Portrait of the Week - 6 November 2004

The people of the north-east of England voted in a referendum on whether they wanted a regional assembly; they didn’t. Forty-seven Labour rebels voted for a complete ban on parents’ smacking when the Commons passed a Bill limiting chastisement of children. Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, told the Commons during the debate on the gambling Bill, ‘There will be no new casinos if local people don’t want new casinos.’ About 160 Crown post offices in high-street sites could be closed or sold off because the Royal Mail lost £70 million on them last year. The borough of Macclesfield was found to have the lowest concentration of cinemas, theatres and libraries in Britain. A 580ft transmitter mast at Morborne, Cambridgeshire, caught fire and collapsed. Residents of Corby, Northamptonshire, population 53,000, were disappointed to learn that there was no prospect of its railway station, closed in 1966, being reopened by 2021. Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, the widow of Prince Harry, Duke of Gloucester, the third son of George V, died, aged 102. Lord Hanson, the industrialist who specialised in takeovers, sale of assets and cost-cutting, died, aged 82. More than 100 armed police in London threw down their arms in response to the suspension of two colleagues who had unlawfully shot dead a man carrying a table leg. A man who had survived the nail-bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, when he was working as a barman there in 1999, was killed by a group of two black boys, two white boys and two white girls who attacked several people on the South Bank in London in the early hours of Saturday. The Times ceased publication as a broadsheet newspaper after 216 years, in favour of a tabloid format.