Portrait of the Week - 9 April 2005

The wedding of the Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles was suddenly postponed for a day because it clashed with the funeral in Rome of Pope John Paul II on 8 April. The Prince of Wales was to represent the Queen at the funeral, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was to perform a service of dedication for the couple, also wanted to go to the funeral, as indeed did Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. Mr Blair said that he was postponing an audience with the Queen for a day as a ‘mark of respect’ for the Pope; after the delayed audience he announced that Parliament was to be dissolved and a general election held on 5 May, as everyone had expected. The Grand National was postponed from 3.45 to 4.10 because of the rescheduling of the wedding. A survey of those with ‘absolutely certain’ voting intentions, by Mori for the Financial Times, gave the Conservatives 39 per cent and Labour 34 per cent. A court found six Labour councillors in Birmingham guilty of electoral fraud at last year’s council election; Mr Richard Mawrey QC, a High Court judge sitting as an election commissioner, said that the episode would ‘disgrace a banana republic’. He said, ‘Short of writing “Steal Me” on the envelopes’ it would be hard to see what more could be done to ensure that postal ballots fell into the wrong hands; ‘fraud will continue unabated’, he said, until there were systems to counter it. In the forthcoming election 15 per cent of votes are expected to be cast postally. MG Rover failed to convince either the British government to give it a £100 million loan or the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp to mount a rescue bid.