PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Welcome to the age of digital television The Conservatives continued in disarray after Mr William Hague, the party leader, sacked Lord Cranborne as leader in the Lords. The grounds were that he had pro- ceeded without permission to arrange with Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister and leader of the Labour party, that Tory peers would not oppose legislation to reform the Lords if 10 per cent of hereditary peers, plus a few hereditary peers with particular jobs, were allowed to continue sitting and voting until the next stage. of reform was reached. This contradicted Labour party policy, but after Lord Cranborne went (say- ing that he had been caught 'running in like an ill-trained spaniel') Mr Hague accepted the accommodation; Lord Strathclyde, the chief whip in the Lords, took over from Lord Cranborne under that proviso; others, including Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the deputy leader in the Lords, resigned from the front bench or from taking the whip. The Human Genetics Advisory Commis- sion and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, both statutory bod- ies, said that human embryos should be cloned, not for the purposes of reproduc- tion, but so that they could be used for medical experiments. Mr Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, proposed a £2,000 fine on lorry drivers for each illegal immigrant they brought into the country; this followed the rounding up of more than 100 Romanian gypsies who had climbed from a lorry in Kent, and then claimed asylum. An arsonist serving an 18-year prison sentence, who is campaigning for a royal commission on vivisection, lay dying after more than 60 days on hunger strike; fellow extremists threatened to murder ten scientists of whom they disapproved. Mr Jonathan Aitken was committed for trial at the Old Bailey on charges of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, John Chad- wick, who with Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B in the 1950s, died aged 78. Mr Frank Johnson, the editor of The Spectator, announced his forthcoming marriage to Virginia Fraser, the mother of Lord Lovat.
MR BILL CLINTON, the President of the United States, decided to visit Israel and the Gaza Strip (part of the Palestinian-con- trolled areas) at a time when Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, was announcing that the Wye River agree- ment was a dead letter because of renewed Palestinian violence, and when 2,000 Pales- tinian prisoners in Israeli jails were on hunger strike. President Boris Yeltsin, who was said to be suffering from pneumonia, left hospital, sacked three important offi- cials, and returned to hospital in the after- noon. In County Cavan, Ireland, 50 mem- bers of the Irish Republican Army met to discuss its response to the impasse on the formation of a multi-party administration in Northern Ireland because of its refusal to decommission arms. Mr Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, visited Colonel Gaddafi of Libya in an attempt to arrange for two men suspected of the bombing of a Pan Am aircraft over Lockerbie in 1988 to be tried under Scot- tish law in Holland. Germany stepped up its campaign to make Britain relinquish its £2,000 million-a-year rebate from contribu- tions to the European Community. RailwaY guards in most parts of France continued in a second week of strikes. A man was found guilty in St Louis, Missouri, of injecting his son with HIV-infected blood to avoid incurring child-support payments. A couple sought $250,000 compensation from the authorities of Houston, Texas, after their two golden retrievers were killed by offi- cials when they were found straying with no collars. Officials of Fuzhou in southern China announced that any of the cis 10,000 pet dogs still there on 21 December would be slaughtered. CSH
Previous page
