Portrait of the Week – 12 March 2005

The government was defeated in the House of Lords by 249 to 119 when a Liberal Democrat amendment to the Prevention of Terrorism Bill was passed — to apply the prior sanction of a judge rather than the say-so of a home secretary to all proposed control orders, not merely those that stipulated house arrest. The next day five votes in the Lords went against the government; 24 Labour peers voted against their party when a ‘sunset clause’ was added to the Bill. Among those who voted against the government were Lord Irvine, the former Labour Lord Chancellor, and Lord Condon, a former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Sir John Stevens, until January the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had written in the News of the World that ‘the main opposition to the Bill, it seems to me, is from people who simply haven’t understood the brutal reality of the world we live in and the true horror of the terrorism we face’; he said that possibly 200 al-Qa’eda-trained terrorists were walking the streets of Britain.