Portrait of the week | 6 March 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the bombings in Iraq that there was ‘a struggle between good and evil’ going on there. Before the bombings, Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said it was withdrawing support from the Butler inquiry into intelligence on purported weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because the inquiry was to be conducted in an ‘unacceptably restrictive fashion’; Mr Michael Mates, the Conservative MP on the Butler committee, said it was his duty to continue. Miss Clare Short was asked on Today on Radio 4 about spying on the United Nations and said: ‘These things are done. … In fact, I have had conversations with Kofi [Annan] in the run-up to war thinking “Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I have been saying.”’ This followed the dropping of an Official Secrets Act prosecution against Katharine Gun, an employee at GCHQ who had leaked an email request from America before the Iraq war for Britain to spy on six countries that would decide a vote in the United Nations Security Council. Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary, wrote to Miss Short, saying, ‘I have to admit to being extremely disappointed by your behaviour.’ Mr David Blunkett announced that the Crown Prosecution Service will be renamed the Public Prosecution Service, which, he said, ‘will become much closer to being understandable by the public’. Cherie Booth said in a speech that Tony Blair had spent a night on a park bench when he came down to London between school and university; the strange story was confirmed by a Downing Street spokesman. The vice-chancellor of the Delaware chancery court ruled that Lord Black had not had the power to conclude a deal to sell Hollinger Incorporated’s control of the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and its others papers directly to Sir Frederick and Sir David Barclay.