Portrait of the Week – 18 December 2004

Lord Butler of Brockwell, who had headed the inquiry into intelligence about Iraq, accused Mr Tony Blair’s administration of ‘bad government’, being unchecked by Parliament and free to bring in a ‘huge number of extremely bad Bills, a huge amount of regulation and to do whatever it likes’ with an eye to the next day’s headlines. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, denied a fresh allegation that he had helped fast-track a tourist visa to Austria for his ex-lover’s nanny, Leoncia Casalme. Dame Janet Smith, in a 1,300-word report, her fifth on the mass murderer Dr Harold Shipman, blamed the General Medical Council for perpetuating the ‘mutual self-interest’ of doctors, and recommended the construction of a national database about every doctor in Britain. Lord Winston said that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority should be abolished because it was ‘not seen to be a very good system’. Ofsted, the education regulator, said that 10,000 schoolchildren had gone missing from official records. Sir Bill Morris, in a report on the Metropolitan Police, said there was a ‘tick-box’ mentality in dealing with discrimination and that white officers lacked ‘the confidence to manage black and ethnic minority officers’. Lord Scarman, who headed the inquiries into the violence in Northern Ireland in 1969 and into the Brixton riots of 1981, died, aged 93. A report of the Catholic bishops’ conference said that ‘prison must not be a dustbin for the problems society fails to address elsewhere’. Mr Patrick Mercer MP sought to introduce a Bill which would protect householders unless they used ‘grossly disproportionate’ force against burglars; Mr Blair said he would ‘look at’ the Bill. There were 100,810 households officially designated as homeless at the end of September, according to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, more than twice the number when Labour was elected in 1997.