Portrait of the week
The Confederation of British Industry urged the government to cut 360,000 Civil Service, local government and Health Service jobs in a new attack on public spen- ding. Otherwise, warned Sir Terence Beckett, CBI director general, the basic rate of income tax would rise to 45 per cent by the end of the decade. Mr Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that £500 million would be raised by reduc- ing the government holding in British Petroleum to 30 per cent. In the contest for the leadership of the Labour Party, Mr Roy Hattersley upbraided Mr Michael Foot for abstaining when the Party executive voted to defeat a move to ensure wider individual participation in the election. Mr Hattersley was quoted as saying to Mr Foot: 'Where's the bloody leadership then?', to which Mr Foot is said to have replied: 'Don't you ever speak to me like that again.' Mr Hattersley denied that he swore. In the Dissolution Honours, delayed by wrangles between Mr Foot and Mrs Thatcher, Sir Harold Wilson, Mr Jo Grimond and Mr Gerry Fitt received life peerages. The TUC agreed to end its boycott on talks with Mr Norman Tebbit, Employment Secretary. The death was an- nounced of the 5th Earl of Stradbroke, only four days after he succeeded to the earldom on the death of his brother: The Times obituary described the former naval officer as an 'oak of a man'. Britain, stated a report by the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit, could have a literacy problem of 'unimagined proportions': the Unit's researchers found that ten per cent of 23-year olds cannot read or write properly, and estimated that at least 3,500,000 adults may be functionally illiterate. Signs of police confusion abounded over the hunt for the killer, or killers, of 5-year old Caroline Hogg of Edinburgh, and 11-year old Susan Maxwell. Spokesmen first linked the two deaths and then expressed doubts over any connection. A search for a West German 'suspect' was modified to 'witness' after he had been interviewed by the press at his home near Dortmund. A threat to peak holiday-time services on the cross- Channel ferries was averted by the settle- ment of a strike by seamen employed by the Townsend Thorensen line: the strike had been about to be extended to the other com- panies. The National Coal Board's
billion showpiece mine at. Selby, Yorkshire, was flooded only four weeks after coal pro- duction started, and could be out of action for months.
A cross the Channel, hail storms ravaged .rIFrench vineyards in the Rhone and around Bordeaux. A freak wind was blam- ed for the death of microlight pioneer Stephen Hunt at a rally of powered hang gliders in south-west France: two French
pilots were also killed during the event. President Reagan despatched a fleet to Cen- tral America, and 4,000 troops to Hon- duras: the task of the Fleet is to practise 'blockade and interdiction of shipping'. In the Middle East, renewed fighting broke out in Lebanon between factions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Christian and Druze militia forces. Israel announced the redeployment of its army along the Alawi river defence line, and President Reagan invited the country's foreign and defence ministers to Washing- ton after Prime Minister Begin had cancell- ed his own visit: the President's invitation was widely described as a 'summons'. Seven Greenpeace anti-whaling campaigners were held by the Russians after going ashore at a remote Siberian settlement in the Bering Strait in a search for evidence of illegal whale catching to provide food for minks. They were later released. Martial law was lifted in Poland, only to be replaced by a new batch of restrictive laws: an amnesty failed to lead to the release of a number of Solidarity leaders. The Royal Navy used up four Exocet missiles, at a cost of £2 million each, in sinking a 700-ton paddle boat in exercises off Gibraltar. Hundreds of deaths ensued from attacks by Sinhalese upon Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Deter Adamson, the actor who plays the beer-swilling Len Fairclough in Granada TV's 'Coronation Street', was ac- quitted at Burnley Crown Court of in- decently assaulting two eight-year-old girls at a swimming pool. A London busker was conditionally discharged by Marylebone magistrates for charming a six-foot python on a Central Line tube train: some passengers put £1.45 in his hat, others com- plained to Underground staff. And two teenage boys from Liverpool were killed at Newquay, Cornwall, when they jumped a wall and fell over the cliffs while being pur- sued by eight Scotsmen following a fracas. PJP.
'We'd like to be divorced in church, Vicar.'
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