The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 November 2012

issue 17 November 2012

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Abu Qatada, detained in Britain for seven years although not charged here, but wanted on terrorist charges in Jordan, could not be deported, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission ruled, because evidence might be used against him that had been obtained from the torture of others; so he was freed on bail. The annual rate of inflation by the Consumer Prices Index rose to 2.7 per cent in October, from 2.2 per cent in September, and to 3.2 per cent, from 2.6 per cent, by the Retail Prices Index. Unemployment fell by 49,000 to 2.51 million in the three months to September. The Rt Revd Justin Welby, Bishop of Durham, is to be enthroned as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury on 21 March 2013. Frankie Dettori, the jockey, was reported to have tested positive for a banned substance at Longchamp. Nadine Dorries, the backbench MP, had 3,000 cockroaches and 5,000 crickets poured on her in an underground crate, as part of a television game show filmed in Australia.

George Entwistle resigned as director-general of the BBC. This followed the admission, by a man who had appeared on Newsnight a week earlier, that the person who had abused him as a child in North Wales was not Lord McAlpine. The Newsnight report had been made by Angus Stickler of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The editor of the bureau, Iain Overton (who later resigned), had tweeted before the broadcast: ‘If all goes well we’ve got a Newsnight out tonight about a very senior political figure who is a paedophile.’ This was retweeted 1,574 times. On 8 November, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, was handed live on This Morning, an ITV programme, a list of names said by the presenter Phillip Schofield to have been named online as paedophiles.

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