Portrait of the Week – 4 June 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, on holiday in Italy, called for ‘time for reflection’ after the French referendum’s rejection of the proposed European constitution. ‘What emerges so strongly from the French referendum campaign,’ he said, ‘is this deep, profound, underlying anxiety that people in Europe have about how the economy in Europe faces up to the challenges of the modern world.’ Mr Bob Geldof announced five simultaneous free concerts on 2 July in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Philadelphia, in support of the Make Poverty History campaign (for fair trade and debt forgiveness) and as an encouragement to a scheme to get a million people to demonstrate in Edinburgh at the time of the G8 summit in Gleneagles from 6 July. Some of the fashionable white wristbands bearing the words ‘Make Poverty History’ were reported to have been made in a Chinese factory paying less than the minimum wage of 16p an hour. The Home Office revised its estimate for introducing an identity card scheme to £5.8 billion, a £300 million increase since its last estimate in November; it would make the cost £93 a head. Tory MPs reacted angrily to an address to them, on changes in their constitution and in leadership election rules, delivered by Mr Raymond Monbiot, the deputy chairman of the Conservative party, accompanying Mr Michael Howard, the party leader; there were mutterings about getting Mr Howard out during the summer, to be replaced somehow by Mr David Davis. Of 615 Tory party members and 1,005 people who voted Tory last month, polled by YouGov for the Daily Telegraph, 54 per cent gave Mr Davis as their first or second choice; 54 per cent said Mr Kenneth Clarke would be ‘completely unacceptable’. Fay Godwin, the landscape photographer, died, aged 74. In April, 84 million text messages a day were sent, 20 per cent up on a year before.