Portrait of the week | 10 April 2004

After the resignation of Miss Beverley Hughes as immigration minister, Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, called a ‘summit’ at Downing Street to plan a ‘cross-government assault’ on failures in the system; MI5 was called in. It had been reported that Mr Blair had promised the Romanian Prime Minister he would lift visa requirements on Romanians coming to Britain as a ‘reward’ for a reduction in the number of asylum-seekers. It was also claimed that immigration officials were ordered not to arrest illegal immigrants lest they apply for asylum and swell the official figures. To mark the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, the Queen took a train with 200 schoolchildren to make a three-day state visit to Paris, where she walked about in the Champs-Elysées. The house at Soham, Cambridgeshire, where the child-murderer Ian Huntley lived was demolished. Mr Michael Grade, once the chief executive of Channel 4, was appointed chairman of the BBC. A consortium of Irish investors agreed to buy the Savoy group, which also owns Claridge’s and Simpson’s, for £800 million. Marks & Spencer is to cut 1,000 jobs at its head office. Nearly half the electorate in England will have to use postal votes if they want to take part in the European elections on 10 June, following a government victory in the Lords that provides for a pilot scheme in the four regions known in Mr John Prescott’s office as the North-East, the East Midlands, the North-West, and Yorkshire and the Humber. Thames Trains was fined £2 million for its part in the 1999 Paddington rail crash in which 31 people died. An inquest found that Keith Turnbull, a biochemist, had died from carbon monoxide fumes while stirring a batch of marmalade on his gas stove. Fred Winter, the jockey, died, aged 77. William Hill, the bookmakers, entered the Financial Times-Stock Exchange share index.