Portrait of the Week – 18 January 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said at a press conference: ‘If there is a breach of the existing UN resolution I have no doubt at all that the right thing to do in those circumstances is disarm Saddam by force.’ He also said: ‘If there is a breach we would expect the United Nations to honour the undertakings that were given.’ The Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer followed the same line in a sudden flurry of interviews. A policeman was stabbed to death and four others wounded after they arrested three men at Crumpsall, north Manchester, in connection with the discovery of traces of ricin poison in north London. In a related operation, police arrested five men and a woman in Bournemouth. Eli Hall, the gunman whom police had surrounded at a house in Hackney, east London, for 15 days, was found dead after a fire broke out; he had an apparently self-inflicted fatal bullet wound to his head, and another from a police weapon. The Fire Brigades Union planned more strikes but engaged in talks with employers. Morrison, the northern supermarket chain, bid to take over Safeway, but Sainsbury’s and Asda then put in rival bids. The Queen had an operation to remove a torn cartilage from her right knee, which she had wrenched while walking on uneven ground during a visit to Newmarket on the Friday before Christmas. A worker fell 350 feet to his death down the chimney of the Windscale power station that had caught on fire in 1957. Pete Townshend, the guitarist from the Who, said, after the Daily Mail published a leak from police sources, that he had paid with a credit card to look at a child pornography site on the Internet, although he was not a paedophile. Mr David Yelland resigned after four years as editor of the Sun and Miss Rebekah Wade, the editor of the News of the World, replaced him.