A failed attempt by Mr Geoff Hoon and Miss Patricia Hewitt to provoke a ballot on the Labour leadership was not mentioned at the next meeting of the Cabinet meeting, Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister said. Instead he had urged ministers to apply a ‘laser focus’ on Britain’s problems, such as the weather. A week earlier, Mr Brown had said that Labour had a ‘laser focus on school standards’. He told the News of the World that he had been inspired, like Nelson Mandela, by W.E. Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’ (though he did not mention that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, had been inspired by it too). Mr Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, made Islam4UK a proscribed group; it is also proscribed under the name Al Muhajiroun, Call to Submission, Islamic Path and London School of Sharia, as it had already been as Al Ghurabaa and The Saved Sect. Mr Peter Robinson stood aside as the First Minister of Northern Ireland for up to six weeks (under the Northern Ireland Act 1998). This followed the expulsion of his wife, Iris, from the Democratic Unionist Party after it was found she had secured £50,000 in 2008 from two developers to help a 19-year-old man, with whom she was having an affair. Jessica Davies, the niece of Mr Quentin Davies, a junior defence minister, was jailed for 15 years for murdering a man in Paris. Miss Harriet Harman, the Leader of the House of Commons, was fined £350 for driving without due care and attention while on her mobile phone. Virgin Money bought a small private bank, Church House Trust. Mr Jonathan Ross, a television presenter, said he would end his contract with the BBC in July. Mr Chris Evans took over the early-morning Radio 2 programme on the retirement of Sir Terry Wogan.
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