Portrait of the Week – 10 December 2005

Mr David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative party in a ballot of members, beating Mr David Davis by 134,446 votes to 64,398. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his pre-Budget report astonished investors planning self-invested personal pensions by announcing that they ‘will be prohibited from obtaining tax advantages when investing in residential property and certain other assets such as fine wines’. He also enraged North Sea oil producers by increasing corporation tax on their profits, from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. Mr Brown hoped to get an extra £2.3 billion from the oil taxes and another £700 million from other corporate taxes, in order to shore up public finances. Last March he had predicted economic growth of 3.5 per cent this year; now he has reduced that to 1.75 per cent. He hatched a scheme to spend hundreds of millions lying dormant in unused bank accounts to fund volunteer projects during young people’s gap years. Two companies behind a plan to build 30 wind turbines on a sandbank off Porthcawl in Wales shelved the idea because of the cost. The government floated the idea of raising the legal age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18. Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the retired head of the High Court Family Division, said that the government has ‘done nothing practical to support married couples…. There is now no financial incentive to marry or remain married, and a financial incentive to cohabit.’ Civil partnership ceremonies between unrelated people of the same sex are to be allowed from 21 December in England and Wales (from 19 December in Northern Ireland, and 20 December in Scotland); Sir Elton John and his friend Mr David Furnish are to celebrate a civil partnership ceremony at Windsor Guildhall, where the Prince of Wales married the Duchess of Cornwall.