Portrait of the week

Mr Gordon Brown is prepared to campaign actively for Mr Tony Blair, whom he replaced as Prime Minister, to be the first permanent president of the European Council of the European Union, Downing Street said. Mr David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had said earlier that Mr Blair would be a good candidate because ‘we need someone who, when he or she lands in Beijing or Washington or Moscow, the traffic does need to stop’. Sir Christopher Kelly, the Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, told party leaders the outline of his report on MPs’ expenses, to be published next week, and shortly afterwards there was a leak of his recommendations that MPs should no longer be able to claim for mortgage payments on second homes or to employ spouses as secretaries.

On the brink of a planned national postal strike, Royal Mail announced it was recruiting 30,000 temporary staff to deal with the existing backlog and the normal Christmas rush, twice the number usually taken on. The Financial Services Authority published rules to make mortgage lenders assess strictly the ability of borrowers to make repayments, and to ban ‘self-certification’, which had allowed a million borrowers to take up mortgages without providing evidence of income. Five prison managers faced charges of gross misconduct after the Chief Inspector of Prisons found that prisoners at Wandsworth and Pentonville had been switched on the eve of inspections.

Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, is to pay back £12,415.10p that he claimed in expenses between 2004 and 2008 Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, is to pay back £12,415.10p that he claimed in expenses between 2004 and 2008; he had received a letter, along with all other MPs, on the day Parliament returned from its summer recess, from Sir Thomas Legg, aged 74, a retired permanent secretary at the Lord Chancellor’s Department appointed by the Members Estimate Committee as an independent auditor. More than £10,000 of Mr Brown’s repayment relate to cleaning bills. Mr David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, was asked by Sir Thomas to explain why he had needed to repay £218.96p in interest on the mortgage on his constituency home in Oxfordshire.

Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, said that she had signed without asking any questions a form that her husband, Mr David Mills, used to gain a mortgage for a house, which he repaid a month later with an alleged bribe of £340,000 from Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. Mr Mills denies receiving such a payment; an Italian prosecutor is investigating the allegation. Mr Ken Livingstone was suspended for four weeks as Mayor of London by the Adjudication Panel for England when it found that he had brought his office into disrepute by saying to a reporter who had told him he was Jewish and worked for the London Evening Standard, ‘Actually you are just like a concentration camp guard. You are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?

A clause to criminalise the ‘glorification’ of terrorism, which had been removed from the Terrorism Bill by the Lords, was reinstated when the Bill was passed in the Commons by a majority of 38, with only 17 Labour MPs voting against the government. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the vote, ‘The type of demonstrations that we saw a couple of weeks ago, where I think there were placards and images that people in this country felt were totally offensive, the law will allow us to deal with those people and say, “Look, we have free speech in this country, but don't abuse it”.

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, began speaking about all sorts of things outside his ministerial responsibility: security, identity cards, patriotism, a proposed Veterans’ Day each 27 June. The phrase ‘dual premiership’ came up in a question put by the Observer to Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary; in answer to which he said, ‘That’s what Tony would always want, what Gordon should do.

Mustafa Kemal Mustafa, known as Abu Hamza, the hook-handed Muslim cleric, aged 47, was sentenced to seven years in jail on six charges of soliciting to murder, two charges of ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred’, a charge of possessing video and audio recordings intended for distribution to stir up racial hatred, and a charge under the Terrorism Act 2000 of possessing a document, the Encyclopaedia of the Afghani Jihad, containing information ‘of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. He was acquitted on three other charges of soliciting to murder and one of stirring up racial hatred.

The government was twice defeated in the Commons in votes on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, making its provisions less broad. The government produced a form with a box to tick for people who wanted to prevent life-saving treatment being given them in future; this was according to the Mental Capacity Act, 2004, which comes into effect in 2007. A White Paper on health proposed treating more people outside large hospitals; but a question of funding remained. Mr David Blunkett, the disgraced former Cabinet minister, said his ‘sense is that there is a new understanding’ between Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Mr Gordon Brown about the latter replacing the former; ‘So good on them,’ Mr Blunkett said.

Mr Mark Oaten withdrew his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats and then resigned as its Home Affairs spokesman after the News of the World publicised repeated visits to a 23-year-old rent boy. Mr Sven-Goran Eriksson agreed with the Football Association to resign as the England football manager after the World Cup, and to take a £2.5 million pay-off. The News of the World reported that he had said to a journalist in disguise in Dubai that he was considering his future after the World Cup; Mr Eriksson also had talks with the FA’s so-called compliance unit because the paper had said he had named three unnamed premiership clubs as being involved in corruption.

Miss Ruth Kelly resisted pressure to resign as the Secretary of State for Education after it was learnt that a minister had approved the employment in a school of a man who had been put on the sex offenders register after being cautioned by police for gaining access to child pornography on the internet. Other examples emerged, and it became clear that the categorisation of offenders and the clearing of them for work in schools was complicated and uneven. One man, aged 59, who was allowed to teach at a boys’ school by Miss Kelly, had been convicted for the indecent assault of a 15-year-old girl in 1980; he said, ‘I am not a paedophile. I am not a risk to children.

Mr Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, called a press conference and said, ‘Over the past 18 months, I’ve been coming to terms with, and seeking to cope with, a drinking problem.... I’ve not had a drink for the past two months and I don’t intend to in the future.’ He invited rivals to stand against him for the leadership in an election by the party’s 73,000 members. But two days later, after 25 MPs had said they would not serve with him, he resigned, and Sir Menzies Campbell, 64, rapidly put his name forward, to be followed by Mr Mark Oaten, 41, while Mr Simon Hughes, 54, hesitated. The results will be known by 2 March.

The cost of domestic gas and electricity was expected to rise by 15 per cent in the spring, an increase of 50 per cent in three years. Among the New Year’s honours, knighthoods went to Tom Jones, the singer; John Dankworth, the jazz musician; Arnold Wesker, the playwright; and Lord Coe, the Olympics organiser; damehoods went to Vivienne Westwood, the fashion designer; Liz Forgan, of the Heritage Lottery Fund; Susie Leather, of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The whole of the England cricket squad involved in the Ashes series and the Beverley Sisters — Babs, Joy and Teddie — were appointed MBE.

JANUARY Mr Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said it was all right to kill burglars ‘honestly and instinctively’. Iraq held elections. Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the al-Qa’eda leader in Iraq, said, ‘We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy.’ The numbers killed by the deadly wave that devastated the fringes of the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004 was put at 178,000. Mrs Adriana Iliescu, aged 67, gave birth to a baby girl in Bucharest. China decided to measure Mount Everest, amid reports that it had shrunk by four feet. FEBRUARY Members of the IRA murdered Robert McCartney, a Catholic, at a Belfast pub, provoking demonstrations by hundreds after his sisters protested.

Mr David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative party in a ballot of members, beating Mr David Davis by 134,446 votes to 64,398. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his pre-Budget report astonished investors planning self-invested personal pensions by announcing that they ‘will be prohibited from obtaining tax advantages when investing in residential property and certain other assets such as fine wines’. He also enraged North Sea oil producers by increasing corporation tax on their profits, from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. Mr Brown hoped to get an extra £2.3 billion from the oil taxes and another £700 million from other corporate taxes, in order to shore up public finances. Last March he had predicted economic growth of 3.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was forced by the presence of protesters to have a cup of tea instead of delivering a speech in Islington on nuclear energy. After his cup of tea he said that energy policy was ‘back on the agenda with a vengeance’ while ‘round the world you can hear the heavy sound of feverish rethinking’. The government is expected to produce a preliminary White Paper on the matter next spring. Even before it was published, a report on pensions by a commission headed by Lord Turner was discounted by Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a leaked letter.

Downing Street let it be known that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was sympathetic to plans to build new nuclear power stations; but then government ministers announced he had not made up his mind after all. The wholesale price of gas reached five times its cost at the beginning of November. Because of increased rail freight traffic (from 15.1 billion tonne-kilometres in 1996 to 20.7 billion in 2004), chiefly in imported coal, new goods-lines might be built in Britain, according to Mr Iain Coucher, the deputy chief executive of Network Rail. Two probationer policewomen were shot, one fatally, when they were called to a travel agency in Bradford that was being raided.

There was much speculation about the import of the government’s defeat, its first since it came to office in 1997, on a vote on the Terrorism Bill by 322 votes to 291, despite the jetting back from Israel of Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had only got as far in his visit as Tel Aviv airport. Some 49 Labour MPs voted against the provision to allow 90 days’ detention without trial; an amendment was then passed limiting detention to 28 days. Some commentators saw the defeat as a straw in the wind for the last days of Mr Tony Blair as Prime Minister; others wondered how he’d get on with his reforms of the health and education systems.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, insisted on pressing ahead with a Bill to allow police to hold anyone suspected of a terrorist offence for 90 days without charge. The government prepared legislation to allow terrorists who had fled Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement to return to the province without prosecution. Six men were arrested in connection with the £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery in Belfast last December, and two were released without charge. The High Court heard a case for compensation by more than 5,000 serving and former officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (now the Police Service of Northern Ireland), which they said had failed those who suffered lasting effects from traumas in dealing with terrorism.

Mr David Blunkett resigned as the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions after it was revealed that he had taken a directorship in a DNA-testing company called DNA Bioscience, after resigning from his previous Cabinet post, without consulting the independent Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, as the ministerial code of practice stipulates. He had sold some shares he’d bought in the company, saying he wanted ‘to protect family and friends from further intrusion’. After a delay caused by a rift in the Cabinet, the government announced a Bill to criminalise tobacco-smoking in enclosed public spaces, apart from pubs not selling food and private clubs.

In the Lozells district of Birmingham, Isaiah Young Sam, a black man aged 23, was fatally stabbed as he returned from the cinema in an attack by ten or 11 men. The murder came amid fights and rioting by black Caribbeans and South Asian youths. The violence came after a rumour had gone round, and was retailed on a pirate radio station, that a 14-year-old black girl had been raped by 19 Asians after being caught shoplifting. Another man was shot dead nearby the next day. A White Paper on education set out plans to free schools from the control of local authorities and give them power to expand, change curriculum and set admission policies. Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, was said not to like it.