Portrait of the Week – 26 November 2005

Downing Street let it be known that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was sympathetic to plans to build new nuclear power stations; but then government ministers announced he had not made up his mind after all. The wholesale price of gas reached five times its cost at

the beginning of November. Because of increased rail freight traffic (from 15.1 billion tonne-kilometres in 1996 to 20.7 billion in 2004), chiefly in imported coal, new goods-lines might be built in Britain, according to Mr Iain Coucher, the deputy chief executive of Network Rail. Two probationer policewomen were shot, one fatally, when they were called to a travel agency in Bradford that was being raided. Having encouraged people to get injections against influenza, the government announced that the vaccine had run out; luckily, cases of flu were running at only about 12 (against epidemic levels of 200) per 100,000. David Austin, the cartoonist for The Spectator and other papers, died, aged 70. Lord Black of Crossharbour, the former owner of the Telegraph group, delayed by a week his appearance in court in Chicago to face fraud charges. Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, wrote to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former ambassador to the United States, who had published some indiscreet memoirs, and suggested he could no longer be regarded as an ‘honest broker’ as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission; Mr Prescott said Sir Christopher had been seen in Washington

as a ‘red-socked fop’. A few public houses began to take advantage of 24-hour licensing under a new law. The number of applicants for work permits from Eastern European countries in the EU totalled 60,000 just for the third quarter of 2005. Dr John Sentamu, the new Archbishop of York, born in Uganda, called for St George’s Day to be celebrated properly; ‘The English are somehow embarrassed about some of the good things they have done,’ he said.