Portrait of the Week – 24 July 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, passed the tenth anniversary of his election as leader of the Labour party. During a Commons debate on the Butler report, he defended his decision to go to war against Iraq. He then turned his mind to a reshuffle. Mr Blair had said earlier that it was time to abandon ‘the 1960s liberal social consensus on law and order’. Mr David Blunkett came up with a bundle of law-and-order wheezes, in a ‘five-year plan’, including £80 fixed penalties for shoplifting, the experimental tracking of up to 5,000 convicts and suspects by satellite, and an invitation to every town to delate 50 culprits for antisocial behaviour. A secret police dossier showing the 62 best sites to launch anti-aircraft missiles at Heathrow was found abandoned in the road close to the airport’s perimeter fence. A disturbance caused much damage to a detention centre for asylum-seekers at Harmondsworth, near Heathrow; the unrest began after a man there was found hanged.