Portrait of the Week – 18 June 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew to Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin, then to Berlin, Luxembourg and Paris, in preparation for the European Union meeting later this week. A bone of contention was Britain’s £3 billion rebate of its contributions to the EU budget, which President Jacques Chirac of France said Britain should give up as a ‘gesture of solidarity’. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany told Mr Blair that there was ‘no place for national egotism’. In talks with Mr Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, which currently holds the EU presidency, Mr Blair declined a formal proposal to freeze the rebate between 2007 and 2013. In Paris Mr Blair said that his meeting with President Chirac had been ‘immensely amicable, but obviously there’s a sharp disagreement’. Mr Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, an old friend of Mr Blair’s, said in a lecture to the Fabian Society, ‘It is surely wrong to ask the poorer new accession states to pay for any part of the rebate.’ At a meeting of EU foreign ministers, Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said, ‘If we were to abandon our rebates — which we are not going to do — none of Europe’s fundamental problems would be solved.’ Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, outlined a scheme for the G8 group of countries to forgive £30 billion of debt by 18 nations, 14 of them African. Miss Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Education, said that by 2010 schools would open for breakfast at 8 a.m. and let children stay until 6 p.m. The government proposed a change in the law to allow religious language to be used in civil weddings and the civil partnership rituals to be introduced in December for homosexuals. More than a third of the armed forces would have difficulty deploying within the time limit set by defence chiefs, according to a report by the National Audit Office.