Portrait of the Week – 5 October 2002

Mrs Edwina Currie, the former Conservative minister, revealed that she had had a four-year affair from 1984 with Mr John Major, the former Conservative prime minister. The Chestnut Grove School in Balham, south-west London, began to offer the morning-after pill to 11-year-olds. After thousands of A-level students’ results were found to have been manipulated, Sir William Stubbs was forced by Miss Estelle Morris, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, to resign as chairman of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority; he suggested she should consider her own position. Mr Rod Liddle resigned as editor of Today on BBC Radio after he had been told he could not continue to write politically controversial columns for the Guardian, one of which had criticised the Liberty and Livelihood march. At the Labour party conference, Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech that Labour were ‘at our best when at our boldest’; that in foreign affairs ‘partnership is the antidote to unilateralism’; and that at home the National Health Service should be ‘personalised – built around the individual patient’ and that schools ‘need to move to the post-comprehensive era’. Mr Gordon Brown was applauded for a speech in which he gave a commitment to ‘a great British society’; at the same time it became clear that the economic growth forecasts that he gave in the Budget in March could not be met. The stock market continued to slide. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, agreed with Mr Nicholas Sarkozy, his French counterpart, that if the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill becomes law, the Red Cross camp for refugees at Sangatte will stop taking new arrivals from 15 November and close next April. The London Underground was again hit by a 24-hour strike spread over two days; Mr Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, gave the go-ahead for Underground fares to rise in January, with a £1.90