Portrait of the Week – 23 April 2005

Kamel Bourgass was sentenced to 17 years in prison for conspiring, with one named fellow terrorist and others unnamed, to cause a ‘public nuisance’, a common law offence said by the Crown in this case to have involved plotting to use poisons to cause ‘disruption, fear and injury’. Bourgass, an Algerian, had been an ‘illegal absconder’ since August 2001 when his application for asylum was rejected. Unknown to the jury, he was serving a life sentence for the murder with a knife of Detective Constable Stephen Oake during an anti-terrorist operation in Manchester two years ago. Inflation rose to 1.9 per cent. Some 5,000 workers at the MG Rover factory at Longbridge, Birmingham, finally lost their jobs when the government failed to persuade the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation to take on the enterprise, which had been in administration for a week. A High Court judge agreed to hear an application from Mr John Hemming, the deputy leader of Birmingham City Council, for judicial review of the general election because of the possibility of postal-voting fraud. Labour remained ahead in the opinion polls. The Conservatives said they would cancel the revaluation of houses for council tax. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said it would spend £1.7 billion a year to supplement private savings for pensions, which might give future pensioners an extra £10 a week. Mr Tony Blair was unable to say that Labour would not apply a means test to a state pension in future. Mrs Cherie Blair remarked in passing that she was not impressed by the dinners at her son Leo’s primary school in the borough of Westminster: ‘They are not terrific, to be honest. I am seriously thinking about sending him in with a packed lunch.’ Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, gave permission for a 50-storey tower at St George’s Wharf, Pimlico, overruling a planning inspector who had said it would spoil views of the Palace of Westminster.