Portrait of the Week – 19 July 2003

Miss Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said the government would build thousands of offshore wind turbines to supply up to a sixth of homes with electricity by 2010; the sites are in the Thames estuary, the Wash, and off the north-west coast between the Solway Firth and Rhyl. A government Bill to limit jury trials was defeated in the Lords by 210 to 136. Mr Tony Blair played host to 13 centre-left heads of state and government at a ‘Third Way’ conference at Bagshot, Surrey. He then had dinner with Mr Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, who had asked Britain to deal not with President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority, but with Mr Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), its Prime Minister; but Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, had told him that ‘Arafat is the democratically elected president of the Palestinian Authority and we will continue to have dealings with him’. Mr Blair then flew round the world preparatory to a family holiday in Barbados. The press played a new game of hunt-the-issue over the war against Iraq; this time it was whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. In his State of the Union address in January President George Bush of the United States had said, ‘The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ On 7 July, Mr Ari Fleischer, the President’s spokesman, said, ‘Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.’ On 11 July, Mr George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said ‘those 16 words’ should not have been included. The International Atomic Energy Authority announced that documents earlier given it by the CIA on the African connection were forged.