Portrait of the week | 11 October 2003

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. Permission was granted for Granada and Carlton television broadcasters to merge, making independent television a virtual monolith. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, visited the Pope in Rome and kissed his ring; the Pope told him that reunion was threatened by differences in faith and morals (the latter thought to be a reference to Anglicans’ choosing homosexualist bishops), and then kissed the ring Dr Williams was wearing, given by Pope Paul VI to Archbishop Ramsey. Six men and a 75-year-old woman appeared in court in the Western Isles charged with sexually assaulting three girls under the age of 16. Mr Hilary Benn was made Secretary of State for International Development in succession to Lady Amos, who was made Leader of the House of Lords. Professor Sir Peter Mansfield shared the Nobel prize for medicine with Professor Paul Lauterbur, an American, for their work on magnetic resonance imaging body-scanners. Professor Anthony Leggett shared the prize for physics for work on superconductivity. The Commons select committee on science and technology accused the government of failing to take seriously the scourge of light pollution at night.