Portrait of the Week – 21 January 2006

Miss Ruth Kelly resisted pressure to resign as the Secretary of State for Education after it was learnt that a minister had approved the employment in a school of a man who had been put on the sex offenders register after being cautioned by police for gaining access to child pornography on the internet. Other examples emerged, and it became clear that the categorisation of offenders and the clearing of them for work in schools was complicated and uneven. One man, aged 59, who was allowed to teach at a boys’ school by Miss Kelly, had been convicted for the indecent assault of a 15-year-old girl in 1980; he said, ‘I am not a paedophile. I am not a risk to children.’ There was a general game of hunt the issue, since Miss Kelly is also engaged in pursuing the Prime Minister’s educational reform policies against the opposition of Labour backbenchers. The government then decided to take decisions about the employment of sex offenders away from ministers and ask experts instead. The government published proposals to legalise two or three prostitutes working in one brothel. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech that the Union flag should be planted ‘in every garden’. Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, paid a few thousand pounds in council tax that he had inadvertently overlooked as due on the flat allowed him in Admiralty House, Whitehall. The number of unemployed rose by 111,000 to 1.53 million between last September and November. A solicitor was stabbed to death by two young black street robbers near his home at Kensal Green in London. Mr George Galloway, the Respect party member for Bethnal Green and Bow, spent his time locked in the Celebrity Big Brother studio undertaking tasks such as remaining in a cardboard box for quite a long time and pretending to be a cat licking milk from the hands of Miss Rula Lenska, 58, the actress.