Portrait of the Week - 26 April 2003

The Daily Telegraph said that documents found in the ruined Iraqi foreign ministry in Baghdad by a Daily Telegraph reporter were said to discuss payments to Mr George Galloway, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin. Mr Galloway said: ‘I have never solicited, nor would I have accepted had I been offered, any financial assistance of any kind from the Iraqi regime.’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told the Sun how he had explained to his children that a Commons vote on the Iraq war might bring him down: ‘I did sit down with them at one point and I explained that this was going to be extremely difficult and it was possible the thing could go against me,’ he said. Mr Blair also retailed a telephone conversation with Mr Jose Maria Aznar, the Prime Minister of Spain, about the war: ‘He rang me to say, “I have the support of only 4 per cent of my people.” I replied, “Crikey – that’s even less than the number who think Elvis Presley is still alive.”‘ Mr Aznar visited Mr Blair for talks about Iraq and the Middle East. A couple who live at Walcot Hall near RAF Wittering were awarded £950,000 compensation from the Ministry of Defence for the noise of Harrier jets training overhead. Thousands of commuters were stranded in chaos at Ealing Broadway when engineering works that had closed Paddington station over the Easter weekend remained uncompleted the next day. On the London Underground only 49 of the Central Line’s 77 trains were back in operation after the derailment on 25 January that had led to their withdrawal. Fires broke out in Scotland and Wales after weeks of dry weather. Sir Paul Getty, the American-born oil heir who became a philanthropist and Anglophile, died, aged 70. A man who had made a suicide pact to jump off Beachy Head with an acquaintance, but decided not to, hanged himself after being charged under the 1961 Suicide Act with aiding and abetting the suicide of the man who did jump.