Portrait of the week
D eports from the coalfields, before the .M.result of the ballot was known, sug- gested that Miners' Union president Arthur Scargill had again failed to persuade his members to repeat the glories of 1972 and 1974 with a national strike, this time against pit closures. Mr Scargill had assured miners that the strike would be a 'short, sharp' one, and that millions of the unemployed would come to the miners' aid. The Conser- vative CDU-CSU coalition of Chancellor Helmut Kohl swept to victory in the West German elections, emboldening President Reagan to return to the kind of rhetoric more frequently heard in his own bid for the presidency in 1980. He described the Soviet Union as having 'the aggressive im- pulses of an evil empire' and called for prayers — he was addressing an audience of fundamentalists — 'for those who live in that totalitarian darkness'. In the face of continuing harassment, Joshua Nkomo, Zimbabwe's opposition leader, went to Botswana to decide what to do next. In Australia, the general election was won in a landslide by Labour, a triumph for the par- ty's leader of just one month, former union leader Bob Hawke.
Tragedy marked the final stage of the Queen's tour of California when three secret servicemen assigned to guard her were killed in a car crash on their way to the Yosemite national park, where the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were to spend the weekend before going on to Canada. In London, a man dressed as a wolf sprang at Princess Michael of Kent while she was at- tending a preview of the Ideal Home Ex- hibition. He was knocked down by a bodyguard and arrested, but police said later that no charges would be preferred against the wolf man, David Agulnik, 18, as the incident took place on private property. The affair was described as a publicity stunt which went badly wrong. A day later, Princess Michael's sister-in-law, the Duchess of Kent, had her handbag stolen while she was trying on a pair of shoes in a shop in New Bond Street.
Zomax, a drug used to relieve arthritic pain, was withdrawn by its manufac- turers after reports linked it with five deaths in the-United States. The Attorney General urged the Charity Commissioners to remove charitable status from the Moonies sect. Dr Harold Bourne, of London, was fined £500 for feeding,parking meters with ring-pulls from soft-drink cans. A teenager, Maria Rose Lukacs, of Glanaman, Wales, described as buxom, kicked her landlord to death with her Doc Marten boots when he
made sexual advances to her; she was sent to prison for three years. A 15-year-old schoolboy was ordered by St Albans juvenile court to be placed in the care of the local authority when he was found guilty of trying to poison his mother by putting garden insecticide and mildew spray into the family kettle. His plot was discovered when the boiling kettle billowed yellow smoke. A group of senior retired officers, including a general, an admiral and an air marshal, urged the establishment of a 750,000-strong Home Defence Force, to be armed with rifles and CB radios. Admiral Lord Hill-Norton, former First Sea Lord, said the force would be a sensible answer to the Soviet threat, adding that it would fill 'an obvious hole in our defence stocking'.
rIraham Sutherland's tapestry of Christ
in Coventry cathedral was damaged when scaffolding, erected to assist in its cleaning, collapsed. Viscount Boyd of Mer- ton, as Alan Lennox-Boyd, MP for Mid- Beds and Colonial Secretary from 1954 to 1959, died after being knocked down by a car in the Fulham Road. Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-born writer whose novel, Darkness at Noon, charted his disillusion- ment with Communism, was found dead, along with his third wife, at their London home, both having apparently committed suicide. He was 77. Sir William Walton, the Lancastrian composer, died at his home on the Italian island of Ischia, aged 80. He had just completed the score for a new ballet. TV-am, the commercial television breakfast programme, was said to have only 300,000 viewers left, having lost another 200,000 to
'If the viewing figures get any lower, they could gel a grant from the GLC.'
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