Portrait of the Week – 24 July 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, passed the tenth anniversary of his election as leader of the Labour party. During a Commons debate on the Butler report, he defended his decision to go to war against Iraq. He then turned his mind to a reshuffle. Mr Blair had said earlier that it was time to abandon ‘the 1960s liberal social consensus on law and order’. Mr David Blunkett came up with a bundle of law-and-order wheezes, in a ‘five-year plan’, including £80 fixed penalties for shoplifting, the experimental tracking of up to 5,000 convicts and suspects by satellite, and an invitation to every town to delate 50 culprits for antisocial behaviour. A secret police dossier showing the 62 best sites to launch anti-aircraft missiles at Heathrow was found abandoned in the road close to the airport’s perimeter fence. A disturbance caused much damage to a detention centre for asylum-seekers at Harmondsworth, near Heathrow; the unrest began after a man there was found hanged. At Birmingham National Exhibition Centre, police and firemen in a planned exercise simulating a terrorist poison attack on 400 people spent two-and-a-half hours sealing off the area before attending to any of the pretend victims. Huge defence cuts were announced, affecting all three services. An increase in duty on petrol of 1.42p a litre was postponed from September until it is reviewed by Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his pre-Budget report in November. The government pondered plans to increase council tax on a house newly valued at £440,000 to more than £4,000 a year. British aid charities united in an appeal for a million refugees from Arab and government violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. Paul Foot, the Marxist journalist, died, aged 66. Sir Julian Hodge, the financier, died, aged 99. Todd Hamilton, an American, unexpectedly won the Open golf championship at Troon.

The Palestinian intelligence service’s headquarters were set on fire and thousands protested in the streets of Gaza against the nomination of Mr Moussa Arafat, widely regarded as corrupt, as head of the Gaza security apparatus by his cousin President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority; after two days President Arafat changed his mind.