Portrait of the Week – 5 March 2005

The government did a good deal of nodding and winking to the opposition over its rushed legislation to provide for house arrest without trial and other controls on anyone suspected of connections with terrorism. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, conceded that judges should decide if suspects were to be put under house arrest, but police should have powers to hold them in the meantime. The government majority was reduced to 14 in a Commons vote. Sajid Badat, 25, from Gloucester, was convicted, after pleading guilty, of conspiring with Richard Reid, the attempted ‘shoe-bomber’ jailed in America, to destroy aircraft in December 2001; Badat dismantled his own shoe-bomb and was arrested in November 2003. After a meeting of Anglican primates at Newry, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called on the Anglican Churches in the United States and Canada to ‘repent’ for unilaterally consecrating a bishop who was ‘in a committed same-sex relationship’ and for holding ‘public rites of blessing for same-sex unions’ respectively.