Portrait of the Week – 4 March 2006

Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, said that she had signed without asking any questions a form that her husband, Mr David Mills, used to gain a mortgage for a house, which he repaid a month later with an alleged bribe of £340,000 from Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. Mr Mills denies receiving such a payment; an Italian prosecutor is investigating the allegation. Mr Ken Livingstone was suspended for four weeks as Mayor of London by the Adjudication Panel for England when it found that he had brought his office into disrepute by saying to a reporter who had told him he was Jewish and worked for the London Evening Standard, ‘Actually you are just like a concentration camp guard. You are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?’ But his suspension was then itself suspended. Mr Michael Baigent and Mr Richard Leigh sued their own publisher, Random House, in the High Court; they claimed that the novel The Da Vinci Code, published by Random House and written by Mr Dan Brown, an American, copied 15 ‘central theme points’ from their book of supposed history, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982).