The Week

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the Week – 10 May 2003

The Labour party suspended Mr George Galloway, an MP, from ‘holding office or representing the party’ while it investigated complaints that remarks he made during the war against Iraq might have constituted ‘behaviour that is prejudicial or grossly detrimental to the party’. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Mr Alan Milburn, the Secretary of

Diary

Diary – 10 May 2003

I found myself twice debating with Ottilia Saxl, director of the Institute of Nanotechnology, on the radio last week. She assured listeners that I was quite wrong to imply that big business was behind the technology. Governments, she soothed, not corporations, are providing the grants. So what? Governments make bad decisions every day, and most

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Now the real fight begins, and this time the Pentagon won’t help

The central proposition behind the government’s public-relations campaign since the end of the Iraq war is that Tony Blair has undergone some mid-life personality enhancement. We are now entreated to believe that the amiable, grinning weathercock to which we had grown accustomed has been replaced by a steely world leader. These claims do not square

Weak foundations

Tony Blair turned 50 this week. The milestone has been celebrated with a special exhibition by the staff of No. 10. In an impressive display of their talents, the spin doctors of Downing Street have boggled or bullied the media into presenting the Prime Minister as a sort of composite prime minister of 1945: Churchill

Letters

Feedback | 10 May 2003

Comment on with friends like these . . . by Simon Heffer (03/05/2003) Could you please inform Simon Heffer, the next time you speak to him, that the French banned British beef as a result of the British Christmas time ban of French turkey a few years previously. If he cares to research the matter