Portrait of the week | 1 November 2003

Twenty-five Conservative MPs wrote to the chairman of the 1922 Committee calling for a vote of confidence in their leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith. The Labour party expelled Mr George Galloway, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin, on the grounds that remarks he made about Iraq ‘fighting for all the Arabs’ were in some way ‘grossly detrimental’ to the party. Mr Paul Burrell, once the butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, wrote a book, serialised for a week by the Daily Mirror, in which he gave a list of her nine close male friends, and reproduced letters to and from members of the royal family. Princes William and Harry issued a statement suggesting he was guilty of ‘cold and overt betrayal’ that was ‘deeply painful’ to them and ‘would mortify our mother if she were alive today’. Mr Burrell then said that ‘one telephone call’ from them would have stopped the book. ‘Is that too much to ask — really?’ he said on television. He had hoped that the Prince of Wales and his sons would say, ‘Paul, we know what you have been through, come down to Highgrove and have tea with us.’ He also said he would like to give the young princes a piece of his mind. Mr Bill Clinton, the former President of the United States, said that he had long known about the heart problems of Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. ‘He told me about it quite a few years ago,’ he was reported to have said. The government gave indefinite leave to remain to about 50,000 refugees, mostly from Kosovo, Yugoslavia and Turkey, who had applied for asylum before October 2000. The Foreign Office advised British people not to visit Saudi Arabia because ‘terrorists may be in the final phases of planning attacks’. Network Rail took charge of track maintenance, ending its contracts with private companies.