PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`Gay eating area or straight eating area?'
Mr Michael Portillo, the former Cabi- net minister, said that Mr William Hague, the leader of the opposition, should make the Conservative party the rallying point for a campaign to stop Britain taking part in economic and monetary union with the other European Community countries. Mr Hague then wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph saying it was time that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, 'came clean with the British people that the single currency poses risks for our independence'. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that he thought that coun- tries such as Honduras that had suffered natural disasters should be let off debt repayment by the Group of Seven industri- alised nations. The Bank of England cut interest rates by half a percentage point to 6.75 per cent. Mr Gerhard Schroder, the Chancellor of Germany, visited Britain and compared notes on the Third Way with Mr Blair; Mr Peter Mandelson, the Secretary of State for Trade, liaised with Mr Bodo Hombach, the German Economics Minis- ter. On his return to Germany, Mr Schroder, in his inaugural address to parlia- ment, casually mentioned that 'a federal order in Europe seems the best guarantee for solidarity and progress'. Mr Nicholas Brown, the Minister for Agriculture, announced that he was homosexual, lest a man with whom he had once had an affair tell all first in the News of the World. As for Mr Ron Davies, the former secretary of state for Wales, both his story about what he was up to on Clapham Common, and Downing Street's versions of its role in the affair, changed so many times that no one knew what to think. Lord Hunt, who led the expedition that conquered Everest in 1953, died, aged 88. The Right Reverend James Jones, a pogonotrophous glossolal- ist, was enthroned as Bishop of Liverpool.
IN THE United States of America, Mr Newt Gingrich, the Republican leader, resigned as Speaker of the House of Repre- sentatives and gave up his seat in reaction to the losses, though small, of his party in the mid-term elections; `I'm willing to lead,' he said, `but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals.' He is likely to be replaced next week by Mr Bob Livingston of Louisiana. Washington published a list of European exports on which it will impose sanctions of up to 100 per cent import duties in retaliation against the European Union's preference for import- ing bananas from former colonies Of France and Britain. Fifteen officers were sentenced to be shot for their part in the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding president of Bangladesh, in 1975. Armed men thought to be from Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola, killed eight, including tw° Britons, in a raid on a diamond mine in the north of Angola; a United Nations spokes- man said the country seemed to be drifting back to civil war. Rumer Godden, the now elist, died, aged 90. Bob Kane, who drew the first Batman comic strips in 1939, died, aged 83. A survey by Cap Gemini, Europe s biggest software and services company, found it was too late for businesses in Europe and America to remove millennium bugs from their computers in time. The number of dogs in Vietnam, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, rose above 14 million, as more and more farmers took to raising
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