Portrait of the week | 14 February 2004

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, announced plans to set up a Serious Organised Crime Agency, which was likened to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, to replace the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, and to take over the functions of the Home Office and Customs and Excise in investigating the smuggling of people, tobacco and illegal drugs. Mr Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, asked on television: ‘What would be wrong with making heroin available on the state for people who want to abuse their bodies?’ Nineteen Chinese workers, two of them women, were drowned as they picked cockles in Morecambe Bay. One telephoned his home in China as the water rose about him. Police sought gangmasters who make use of illegal immigrants. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told Parliament that at the time of the Commons debate on war against Iraq on 18 March 2003, he was still unaware that it was battlefield weapons to which a government dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction referred when it said they could be used within 45 minutes. Mr Blair later met the Libyan foreign minister. Schools were told they would be given only two days’ instead of two months’ notice of an inspection; ‘We’re exchanging a searchlight for a laser,’ said Mr David Bell, the head of Ofsted. Mr Anver Daud Sheikh was freed from jail after an appeal court quashed his 2002 conviction on charges of sexual assault against boys in a care home because the evidence had been unsafe. Norman Thelwell, the cartoonist who specialised in little girls on fat ponies, died, aged 80. Frances Partridge, the writer, died, aged 103. The Bank of England raised the base rate from 3.75 to 4 per cent; in a report it forecast a growth in gross domestic product of nearly 3.5