Portrait of the Week – 31 August 2002

Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, called for a written constitution for the European Union; but in a speech to Scottish businessmen he played down the significance of the demand: ‘The Conservative party has a constitution,’ he said, ‘and so do golf clubs in Scotland.’ Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, said that the situation in the Middle East was ‘forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals’. The Revd Tim Alban Jones, the vicar of Soham, Cambridgeshire, thanked well-wishers but added, ‘We want our town back,’ after its streets had become crowded with traffic bringing visitors to see the site of the abduction of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, the girls found dead near Lakenheath two weeks later; coach parties had made detours to see the churchyard where thousands of bunches of flowers lay, still wrapped in paper. A man died at Oldbury in the West Midlands after seven people contracted legionnaires’ disease; four had died in an outbreak at Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, a month before. Mr Colin Skellett, the chairman of Wessex Water, was arrested on suspicion of receiving a £1 million bribe at the time the company was sold to YTL Power of Malaysia in May; he vigorously denied the allegation. A report for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about a tax on supermarket plastic carrier-bags in Ireland recommended that a tax of 10p a bag might usefully be imposed in Britain. Titian’s ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt’, stolen from Longleat in 1995, was recovered after being left in a plastic bag in a bus shelter. The Leeds music festival ended in rioting, with the main block of temporary lavatories being burned. An 18-stone man making a 200ft bungee jump for charity fell to his death when the harness slipped from his ankles.