Portrait of the week | 13 March 2004

The House of Lords voted by 216 to 183 to refer to a special select committee, and thus delay, the Constitutional Reform Bill, which seeks to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor and to set up a Supreme Court to replace the Law Lords; a week earlier Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, had called the Bill ‘exchanging a first-class Final Court of Appeal for a second-class Supreme Court’, but he changed his tune. The government said it would not compensate policyholders of Equitable Life, the troubled mutual society, after a report by Lord Penrose found it was the ‘author of its own misfortunes … policyholders were effectively powerless, and the board was a self-perpetuating oligarchy amenable to policyholder pressure only at its discretion’. The Jockey Club gave the champion jockey Kieren Fallon a maximum 21-day suspension for failing properly to push his horse, Ballinger Ridge, to the finish when it came second at Lingfield last week; Mr Fallon had predicted that another horse would win.