Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, had sworn at senior aides and ‘roughly shoved aside’ an adviser and hit a car seat, according to an extract in the Observer from a forthcoming book by Mr Andrew Rawnsley.
Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, had sworn at senior aides and ‘roughly shoved aside’ an adviser and hit a car seat, according to an extract in the Observer from a forthcoming book by Mr Andrew Rawnsley. ‘I have never, never hit anybody in my life,’ Mr Brown said. ‘I throw the newspapers on the floor or something like that.’ The question then moved on to whether bullying went on in 10 Downing Street: ‘three or four’ telephone calls had been made to the National Bullying Helpline in recent years, according to its chief executive. Lord Mandelson, the First Secretary of State, said that Mr Brown ‘doesn’t bully people’. Mr Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that when he warned in August 2008 that economic conditions were ‘arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years’, the ‘forces of hell were unleashed’ by Downing Street and the Tories. Mr Brown said it was not by his command. Earlier Mr Brown had unveiled a new party slogan: ‘A future fair for all’. He had spoken under the same slogan at a party conference in 2003. A sharp rise in government spending and a drop in tax receipts took government borrowing to £4.3 billion in January. Mortgage lending in January fell to its lowest since March 2001. BAA, the owners of Heathrow, reported a loss of £822 million, £277 million from its forced sale of Gatwick. British Airways staff voted again to strike, though not over Easter. A Eurostar train was stranded near Ashford, Kent, leaving passengers in the dark for hours.
Mr Brown promised an inquiry into the use of British passports by the gang that murdered Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas official, in a Dubai hotel. Mr David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had invited the Israeli ambassador’s co-operation in investigating the imposture, but he said he was ‘unable to shed any further light on the events’. Mr Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, said that the scheme that had seen the early release of 80,000 criminals, including 15,000 violent offenders and two terrorists, would come to an end by April. A car bomb weighing perhaps 250lbs exploded at 10.27 p.m. outside the courthouse in Newry, Co. Down, injuring no one; it was the work of a splinter republican group. Mr Peter Blake, on trial on charges of being a member of an armed gang that stole more than £1.75 million at Heathrow, walked down a spiral staircase at the Royal Courts of Justice and has not been seen since. Four men in their late teens were sought after a Sikh shopkeeper was killed with nine blows, probably from a hammer, in Huddersfield. A strategy launched by Scotland’s obesity minister, Miss Shona Robison, counselled shops not to display sweeties by the till.
The Dutch said they would withdraw their 2,000 troops from Afghanistan in August, because a political coalition had collapsed at home. United States war planes killed at least 27 civilians, including women and children, and wounded dozens when three minibuses were attacked in the belief they were Taleban vehicles. In New York, an Afghan immigrant bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, pleaded guilty to plotting to set off homemade bombs on the subway system; he said he had been trained by al-Qa’eda. Alexander Haig, the former US secretary of state, died, aged 85. India and Pakistan held their first face-to-face talks since the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008. President Barack Obama met the Dalai Lama in private at the White House; China protested at the meeting. During private talks in Mexico, President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia was reported to have told President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela: ‘You’re brave speaking at a distance, but a coward when it comes to talking face to face.’ Mr Chavez retorted: ‘Vete al carajo’ (Go to hell).
Goldman Sachs explained how it had helped Greece to trim its national debt figures in 2001, just before it joined the eurozone. Mr José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, appointed the man who had been his chief of staff for five years to be the EU ambassador to Washington; Lady Ashton, the EU’s new foreign affairs chief, let it be known that she was ‘fully involved’. A coup in Niger was signalled by the traditional broadcasting of martial music. Former heads of the navy and air force were arrested in Turkey in an investigation of a coup plot said to date to 2003. More than 40 died in Madeira when floods swept down the hills and through the capital, Funchal. Lufthansa cancelled hundreds of flights before pilots cancelled a strike. France faced strikes by air-traffic controllers. Posters went up in SNCF trains in Midi-Pyrenees: ‘A number of bag thefts have been noted. All sightings of Romanians must be reported.’ CSH
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