Portrait of the Week – 23 November 2002

Three men of north African origin were arrested under the Terrorism Act, and some newspapers said that a plot to spread poison gas in the London Underground had been foiled. The government denied this was so; Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said: ‘If there is a specific threat against a specific target, we of course will warn people.’ The Fire Brigades Union held ‘very constructive’ talks with Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister. But Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in the Commons: ‘This is exactly the wrong time, with exactly the wrong claim, pursuing the wrong methods to demand wage rises so much higher than inflation.’ Miss Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development, denounced the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy for giving ‘every European dairy producer two dollars a day for each cow that he owns, while 2.7 billion men, women and children around the world are living on less than that’.