Portrait of the Week - 5 February 2005

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, was reported to have warned ministers that plans to allow the Home Secretary to put suspected terrorists under house arrest were likely to be challenged and ruled illegal by the courts. A man known as ‘C’, suspected of terrorist activity, was suddenly released; another man, whom imprisonment had made increasingly mad, was released on bail. Mr Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, issued advice on how to deal with burglars; they could be killed, he said, as long as it was done ‘honestly and instinctively’. The Association of British Insurers said that a third of the housing announced by Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, was located on flood plains where the risk was ‘unacceptably high’. Mr Chris Smith, the former Labour culture secretary, announced that he had been HIV-positive for the past 17 years. Labour and the Tories made rival claims that they would improve discipline in schools. A girl, aged 12 at the time, was convicted of driving off in her father’s car while having nearly double the permitted level of alcohol in her blood; magistrates banned her from driving for two years, though the law does not allow it for two more after that. Fourteen-year-old smokers in Lanarkshire will be counselled by schoolfriends and offered nicotine patches in a £180,000 lottery-funded scheme. Rethink, a mental health charity, asked the Commons health select committee to investigate links between cannabis and mental illness. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency withdrew the painkiller Co-proxamol, which has been linked to between 300 and 400 fatal overdoses a year. Barclays began to move 5,000 staff from Lombard Street to Canary Wharf.