Portrait of the Week – 25 January 2003

Police raided the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park, long suspected to have terrorist links. Seven people were arrested and a stun gun and a CS gas canister were seized. The government dispatched 30,000 troops and 120 Challenger tanks to the Gulf in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, but insisted that war was not inevitable. Half of the soldiers have bought their own boots, a Ministry of Defence survey revealed, because they didn’t like the ones with which they had been issued. The Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, proposed to allow universities to charge their students up to £3,000 in tuition fees. Mr Clarke also announced that he wished to devise a ‘British baccalaureate’ to replace GCSEs and A-levels, missing the point that what makes the baccalaureate so respected a qualification is that it is independent of any state. An unemployed Welshman who devised a computer virus that damaged thousands of computers around the world was jailed for two years.