The Spectator

It is traditional at this time of year to feel a kind of self-disgust. After the wrapping-paper has been burned in the fire, and the last mince pie has been forced down the gullet, you sit back, crapulous and afraid, and try to find some spiritual meaning in the festival of Christ’s nativity. What’s it all about, eh? you say to yourself as you watch your children fool apathetically with toys more costly and complicated than anything you could have expected as a child. Is this it, then? you wonder, and, as the mercury sinks in the mouth of the dying day, you may be inspired by this guilty thing called the spirit of Christmas.

The Democratic Unionist party became the biggest in Northern Ireland after elections for the Assembly there, which has been suspended for more than a year; 'A democrat will not sit down with armed gangsters and murderers to negotiate the future of this country,' said the Revd Ian Paisley, the leader of the DUP. The DUP has 30 seats, the Ulster Unionists 27; Sinn Fein with 24 overtook the Social Democratic and Labour party with 18. More than half the Labour party's backbenchers at Westminster signed an early day motion questioning government plans to allow university top-up fees of '3,000 a year payable after graduation. A vote on the issue was delayed until the New Year, but Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said there would be 'absolutely no retreat'.

In the Queen’s Speech the government announced plans to remove hereditary peers; take failed asylum-seekers’ children into ‘care’; let universities charge fees of £3,000 a year; make sellers of houses produce ‘information packs’; prosecute wife-beaters; control firemen; impose identity cards; introduce ‘gay marriages’; but not to ban hunting. The government let it be known that it was prepared to see negotiations for a European constitution fail.

President George Bush of the United States made a state visit to Britain, accompanied by a huge entourage. ‘This is the right moment for us to stand firm with the United States in defeating terrorism, wherever it is,’ said Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Britain. Over four days, police in London were to work 14,000 shifts, with 5,000 on duty on the day of a protest march that the Metropolitan Police decided to allow to cross Westminster Bridge and go up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square. About 250 American secret servicemen will be allowed to carry guns under a previously unknown agreement. A security alert was raised over a possible attack, unconnected with Mr Bush’s visit, by North African operatives of al-Qa’eda.

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, pressed for the issuing of identity cards, despite lack of enthusiasm in the Cabinet; ‘An ID card is not a luxury or a whim — it is a necessity,’ he said. Mr Michael Howard, the new leader of the Opposition, chose Maurice, Lord Saatchi, and Dr Liam Fox to take on between them the tasks of the party chairman, from which post Mrs Theresa May was removed to become shadow environment and transport secretary. In a shadow Cabinet reduced to 12, Mr Oliver Letwin got the Exchequer, Mr David Davis the Home Office, Mr Tim Yeo health and education, and Mr David Willetts policy co-ordination (writing the manifesto).

Mr Michael Howard remained the only candidate for the leadership of the Conservative party after a vote the week before of 90 to 75 against a motion of confidence in Mr Iain Duncan Smith, who later likened the event to a ‘near-death experience’. Talks between the Communication Workers Union and the Post Office ended unofficial strikes by postmen that had brought mail in London and elsewhere to a standstill. Firemen went on unofficial strike over pay rises. Mr James Murdoch was appointed chief executive of BSkyB; he is the 30-year-old son of Mr Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the company.

Twenty-five Conservative MPs wrote to the chairman of the 1922 Committee calling for a vote of confidence in their leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith. The Labour party expelled Mr George Galloway, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin, on the grounds that remarks he made about Iraq ‘fighting for all the Arabs’ were in some way ‘grossly detrimental’ to the party. Mr Paul Burrell, once the butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, wrote a book, serialised for a week by the Daily Mirror, in which he gave a list of her nine close male friends, and reproduced letters to and from members of the royal family.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was taken to hospital after complaining of pain in his chest; he is thought to have been suffering from supraventricular tachycardia, an over-rapid heartbeat, or, some said, atrial fibrillation, which was adjusted with electrical treatment. After a day’s rest he flew to Northern Ireland and confirmed that elections to the Assembly there, suspended for a year, would take place on 26 November. But a breakthrough in peace negotiations collapsed when the IRA and Sinn Fein refused to let General John de Chastelain, head of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, or the prime ministers of Britain and Ireland, give details of arms the IRA had put out of use; this prevented the Unionists from accepting the gesture.

At a specially reconvened hearing of the Hutton inquiry into circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the expert on Iraqi weapons, Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, said that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, had chaired the meeting that agreed a ‘change of stance’, under which officials would confirm the scientist’s identity as the man who illicitly briefed Mr Andrew Gilligan, a BBC radio correspondent, if his name was put to them by reporters. Lord Hutton said that his report ‘might not be delivered and published before the New Year’.

The Conservatives, holding their annual conference in Blackpool, offered to reinstate the link between pensions and average earnings, but at the same time to reduce taxation if elected. They also floated ideas for the equivalent of vouchers for education and health, the localisation of policing and the need for a referendum on the European Union constitution. Extracts from the diary of Mr Robin Cook published in the Sunday Times represent Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, accepting his remark in February that ‘Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction in a sense of weapons that strike at strategic cities’; but the government’s dossier of September 2002 had referred implicitly only to battlefield weapons.

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a speech at the Labour party conference that pointedly made reference to ‘Labour’ 20 times and never to ‘New Labour’; the party needed ‘not just a programme but a soul’. His performance was seen as a move to succeed Mr Tony Blair as Prime Minister. In his own speech, Mr Blair held out the prospect of a third Labour term. ‘I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear,’ he said. ‘After six years, more battered without, but stronger within. It’s the only leadership I can offer.’ Earlier, asked in a television interview whether he would have done anything differently in going to war against Iraq, he said: ‘Nothing. I would have done exactly the same.