Portrait of the Week – 22 January 2005

The Conservatives published plans for spending if they were to win the next election. Presuming savings proposed by Sir Peter Gershon’s report for the Treasury, and incorporating new savings devised for them by Mr David James, they said they could reduce government spending by £35 billion, partly by cutting 235,000 Civil Service posts. Of this, £23 billion would be spent on extra services, principally health and education, £8 billion would fill the ‘black hole’ (borrowing) incurred by Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and £4 billion would pay for tax cuts; tax revenues for the current year are expected by the government to be about £450 billion. Just before this announcement Mr Robert Jackson, once a Tory minister, suddenly joined the Labour benches; the Conservatives managed to find a remark made in 2003 by Mr Alan Milburn, at that time and once more a Labour minister, ‘Support from the honourable gentleman is about as welcome as myxomatosis in a rabbit hutch.’ Mr Robert Kilroy-Silk, a Member of the European Parliament who resigned the UK Independence party whip in the autumn, set about forming a new party to be called Veritas. A great fuss was made when a photograph appeared on the front page of the Sun of Prince Harry at a fancy dress party wearing a shirt with a swastika armband, apparently intended to represent, however inaccurately, the uniform of the Afrika Korps; the prince apologised. Mr David Bell, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, criticised some Muslim schools for not encouraging tolerance of other religions and of people with no religious belief; he said on the television programme Newsnight that those schools which did not meet Ofsted requirements would be closed down. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, said that the government would think of a way by which relations of those Britons killed by the Indian Ocean wave would not have to wait seven years before those whose bodies are lost were declared dead.