Portrait of the Week – 2 August 2003

Mr Alastair Campbell was expected to resign as the director of communications and strategy at the Prime Minister’s office before the Labour party conference at the end of September. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, let it be known through friends including Lord Falconer of Thoroton that he intends to complete a third term. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service proposed that women up to nine weeks pregnant should be allowed to induce abortions with drugs at home; the foetus would be thrown down the lavatory. As part of investigations into the murder of a young boy whose torso was found floating in the Thames, 200 police arrested 21 people in south and east London suspected of immigration offences and people-trafficking. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot dead a teenage burglar, was released from prison after serving two-thirds of a five-year sentence for manslaughter; Brendon Fearon, the other burglar, who was wounded in the incident, was released three days earlier after serving a third of an 18-month sentence for subsequently supplying drugs. A money-laundering case at Southwark Crown Court collapsed after 418 days of legal arguments without a jury even being sworn in; Judge George Bathurst Norman said that a ten-year investigation into drug-trafficking amounted to ‘state-created crime’ in which police had tried ‘to lure as many people as possible to their honeypot’. A pot of Roman face-cream, with fingermarks still visible, was found at an archaeological dig in Southwark. Bob Hope, the comedian, died, aged 100. Trade unions spent days in talks with British Airways after unofficial strikes last month cost it £30 million. In Carmarthen 600 people queued for hours outside the Brynteg Dental Practice to secure 300 places with a new National Health Service dentist. Nine out of ten ladybirds in London were found to suffer from a sexually transmitted fungal disease caught because of increased activity spurred by a plentiful diet of greenfly, which in turn thrive in polluted air.

The American authorities in Iraq released photographs of the wounded faces of the dead Uday and Qusay Hussein, which were reproduced in the British press and on television.