Portrait of the week | 10 April 2004

After the resignation of Miss Beverley Hughes as immigration minister, Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, called a ‘summit’ at Downing Street to plan a ‘cross-government assault’ on failures in the system; MI5 was called in. It had been reported that Mr Blair had promised the Romanian Prime Minister he would lift visa requirements on Romanians coming to Britain as a ‘reward’ for a reduction in the number of asylum-seekers. It was also claimed that immigration officials were ordered not to arrest illegal immigrants lest they apply for asylum and swell the official figures. To mark the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, the Queen took a train with 200 schoolchildren to make a three-day state visit to Paris, where she walked about in the Champs-Elysées. The house at Soham, Cambridgeshire, where the child-murderer Ian Huntley lived was demolished. Mr Michael Grade, once the chief executive of Channel 4, was appointed chairman of the BBC.