Portrait of the Week – 12 June 2004

Britain went to the polls to elect members for the European Parliament, an exercise which the Liberal Democrats had portrayed as a ‘referendum on Iraq’. Thousands of postal ballot papers went undelivered in Bolton, and two men were arrested in Oldham after claims of fraud. London re-elected a mayor. ‘I am back playing the guitar now and I love it,’ Mr Blair said in an interview with Time Out. Heads of state from Britain, the United States, Russia, France and Germany marked the 60th anniversary of D-Day with ceremonies in Normandy. The first transit of Venus visible from Britain for 122 years duly occurred. Government figures showed that military equipment worth £992 million was sold abroad by Britain in 2003, compared with £942 million the year before; the biggest buyer was Saudi Arabia, with £189 million, then the United States with £116 million. Mr Simon Cumbers, a freelance cameraman working for the BBC, was shot dead and Mr Frank Gardner, the BBC security correspondent, seriously injured as they filmed, accompanied by members of the Saudi interior ministry, outside the house of a suspected terrorist in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Irish National Liberation Army shot dead Kevin McAlorum after he dropped off his child at Oakwood primary school in south Belfast because he was said to have killed Gino Gallagher, its ‘chief of staff’, in 1996. Police refused to allow ambulancemen into a house in Oxfordshire where two women had been shot in case a gunman was still around. Police impounded a 264lb sturgeon that had been sold by a fisherman to a wholesaler. Frances Shand Kydd, the mother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, died, aged 68. A World Health Organisation report found that 17 per cent of British families had only one parent, a figure exceeded in Europe by Latvia with 18 per cent and Greenland with 19 per cent; more than 90 per cent of children in Malta and Greece live with both parents.