Portrait of the Week – 12 February 2005

Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, proposed a points system, measuring desirable skills and suchlike qualities, to determine which immigrants from outside the European Community would be allowed to settle permanently in Britain. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) refused to return a man with alleged al-Qa’eda links to Belmarsh prison, where he had been driven mad; the Siac judge ruled that the Home Secretary had failed to prove ‘to the necessary standard’ his allegation that the man, known as G, had received two unidentified visitors at his home. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, proposed that prisoners should serve the whole of a minimum term specified by the courts. Mr Alastair Campbell admitted having been responsible for an advertisement that depicted the Tory leader, Mr Michael Howard, and Mr Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor, as flying pigs. Mr Campbell also sent an email suggesting that a good response to an inquiry from Newsnight on the matter would be: ‘Fuck off and cover something important you twats’; but he sent the email to Newsnight instead of a colleague, apparently by mistake. The Irish Republican Army sulked at being accused by the British and Irish governments of the £26 million Northern Bank robbery in Belfast; ‘We do not intend to remain quiescent within this unacceptable and unstable situation,’ it said. Professor Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep, was given permission by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to clone human embryos suffering from motor neurone disease in order to conduct experiments on them. BP announced a surplus of £8.7 billion. Shell had already announced a record net income of £9.82 billion, though it cut the figure for its proved oil and gas reserves by another 10 per cent. Miss Ellen MacArthur set a new record for sailing single-handed round the world, making the voyage of 27,000 miles in 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds, more than a day less than the previous record.