Portrait of the Week - 19 April 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a statement to Parliament about the war in Iraq, said, ‘There is upon us a heavy responsibility to make the peace worth the war. We shall do so …with a fixed and steady resolve that the cause was just, the victory right, and the future for us to make in a way that will stand the judgment of history.’ Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said during a stop in Kuwait: ‘There is much evidence of co-operation between the Syrian government and the Saddam regime in recent months.’ But in a press conference in Bahrain he said, ‘We have made it clear that there are no plans for Syria to be next on the list.’ And Iran was a ‘different case’, he told the BBC in Bahrain. ‘We’ve been developing better diplomatic relations with Iran.’ By 15 April, Britain had lost 30 men, 22 of them in accidents or ‘friendly fire’. Mr Blair and Mr Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach of Ireland, asked for several points of clarification from the Irish Republican Army after it delivered a statement to the governments in London and Dublin on 13 April. Brian Nelson, who had acted as an agent for the Force Research Unit of the British army, died of a brain haemorrhage; he had given information to loyalist terrorists that helped bring about the murder of the lawyer Pat Finucane, but had also saved lives by passing on loyalist plans, including an attempt on the life of Mr Gerry Adams in 1987. Mr Peter Mandelson, a former Cabinet minister, said he thought Mr Blair’s ‘instinct will be to go for a referendum’ on joining the euro zone in this Parliament. The mobile telephone company MmO2 sold its loss-making Dutch subsidiary O2 for £18 million. A survey found that 47 per cent of British people believe in the Resurrection of Jesus.