The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 April 2014

Home Nigel Evans, who had resigned as deputy speaker before being cleared of a bundle of rape and sexual assault charges against men, questioned the right of the Crown Prosecution Service to pursue cases that were ‘decades’ old and said that people should not have to spend their life savings defending themselves. Sajid Javid was

Vladimir Putin knows what he stands for. Do we?

Possibly because his oratory is no match for his much-displayed pectoral muscles, the speeches of Vladimir Putin are seldom reported at length in the West. But as a means of understanding the manoeuvres in eastern Ukraine this week, there is no better starting point than the speech he made to the Duma when the Russian

Runaway runners and other other sporting refugees

Done a runner Mami Konneh Lahun, a 24-year-old athlete from Sierra Leone, went missing after finishing as the 20th-placed woman in the London Marathon. She is not the first athlete to have done a runner. — In the 2002 Commonwealth Games, 20 of her compatriots failed to return home. — After the London Olympics, 21

Fly

‘Apart from making a buzzing noise and an inability to find an open window, what else do you do?’

Talk

‘Why do you say “we’ve got to talk” when what you mean is I’ve got to listen?’