PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The Good Fairy Mr Gordon Brown in a 'pre-Budget statement' said the government would spend £300 million on after-school clubs for the children of lone parents at work; the clubs would be run by unemployed youths on the so-called 'welfare to work' pro- gramme. Mr Brown also gave £20 each to pensioners to spend on heating if they want. Mr John Major, the former Conser- vative prime minister, took on the guardian- ship of Prince William and Prince Harry's inheritance, which is to be hit by death duties on Diana, Princess of Wales's for- tune derived from her divorce settlement. Palace officials floated the idea of turning Kensington Palace into a gallery for the Queen's pictures after its inhabitants are turned out. Mr Peter Temple-Morris resigned from the Conservative party when Mr William Hague, the leader of the Con- servatives, withdrew the whip from him after he publicly stated he could not stand in the next election as a Tory if the party policy on European economic and mone- tary union remained unchanged. The Con- servatives lost the seat of Winchester when a new ballot was held because the general election result had been set aside. In May the Liberal Democrat candidate had been given 26,100 votes, only two more than the Tory; now the Liberal Democrat increased his majority to 21,556, with 37,006 votes (the Conservative polling 15,450, and the Labour candidate losing his deposit with 946). In Beckenham, where the sitting Tory had relinquished his seat after a sexual scandal, the Conservative candidate won a majority of 1,227, against 4,953 in the gen- eral election. Mr Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, explaining why Britain was standing by to support any American action against Iraq, said, 'Saddam Hussein is still producing enough anthrax to fill two mis- siles every week.' Three new members of the Order of Merit were announced: Lord Denning, the former Master of the Rolls, Sir Norman Foster, the architect, and Sir Denis Rooke, the former chairman of Brit- ish Gas. Humphrey the Downing Street cat was produced for photographers at a secret location in south London after suspicion had grown that, instead of having been sent to a good home in retirement, as the Cabi- net Office claimed, he had been put down.
YAMAICHI, Japan's fourth biggest securi- ty broker, collapsed with vast debts. Several other south-east Asian economies had already slumped, the latest being South Korea, which hoped to be aided by the International Monetary Fund. President Bill Clinton of the United States called the .turmoil in these economies 'a few little glitches in the road'; he was speaking at a meeting in Vancouver of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, and had come out in favour of a scheme outlined in Manila for rich nations such as America and Japan to bail out the troubled tiger economies. One of 558 competitors in an annual race up the stairs of the 60-storey Sunshiner Building in Tokyo died of a heart attack between the 22nd and 23rd floors. Iraq agreed to allow United Nations weapons inspectors to resume their duties after negotiations initiated by Mr Yevgeny Primakov, the Russian foreign minister; Mr William Cohen, the United States Defense Secretary, said President Saddam had made enough VX chemical weapons to kill every- one on earth. President Ibrahim Mainas- sara of Niger dismissed the government for `incompetence' in failing to put down Tuareg insurgency. Mrs Winnie Mandela appeared before the Truth and Reconcilia- tion Commission in South Africa to be con- fronted by relatives of people who had gone missing in the 1980s. Earl Spencer's divorce proceedings began in Cape Town with claims, which he denied, from his estranged wife that he had slept with 10 or 12 women while she was in a clinic. Michael Hutchence, a singer and the father of Miss Paula Yates's youngest daughter, died, aged 37. Dr Hastings Banda, the former dictator of Malawi, died, probably aged 99. CSH
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