M embers of the Conservative party began the postal election of
a new leader; Mr lain Duncan Smith gained the support of the former leaders Lady Thatcher and Mr William Hague, and Mr Kenneth Clarke's was backed by Mr John Major. Mr Clarke commented: 'Mrs Thatcher was more disloyal to John Major than Ted Heath ever was to Mrs Thatcher.' After 26 weeks of the foot-and-mouth epidemic there had been 1,964 outbreaks with 3,763,000 livestock slaughtered. The Home Office allocated £80 million for the establishment of closed-circuit television cameras in public places in 200 areas. Both the Social Democratic and Labour party and the Catholic bishops in Northern Ireland supported the planned Police Service of Northern Ireland, which is opposed by Sinn Fein. Paul Burrell. the former butler of Diana, Princess of Wales, was charged with theft of 342 items from her. the Prince of Wales and Prince William, worth an estimated £5 million; they included a record by Leo Sayer, a handbag containing a yellow chain, chewing-gum and a 2p piece, and a writing desk inscribed: 'Presented by the City of Aberdeen'. Lurid newspaper reports, in apparent disregard of the law on contempt, detailed the life and claims of a woman who had accused Mr and Mrs Neil Hamilton of a sexual assault against her. Thousands of commuters were delayed when a helicopter ambulance tipped onto the track from Paddington as it picked up a man who had been hit by a train when he walked on the line after crashing his car on a railway bridge. Abseilers gave a six-yearly clean to the faces of Big Ben's clock. Professor Sir Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who invented the phrase 'Big Bang' as a pejorative term, died, aged 86. A man who claimed he had spent £2,000 on mints to mask his bad breath was awarded £10,000 compensation when it was found that a rubber splint had been left in his nose after an operation 12 years before. Belper, in Derbyshire, refused to put on display a seven-foot plastic effigy of Mr Potato Head (from the film Toy Story') that had been kindly sent to them by their twin town of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, USA.
SOLDIERS, mostly British, under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, began arriving in Macedonia in an operation called Essential Harvest, intended to collect arms as they were handed in by Albanian guerrillas. Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna, the Basque terrorists, exploded a car bomb outside a hotel at Salou, near Tarragona, slightly injuring 15: a woman was killed in San Sebastian when a remote-controlled toy car which had been given to her grandson exploded in their car. An explosion killed 36 outright in a mine at Donetsk in Ukraine,
and fire trapped another ten, for whom hope was abandoned. Fire destroyed 450,000 acres in the western United States. In the United States, the Federal Reserve cut the federal funds rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 3.5 per cent. Fujitsu, the computer chip manufacturers, got rid of 10,000 workers, a tenth of its employees. Mr Kamal Kharazi, the foreign minister of Iran, told Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi, the head of the judiciary, that a recent wave of public floggings could 'present a violent image of Islam in other countries'. Eurotunnel attempted in a French court to regain control of a vast warehouse at Sangatte that was requisitioned two years ago by the French Red Cross as a shelter for asylumseekers; hundreds have stowed away on trains to Britain. Spanish police arrested 800 Africans attempting to enter the country last weekend, bringing the total for the year to 7,000. Donald Woods, the anti-apartheid campaigner, died, aged 67. The new Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Mr Simeon SaxeCoburg, formerly King Simeon, took steps to cut taxes. The province of Buenos Aires in debt-plagued Argentina has begun to pay employees in Patacones, one-year bonds, each of which is worth enough to be accepted in payment for two cheeseburgers, fries and a drink at McDonald's.
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