Portrait of the week

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.

Conservative MPs got down to selecting the two candidates for the leadership of the party between whom members at large will be asked to choose; they did not include Mr Kenneth Clarke, who came last in the first ballot. Miss Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Health, confirmed that, if avian influenza communicable between human beings visited Britain, then perhaps a quarter of the population might be infected and 50,000 might die. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a speech to Progress, a Labour party organisation, said, ‘What we must not do is fall for some modern version of the old Left delusion: that the problem with the progressive government is that it is not Left enough and if only its leadership rediscovered its true principles, all would be well.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said that the government had ‘got to make sure that the police have the powers they can to deal with people who are drug dealing in the street’. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said that the government had abandoned plans to introduce a new offence of ‘glorifying terrorism’. Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the new Lord Chief Justice, said, ‘Occasionally one does feel that an individual politician is trying to browbeat the judiciary.’ Britain’s Assets Recovery Agency and the Irish Republic’s Criminal Assets Bureau looked into the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s link to a £30 million property portfolio in Manchester.

Mr David Davis, Mr Kenneth Clarke, Mr David Cameron, Dr Liam Fox and Sir Malcolm Rifkind displayed what attractions they could muster as candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party at its annual conference in Blackpool. Boots the chemist, with 1,400 outlets in Britain, announced a merger with Allied UniChem, with 1,250 outlets in Britain and Europe, to produce a company with 100,000 employees and a value of £7 billion. A takeover of Telewest by its rival British cable operator NTL was expected to produce a communications company with revenues of £3.4 billion. BP warned that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita might knock more than £400 million off its third-quarter profits.

Mr Tony Blair, in a speech at the Labour party conference, said, ‘The challenge we face is not in our values. It is how we put them into practice in a world fast-forwarding to the future at unprecedented speed.’ To combat antisocial behaviour he proposed ‘a radical extension of summary powers to police and local authorities to take on the wrongdoers’ and ‘more competitive sports in schools’. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wants soon to be prime minister, said in his speech, ‘I learnt from my parents not just to do my best and to work hard but to treat everyone equally, to respect others, to tell the truth, to take responsibility’; this he called his ‘moral compass’.

The government decided to put off overhauling council tax by revaluing houses until after the next election. The National Health Service, despite unprecedented increases in government spending on it, went into the red for the first time in five years, with a deficit of £250 million, which Sir Nigel Crisp, its chief executive, pointed out was only 0.4 per cent of its £69.7 billion budget. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, proposed keeping suspected terrorists in jail for three months without charge; but he inadvertently sent out a letter that retained an earlier draft of his views, including the sentence, ‘I believe there is room for debate as to whether we should go as far as three months.

As the price of petrol rose above £1 per litre, a group of protesters calling itself the Fuel Lobby threatened to blockade motorways and oil refineries in protest against fuel duty. Many petrol stations ran out of fuel as motorists resorted to panic-buying. Loyalists rioted in Belfast for two nights, injuring 30 police officers, after the Orange Order was told by the Parades Commission to alter the route of one of its marches by 100 yards. The TUC gathered in Brighton for its annual conference and demanded a return of the right for secondary picketing. A team from Edinburgh University announced it had succeeded in creating a human embryo using an egg but no sperm.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew off to China and appeared at a press conference with the Chinese leader, Mr Wen Jiabao, where it was said that there had been a resolution of the dispute over European Union import quotas, which had seen 80 million items of clothing of Chinese manufacture piling up at docks. Mr Wen said that Mr Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, had spent a ‘sleepless’ night on the matter; next year’s quotas are to be cannibalised, although this requires agreement from each EU country. Petrol rose above £1 a litre. Twenty-four new companies were given licences to explore for oil off the coast of Britain.

The Home Office proposed a new offence of having images from the internet of serious sexual violence and other obscene material; it would be punishable by three years in jail. The presumed murderer of an 11-year-old boy in West Lothian was found dead, hanged in his house; the man was on bail awaiting trial on charges of sexual offences against young girls. A woman was shot dead with a baby in her arms at a christening party in Peckham, south London; a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old black youth were arrested. A survey of 9,700 children aged 11–15 found that 9 per cent of them had said they had been able to buy alcohol in a pub or bar. Last year there were 44,488 cases of Clostridium difficile in England, against 35,536 cases in the previous year, before reporting became mandatory.

The news blackout that Downing Street had asked newspapers to impose about the whereabouts of Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, on holiday, supposedly for reasons of security, was broken by the man himself when he popped up at a VJ Day commemoration on Barbados, where he had stayed previously at a house belonging to Sir Cliff Richard, the 64-year-old singer. There was a shuffling about for reasons to ask for the resignation of Sir Ian Blair, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The brother of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian shot dead on 22 July by police who took him for a suicide-bomber, criticised the police for offering his family an ex gratia payment of £15,000; ‘They thought we were poor people, stupid people,’ he said.

British Airways flights to and from London Heathrow were brought to a standstill for a day, and disrupted for days afterwards, by unofficial strikes by ground staff in sympathy with 700 staff sacked by a company supplying airline meals. Leaked documents showed that the Brazilian man shot dead at Stockwell in London by police seeking suicide-bombers had not vaulted over a barrier at the station, nor had he been wearing a baggy jacket. Mr Omar Bakri, a radical Islamic cleric who had left Britain after 20 years to visit his mother, he said, in Lebanon, was barred from returning by Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, who declared his presence in Britain ‘not conducive to the public good’. Police held four people in Manchester under the Terrorism Act 2000.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, floated all kinds of schemes to counter terrorists, with legislation to be introduced in the autumn, including the amendment of the Human Rights Act in respect of the provisions of the European convention on human rights. Involvement with extremist websites, bookshops or centres would be used as grounds for deporting foreign nationals; bilateral arrangements would be made to protect deportees from torture in their native lands. Mr Blair predicted ‘a lot of battles’ with the courts. ‘Let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing,’ he said, before going off on holiday, leaving Britain under the notional care of Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister.

The Irish Republican Army sent out a digital video disc in which Mr Seanna Walsh, once imprisoned for his deeds, read out a statement saying, ‘The leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign ...Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.’ In a joint response Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Mr Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach of Ireland, took this to mean ‘the end of the IRA as a paramilitary organisation’. Mr Blair called it ‘a step of unparalleled magnitude’. The IRA offered to let a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister see some arms being put beyond use, but disallowed photography.