Portrait of the Week - 8 October 2005

Mr David Davis, Mr Kenneth Clarke, Mr David Cameron, Dr Liam Fox and Sir Malcolm Rifkind displayed what attractions they could muster as candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party at its annual conference in Blackpool. Boots the chemist, with 1,400 outlets in Britain, announced a merger with Allied UniChem, with 1,250 outlets in Britain and Europe, to produce a company with 100,000 employees and a value of £7 billion. A takeover of Telewest by its rival British cable operator NTL was expected to produce a communications company with revenues of £3.4 billion. BP warned that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita might knock more than £400 million off its third-quarter profits. The Office for National Statistics found that, at 570,000, the number of civil servants remained the same as the year before, despite a promise in 2004 by Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to cut them by 84,000; public sector jobs rose by 95,000 in the year to June to stand at 5.85 million — nearly one in four employees. New figures from the Continuous Mortality Investigations Bureau gave a life expectancy of 89 years ten months to British men born in 1950; this worried pension providers. Ronnie Barker, the television comedian, died, aged 76. Police freed 19 prostitutes, mostly of East European origin, during a raid on Cuddles, a massage parlour in Birmingham. Three photographs from the Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual (1987) were found to bear a striking resemblance to the figures in ‘The Singing Butler’ (1992), a painting by Jack Vettriano sold last year for £750,000. Gary Ozzy Osbourne, who had changed his name from Gary Bacon out of admiration for the singer, was jailed for life for murdering a friend.