Portrait of the Week – 31 July 2004

The government is to post a leaflet called ‘Preparing for Emergency’ to all 25 million households in Britain; it recommends keeping indoors with bottled water, tinned food, a battery radio, spare batteries and a first-aid kit in case of terrorist attack. Mr Peter Mandelson, the Labour MP who was twice obliged to leave the Cabinet, became Britain’s sole nomination as a European commissioner, to work under Mr Jose Manuel Barroso, the president-elect of the Commission. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, turned his attention to animal rights extremists. Labour party policy-makers agreed to stop employers counting bank holidays as part of workers’ statutory 20-days-a-year holiday, and proposed increasing the length of time jobs will be protected during a strike from eight weeks to 12. General Sir Mike Jackson, the chief of the general staff, said that if the government requested it, 5,000 troops could be sent to Sudan, where hundreds of thousands had fled their homes. Mr John Morrison, an intelligence official who said he ‘could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall’ when Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said that the threat from Iraq was ‘current and serious’, has been told that his contract as chief investigator to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee will not be renewed. Mr Blair flew off with his family for a holiday in Sir Cliff Richard’s villa in Barbados; Sir Cliff will not be there. New cases of sexually transmitted infection in England, Wales and Northern Ireland increased from 678,709 in 2002 to 708,083 in 2003; syphilis went up from 1,232 cases in 2002 to 1,575 in 2003. Police seized 370lbs of cocaine at Aylesbury, Bucks. The Google search engine was brought down for several hours by a virus called MyDoom. Abbey, the bank recovering from bad trading results, recommended acceptance of an £8.5