Portrait of the week | 13 March 2004

The House of Lords voted by 216 to 183 to refer to a special select committee, and thus delay, the Constitutional Reform Bill, which seeks to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor and to set up a Supreme Court to replace the Law Lords; a week earlier Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, had called the Bill ‘exchanging a first-class Final Court of Appeal for a second-class Supreme Court’, but he changed his tune. The government said it would not compensate policyholders of Equitable Life, the troubled mutual society, after a report by Lord Penrose found it was the ‘author of its own misfortunes … policyholders were effectively powerless, and the board was a self-perpetuating oligarchy amenable to policyholder pressure only at its discretion’. The Jockey Club gave the champion jockey Kieren Fallon a maximum 21-day suspension for failing properly to push his horse, Ballinger Ridge, to the finish when it came second at Lingfield last week; Mr Fallon had predicted that another horse would win. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, had talks at Downing Street with Mr Ahmed Qureia (Abu Alaa), the Palestinian Prime Minister. Two British suicide bombers, Asif Hanif, 21, from London and Omar Khan Sharif, 27, from Derby were shown in a video released by Hamas calling on God to punish Mr Blair and President George Bush of America; the men bombed a Tel Aviv pub, killing three and wounding 55 last April, and both died. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, flew to Washington for talks about terrorism; he announced the return of five British detainees from the American camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and plans for a joint exercise in America and Britain next year simulating a response to an attack. The number of people in prison in England and Wales passed 75,000, more than ever before and 2,600 more than at the beginning of the year.