Portrait of the Week – 4 March 2006

Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, said that she had signed without asking any questions a form that her husband, Mr David Mills, used to gain a mortgage for a house, which he repaid a month later with an alleged bribe of £340,000 from Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. Mr Mills denies receiving such a payment; an Italian prosecutor is investigating the allegation. Mr Ken Livingstone was suspended for four weeks as Mayor of London by the Adjudication Panel for England when it found that he had brought his office into disrepute by saying to a reporter who had told him he was Jewish and worked for the London Evening Standard, ‘Actually you are just like a concentration camp guard. You are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?’ But his suspension was then itself suspended. Mr Michael Baigent and Mr Richard Leigh sued their own publisher, Random House, in the High Court; they claimed that the novel The Da Vinci Code, published by Random House and written by Mr Dan Brown, an American, copied 15 ‘central theme points’ from their book of supposed history, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982). A gang stole £53,116,760 from a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, after abducting at gunpoint a depot manager and his family; guns, balaclavas and £1.3 million in cash were later found in a white Transit van in the car park of the Ashford International Hotel and a series of arrests made. Fourteen members of a gang that smuggled £50 million worth of cocaine into Britain and processed it into crack at a house in East Ham in London were given sentences totalling 178 years; its leader got 27 years, and other gang members were convicted abroad, 25 in France, 13 in Guyana and 10 in the United States.