Portrait of the Week – 15 January 2005

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was jolly annoyed when Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, decided not to step down in his favour last year after all, according to a new book by Mr Robert Peston; ‘There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe,’ Mr Brown reportedly said to Mr Blair. During a heated meeting between Labour backbenchers — displeased with the wrangling — and Mr Blair and Mr Brown, Lord Campbell-Savours asked Mr Brown either to deny the attributed quotation or rescind it, lest the Tories use it in the election campaign. The confirmed number of British people killed by the great wave in the Indian Ocean was 51, with 416 presumed dead and 701 unaccounted for. Mr Hugh Orde, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said that the Provisional IRA was responsible for the theft of £26.5