Portrait of the week

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said that political control of military action would pass to the Iraqi government after 30 June. Speaking at his regular monthly press conference, he said, ‘Let me make it a hundred per cent clear: after June 30 there will be the full transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi government. If there is a political decision as to whether you go into a place like Fallujah in a particular way, that has to be done with the consent of the Iraqi government.’ British troops should leave Iraq now, according to 35 per cent of respondents to an ICM poll for the Guardian; 45 per cent said they thought they should remain in Iraq as long as necessary.

‘The task of leadership when things are difficult is precisely not to cut and run,’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said at a press conference during a visit to Turkey. ‘We have the will, we have the leadership to do it, we will get the job done,’ he said, with reference to Iraq, but also in response to speculation that he might stand down as Prime Minister. Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, was observed to have spent 90 minutes in the carpark of the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar in Argyllshire with Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wants to be Prime Minister. ‘Tony Blair and I are working closely on both our spending round and the five-year departmental plans,’ Mr Brown said later in a speech.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, apologised conditionally for crimes that British soldiers might have committed in Iraq: ‘We apologise deeply to anyone who has been mistreated by any of our soldiers.’ He and Foreign Office ministers denied having seen until very recently a Red Cross report of alleged Coalition abuses that was delivered to high Coalition officials in February. More evidence was found for the inauthenticity of photographs published by the Daily Mirror purporting to show British troops mistreating Iraqi prisoners.

Labour published a summary of its achievements, under the title Britain is Working. Mr Tony Blair celebrated the seventh anniversary of his becoming prime minister even more quietly than Lady Thatcher celebrated the 25th anniversary of her becoming prime minister. Dr Paul Drayson, who used to run PowderJect, a company awarded a £32 million government contract, and Sir Kumar Bhattacharyya were two donors to the Labour party among its 23 nominees as new peers; but the Tories had three donors among its five new peers, including Sir Stanley Kalms. Mr Blair visited Dublin to make optimistic noises with Mr Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach, about the future of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which has been suspended since October 2002.

Fifty-two former ambassadors, high commissioners and governors criticised Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, for supporting an American policy in Iraq that was ‘doomed to failure’. ‘The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement,’ their open letter said. It also spoke of ‘one-sided and illegal’ policies over Israel, which meant ‘abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land’. The letter was co-ordinated by Mr Oliver Miles, a former ambassador to Libya, and its supporters included Sir Crispin Tickell.

A referendum on the proposed constitution for the European Union will be held, the government conceded; the next argument was over the timing. ‘Parliament should debate it in detail and decide upon it,’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told the Commons, ‘then let the people have the final say.’ After meeting President George Bush of the United States in Washington, Mr Blair said that they would seek a United Nations Security Council resolution to authorise a ‘central role’ for the UN in Iraq after America relinquishes nominal control on 1 July.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said, in reaction to violence in Iraq, ‘Our response to this should not be to run away in fright or hide away, or think that we have got it all wrong. Our response on the contrary should be to hold firm, because that is what the vast majority of the Iraqi people want.’ He was speaking before a visit to the United States for talks with President George Bush. A convicted murderer, James McCormick, aged 17, was allowed to go free from Hamilton sheriff court; he was under the care of Reliance Custodial Services, which had just begun an £11 million contract to escort prisoners.

After the resignation of Miss Beverley Hughes as immigration minister, Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, called a ‘summit’ at Downing Street to plan a ‘cross-government assault’ on failures in the system; MI5 was called in. It had been reported that Mr Blair had promised the Romanian Prime Minister he would lift visa requirements on Romanians coming to Britain as a ‘reward’ for a reduction in the number of asylum-seekers. It was also claimed that immigration officials were ordered not to arrest illegal immigrants lest they apply for asylum and swell the official figures.

Seven hundred police made 24 simultaneous raids around London, seizing half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in Hanwell, west London, arresting two men in Uxbridge, one in Ilford, one in Horley, one in Slough and three in Crawley — all British Muslims of Pakistani descent, aged between 17 and 32. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, suspended immigration from Romania and Bulgaria in a scandal involving immigration checks. First Miss Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister, was found to have cleared backlogs by letting through unchecked applications from people already in Britain.

Liberal Democrat delegates at the party’s spring conference in Southport voted in favour of 16 year olds being allowed to appear in explicit pornography and of doctors being allowed to assist suicides. Mr Charles Kennedy broke into a sweat during his speech to the conference, following his sudden absence during the budget debate the week before with a stomach disorder. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew to Madrid for a requiem Mass for those killed in the train bombings. He then flew for talks with President Gaddafi of Libya. A Nottingham brain surgeon was suspended while an investigation was ordered into allegations that he had failed to pay for an extra helping of croutons for his soup in the hospital canteen.

In the eighth budget of his career, Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed to narrow his deficit by cutting 40,000 public-sector jobs and selling off assets, including land worth £5 billion. The Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise would merge, making 14,000 people redundant. There was much tinkering. Duty on beer up 1p a pint, wine up 4p a bottle; spirits, champagne and cider stayed the same. Duty on cigarettes went up by 8p a packet; petrol duty up by 1.9p a litre. In consideration of the burden of council tax, people over 70 would get an extra £100 from the government. Stamp duty on house sales stayed still, and the threshold on inheritance tax went up to £263,000, below the margin of house-price inflation.

The House of Lords voted by 216 to 183 to refer to a special select committee, and thus delay, the Constitutional Reform Bill, which seeks to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor and to set up a Supreme Court to replace the Law Lords; a week earlier Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, had called the Bill ‘exchanging a first-class Final Court of Appeal for a second-class Supreme Court’, but he changed his tune. The government said it would not compensate policyholders of Equitable Life, the troubled mutual society, after a report by Lord Penrose found it was the ‘author of its own misfortunes ... policyholders were effectively powerless, and the board was a self-perpetuating oligarchy amenable to policyholder pressure only at its discretion’.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the bombings in Iraq that there was ‘a struggle between good and evil’ going on there. Before the bombings, Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said it was withdrawing support from the Butler inquiry into intelligence on purported weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because the inquiry was to be conducted in an ‘unacceptably restrictive fashion’; Mr Michael Mates, the Conservative MP on the Butler committee, said it was his duty to continue. Miss Clare Short was asked on Today on Radio 4 about spying on the United Nations and said: ‘These things are done. ...

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, proposed internment without trial for those suspected of terrorist offences, and other measures such as wider telephone-tapping. The government said that migrants from countries joining the European Union on 1 May will not be able to claim some benefits until they have worked in Britain for a year. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said: ‘If they can’t support themselves, they will be put out of the country.’ But the criteria sounded unclear and open to legal challenge, as the European Commission lost no time in pointing out.

Mr Oliver Letwin, the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the Tories wanted to freeze government spending, except that on health, education and pensions, and would fund increases there from economic growth. On the day he made his remarks, a report by the government’s efficiency review, headed by Sir Peter Gershon, said that perhaps £15 billion could be saved by transforming the way public-sector bodies worked; his prescription envisaged centralisation, economies of scale and regulation by penalties. Vodafone was beaten in its attempt to take over AT&T Wireless by the American group Cingular. Mr Mike Tomlinson, the former chief inspector of schools, recommended that GCSEs and A-levels should turn into components of a new four-tier diploma.

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, announced plans to set up a Serious Organised Crime Agency, which was likened to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, to replace the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, and to take over the functions of the Home Office and Customs and Excise in investigating the smuggling of people, tobacco and illegal drugs. Mr Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, asked on television: ‘What would be wrong with making heroin available on the state for people who want to abuse their bodies?’ Nineteen Chinese workers, two of them women, were drowned as they picked cockles in Morecambe Bay. One telephoned his home in China as the water rose about him.

The government announced a committee of inquiry into the accuracy of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war last year; it will be chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell, the former Cabinet Secretary; the other members will be Mrs Ann Taylor, a Labour MP and chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee (ISC); Mr Michael Mates, a Conservative MP and member of the ISC; Sir John Chilcot, the staff counsellor for the security and intelligence services; and Field Marshal Lord Inge, the former Chief of the Defence Staff. There will be no Liberal Democrat, since Mr Charles Kennedy, the party leader, decided not to support the inquiry.

The government narrowly carried the second reading of the Higher Education Bill, which makes provision for universities to charge British students an extra £3,000 a year. The vote was 316–311, with 72 Labour MPs voting against the government and 18 abstaining; Mr David Taylor, the Labour member for North West Leicestershire voted both for and against the Bill. Mr Jack Cunningham, a former Labour Cabinet minister, broadcast to the nation his view that the Labour rebels resembled the Militant Tendency. The next day Lord Hutton published a long report into the death of Dr David Kelly, the government expert on weapons.

Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, ordered a review of 258 convictions of parents for killing their children after the Court of Appeal ruled improper convictions based solely on expert opinions where two or more babies had died. Mr Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, met Samantha Roberts, the widow of a sergeant shot dead during the war against Iraq after having been ordered to hand over his body armour for use by another soldier. Lord Hutton announced that the report of his inquiry into the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly would be published on 28 January. This is the day after the Commons vote on government proposals on university fees, which Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, has been energetically trying to persuade backbench rebels to support.

The government proposed adding a surcharge to fixed-penalty fines for offences such as speeding and being drunk in public; it would be hypothecated to the compensation of victims of crime, but employers would also have to pay compensation for those injured at work by criminals. Asked in Parliament by Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the opposition, about denying having authorised the naming of Dr David Kelly, Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said, ‘I suggest you look at the totality of what I said. But I stand exactly by what I said then.’ Mr Robert Kilroy-Silk was suspended from his programme by the BBC after writing in the Sunday Express about Arab countries: ‘What do they think we feel about them?...