Mr Gordon Brown is prepared to campaign actively for Mr Tony Blair, whom he replaced as Prime Minister, to be the first permanent president of the European Council of the European Union, Downing Street said. Mr David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had said earlier that Mr Blair would be a good candidate because ‘we need someone who, when he or she lands in Beijing or Washington or Moscow, the traffic does need to stop’. Sir Christopher Kelly, the Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, told party leaders the outline of his report on MPs’ expenses, to be published next week, and shortly afterwards there was a leak of his recommendations that MPs should no longer be able to claim for mortgage payments on second homes or to employ spouses as secretaries. The Communication Workers Union pondered more strikes after talks with the Royal Mail at the Trades Union Congress headquarters near the British Museum. The British economy unexpectedly shrank by 0.4 per cent between July and September, its sixth successive quarter of contraction. Mr Bill Rammell, the Minister for the Armed Forces, announced that plans to slash the budget of the Territorial Army by £20 million had been dropped, and it would be slashed by only £17.5 million. Then Mr Brown let it be known that the rest would be reinstated. The all-party Public Accounts Committee lambasted a quango called the Rural Payments Agency over the cost of administering the EU single payments scheme for farmers in England; a National Audit Office interim report had found that extra staff costs since 2005 amounted to £304 million and a computer system had cost £350 million. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that an advertisement on the wireless by the Department for Children, Schools and Families was misleading in its suggestion that the new ‘Advanced Diploma, equivalent to 3.5 A-levels, can get you into any university’. Government advertisements on the television showed how to spread swine flu by sneezing over people. Doctors’ surgeries were also thronged by sufferers from norovirus, the usual winter vomiting infection. The Health Protection Agency decided to take no action against Mr Hector Blumenthal, the restaurateur, after 529 people suffered from the effects of norovirus when they had dined at the Fat Duck at Bray, Berkshire, in February. Mr A.A. Gill, a restaurant critic, wrote about how he shot an inedible baboon in Tanzania; Mr Douglas Batchelor, the chief executive of the League Against Cruel Sports, said it would have been morally reprehensible ‘even if the world was overrun with such animals’.
The highest court in the Czech Republic delayed until next week a decision on whether the Lisbon Treaty is consistent with the country’s constitution. The mandate of the current European Commission runs out at the end of October, but it said it would stay on until after the treaty was resolved. An Italian appeal court upheld the conviction of David Mills, Mrs Tessa Jowell’s estranged husband, who was sentenced to four years’ jail for accepting a bribe to protect Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy in court; Mills is unlikely to go to prison as his lawyers are to appeal to a higher court, and the charges expire under Italian law in April. Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, who is conducting his own defence, refused to attend the first day of his trial for genocide and war crimes before a United Nations tribunal at The Hague.
The head of the election commission appointed by President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan said that for the second round of elections in November he hoped to open all 23,960 polling stations from the first round; the United Nations wants only 16,000 stations opened in order to avoid the stuffing of ballot boxes in stations never used. Iran dithered over proposals for processing its enriched uranium after talks with Russia, France and the United States. Two suicide car bombs in Baghdad killed at least 155 and wounded more than 500. A bomb in a market in Peshawar killed more than 80 while Mrs Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, was visiting Pakistan. President Barack Obama of the United States declared swine flu a national emergency. King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, aged 80, the world’s longest-reigning monarch, was seen in public, sitting in a wheelchair, after a month in hospital. An aeroplane carrying 144 passengers from San Diego accidentally flew 150 miles past its destination of Minneapolis before the pilots turned back. Mr Mohamed Mansour resigned as Egypt’s transport minister after 19 people died when two trains crashed after one ran into a water buffalo. McDonald’s announced the closure of its three outlets in Iceland. An ice-skating bear in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, killed a visiting circus director. CSH
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