Portrait of the Week – 12 November 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, insisted on pressing ahead with a Bill to allow police to hold anyone suspected of a terrorist offence for 90 days without charge. The government prepared legislation to allow terrorists who had fled Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement to return to the province without prosecution. Six men were arrested in connection with the £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery in Belfast last December, and two were released without charge. The High Court heard a case for compensation by more than 5,000 serving and former officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (now the Police Service of Northern Ireland), which they said had failed those who suffered lasting effects from traumas in dealing with terrorism. Mr Hu Jintao, the ruler of China, came to Britain on a state visit, staying at Buckingham Palace. A gas pipeline from Zeebrugge in Belgium to Bacton in Norfolk which had exported 46 billion cubic metres since it opened in 1998 began to import gas at a rate of 23 billion cubic metres a year. Plans by Leeds to build a tramway system were dropped for lack of government support. A coalition of wildlife groups and quangos prepared to spend £1 million in trying to save the 20,000 red squirrels surviving in the Kielder Forest, Northumberland, Whinfell, near Penrith, Sefton Sands, near Southport, and Widdale, near Hawes in Yorkshire. John Fowles, the novelist who wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman, died, aged 79. A 17-year-old boy who had his lip pierced for a ring in Sheffield died of blood-poisoning. A man who 23 years ago adopted the name Christopher Buckingham, after someone who had died as a child, was jailed for 21 months for making an untrue statement to obtain a passport; he still refused to reveal his true name. Miss Cherie Booth, the wife of the Prime Minister, told a legal magazine: ‘If I hadn’t had the funding from the state to go to university, I would have worked in a shop.’