Portrait of the Week – 25 June 2005

Spies will be sent out to inform upon people smoking in public places, including bus shelters and office doorways, under plans by Miss Caroline Flint, the minister for public health, who advocated ‘an intelligence-led approach to enforcing the law’. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, borrowed £8.735 billion in May, the highest amount since 1993, when such records began. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, returned from Brussels, where a summit of European Union leaders could not agree on a budget to run from 2007 to 2013; he had defended Britain’s rebate, which he had said should not be renegotiated without connected changes to the Common Agricultural Policy. ‘The rebate is an anomaly that has to go,’ he told a press conference in London, ‘but it has to go in the context of the other anomaly being changed away.’ Britain begins its six-month presidency of the EU on 1 July.