Portrait of the week | 31 January 2004

The government narrowly carried the second reading of the Higher Education Bill, which makes provision for universities to charge British students an extra £3,000 a year. The vote was 316–311, with 72 Labour MPs voting against the government and 18 abstaining; Mr David Taylor, the Labour member for North West Leicestershire voted both for and against the Bill. Mr Jack Cunningham, a former Labour Cabinet minister, broadcast to the nation his view that the Labour rebels resembled the Militant Tendency. The next day Lord Hutton published a long report into the death of Dr David Kelly, the government expert on weapons. It said that the government was not ‘dishonourable, underhand or duplicitous’ in confirming that Dr Kelly had been the source for a report by Mr Andrew Gilligan. The Ministry of Defence was ‘at fault’ and ‘to be criticised’ in its handling of Dr Kelly at that time. Mr Gilligan had made an unfounded report that the government ‘probably knew’ that its ‘45-minute claim’ in its Iraq dossier was untrue.