PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Night falls on Clapham Common. Part 2 Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, reduced the growth rate predicted for next year to around 1 per cent (compared with 1.75-2.25 per cent pre- dicted at the Budget last March; he reiterated his plans to spend £40 billion on schools and hospitals, which would have to be funded by increased borrowing, though the Chancellor asserted that the borrowing was merely investment. Mr Ron Davies, who had resigned as Secretary of State for Wales after a nocturnal 'moment of mad- ness' on Clapham Common that ended in his being robbed at knifepoint, appeared on television with the word 'sorry' written on the back of one hand; in the press there was talk of blackmail. The BBC circulated a memorandum forbidding broadcasters to speculate on whether Mr Peter Mandelson, the Secretary of State for Trade and Indus- try, was homosexual; the claim had been made, though not for the first time, by Mr Matthew Parris on Newsnight. A Loyalist splinter group murdered a Catholic in Belfast on the day that a deadline passed for terrorists, including the Irish Republi- can Army, to decommission their arms. General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, was granted bail on con- dition that he remained in a private psychi- atric hospital in north London; his case went to the Lords. Lord Jenkins presented his report on proportional representation, which no ordinary person understood, rec- ommending an alternative vote system in constituencies, with a top-up of candidates from party lists to redress the dispropor- tionality. The government told primary schools that pass marks for reading tests were being raised because 20 per cent of the seven-year-olds formerly reckoned lit- erate turned out not to be able to read at all; the true figure of illiteracy at that age is 40 per cent it said. Two prisoners were let out of Barlinnie jail by mistake. Rupert Murdoch accused the government of being swayed by 'paranoid hacks' after the refer- ral to the Monopolies and Mergers Com- mission of a bid by British Sky Broadcasting for Manchester United. Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate, died, aged 68.
IRAQ SAID it would no longer co-operate with United Nations weapon inspectors; America spoke of air attacks as a possible response. President Bill Clinton of the United States lay low in the days before the congressional elections; it seemed to do the trick, for the Democrats did not suffer their expected losses in Congress. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia went on a recupera- tive holiday beside the Black Sea. Mr Yass- er Arafat, the President of the Palestinian entity, placed under house arrest Sheikh Ahmed Yessin, the wheelchair-bound lead- er of the Islamic militant guerrillas, Hamas, who claimed they had been behind the sui- cide grenade attack on an Israeli school bus last week in the Gaza strip. Hurricane Mitch hit Nicaragua and Honduras killing perhaps 7,000 people in mudslides and floods. Sixty teenagers died in a fire at a Hallowe'en disco in Gothenburg, Sweden. Mr John Glenn, who orbited the Earth In 1962, returned to space, aged 77, in the shuttle Discovery. A peace treaty was signed by the two sides in the civil war that has split Guinea-Bissau for five months. In Nairobi both Kenya Breweries and Castle Brewery, its South African rival, have com- plained that posters advertising their wares had been defaced. The European Commis- sion recommended a ban on the export of beef from Portugal where 67 new cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy have been reported this year. In India, people began to hoard salt, fearing shortages of the kind that have recently sent the price of
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