationals and dependants beyond 31 August. But the Taliban said no. Britain took 8,600 people out of Afghanistan in ten days, but

Home Parliament was recalled after the rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, returned from a foreign holiday on Sunday. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, declared as Kabul fell: ‘We don’t want anybody bilaterally recognising the Taliban.’ But Mr Raab said that Britain recognised states, not governments. Britain sent an

Home With less frightening domestic data on the coronavirus pandemic to ponder, subjects such as the rivalry between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, found time for discussion. The seven-day average of coronavirus cases detected by tests remained below 30,000. In the seven days up to the beginning

Home After the number of people ‘pinged’ (alerted by an NHS Covid-19 app) neared 700,000, the app was adjusted so that it hunted for contacts of a person testing positive for Covid only from the two previous days, not five. When no more than 68 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds in England had yet

Home The daily number of coronavirus cases detected by tests fell from 54,674 on 17 July to 23,511 by 27 July. About 92 per cent of adults in England and Wales had coronavirus antibodies at the beginning of July, according to an estimate by the Office for National Statistics. In the seven days up to

Home On the eve of the day that most coronavirus restrictions were to be lifted, the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer had to react to having been in close contact with Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, who, despite being doubly vaccinated, had contracted Covid. At first Boris Johnson said that under a pilot

Home England expects everyone to wear masks in crowded places, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said in a televised address, even though the law requiring it was to be dropped on 19 July. He said: ‘We’re removing the government instruction to work from home where you can but we don’t expect that the whole country