Portrait of the Week – 28 May 2005

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, unveiled a £1 billion scheme to help first-time buyers purchase shares of new homes. He also announced plans to ‘cut red tape’ by merging 29 regulatory bodies into seven. It was revealed that four out of ten prisoners released early end up back in jail after reoffending. The Conservative party met to discuss how to change the rules for its increasingly frequent leadership elections; meanwhile, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, announced that he would not be a candidate this time around. There was a one-day strike at the BBC over proposals to cut 4,000 administrative jobs; audience figures for BBC1’s Ten O’Clock News soared after its highly paid newsreader, Huw Edwards, joined the walkout. A 17-year-old girl who starred in a BBC documentary recreating the early settlement of Australia was found dead, having apparently taken her own life. A Royal Marine who scratched his leg on a training run died from a ‘superbug’ called Panton-Valentine Leukocidin (PVL), which was thought to have been eradicated in the 1950s. A GP whose over-enthusiastic appetite for night calls boosted his salary by £514,593 over a period of eight years was struck off. A West Mercia police officer was acquitted of driving at 159 mph on a motorway in an unmarked car; he said he was familiarising himself with the vehicle. High Street banks agreed to cut the time it takes to transfer money from one account to another from three days to one. Scientists at a laboratory in Newcastle announced that they had cloned a human embryo, the first in Britain. The Prime Minister was treated in hospital for a slipped disc. Arsenal won the FA Cup, the first time any team had won the competition in a penalty shoot-out. A gorilla gave birth in Bristol Zoo after a cataract operation to restore her sight and make her more attractive to males.