The Week

Britain lost a Foreign Secretary and gained an uncle: James Callaghan became the seventeenth British Prime Minister of the century and, whatever lies ahead, already

memorable by the circumstances of his election. He was the first Prime Minister to be elected by the Labour Party, the first to have held all three major Cabinet posts (Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary), the first to have made his Commons debut at Question Tune before the Chancellor opened his budget. The Labour election, of course,

gave Mr Healey no respite and he duly presented yet another budget—a conditional

(Me, dependent on TUC assent and co-operation.

The Chinese made unusually dissenting noises about their Premier. In the Square of Heavenly Peace in Peking, 250,000 'moderates' (which would make them well to Mr Bern's left) protested in favour of Chou En-lai's deposed successor, Teng Hsiao Ping, fought with troops and gave Chairman Mao another thought for his collection. Thirty-two Birmingham toolmakers who had received an unusual 'back to work' order from the union, rejected it, thought about it, talked and went back to work. While they were thinking and talking, the Pound slid. In the New Jersey Supreme Court, twenty-two-year-old Karen Quinlan's Roman Catholic parents won for her the right to die: for a year she had been in a hving-dead state in a mechanical respirator after allegedly mixing tranquillisers with alcohol.

In Britain it was reported that a fourteenYear-old girl in care had earned £100 a week as a prostitute. Later she went missing. Girls in care and social workers were under

scrutiny. Parents of a sixteen-year-old girl Were reported to be opposing a social worker s recommendation that she should be allowed to visit her imprisoned lover.

Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips

came out against the anti-foxhunting lobby, the Princess saying that people who went to work on an egg should think about how it Was produced. From Angola came news that .the notorious Colonel Callan, a former British paratrooper named Kostas Georgia, said to have ordered the execution of fourteen British mercenaries, was one of twelve captured mercenaries to be put on trial.

Mr Macmillan, Lord Hinton and Lord Clark became members of the Order of Merit.

British Rail sacked four employees and

Issued notices to twenty-three others for refusing to comply with the closed shop PuIleY and join a union. A farther seventytwo awaited sentence. The Commons Ex

penditure Sub-Committee unanimously declared that the latest White Paper on Public Expenditure was almost useless. Gaiety Girl Ruby Miller, of the champagne slipper and the stage-door Johnnie era, died aged eighty-six.

Fifty thousand people saw Red Rum beaten by the lighter-weighted Rag Trade in the Grand National. Rag Trade, owned by Teasy Weasy Raymond, was said by jockey John Burke—who had already won the Welsh National and the Gold Cup—to have gone round like a cat. Manchester United beat Derby 2-0 in one FA Cup semi-final and Southampton beat Crystal Palace 2-0 in the other.

Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery was laid to rest in a Hampshire churchyard after a full military funeral at St George's Chapel, Windsor. The Russian Defence Ministry was uncharacteristically generous about his part in the Second World War and sent a special representative to the funeral.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk 'resigned' as Cambodia's titular head of state; President Ford stayed away from the premiere of All the President's Men. The Lebanon lapsed into an uneasy cease-fire.

Western India's premier state, Maharashtra, was reported to be introducing compulsory sterilisation of people with three or more living children. The RSPCA appealed in Britain for an increase in the cost of dog licences. The South Africans were said to be thinking of freeing Nelson Mandela from the Robben Island prison, off Cape Town, where he has spent the last twelve years.

A homosexual vicar became head of the new Gay Christian Movement. In Rome the Pope referred to an accusation by French writer Roger Peyrefitte that he was a homosexual as 'a horrible and slanderous insinuation'. The film, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, won five Oscars, and author Ken Kesey announced he was suing the makers. His screenplay had been thrown out, he had been paid £3,000 and he had signed away the film rights, he said, as a young author. Tycoon-recluse Howard Hughes, aged seventy, died from kidney failure in a plane taking him to Houston for hospital treatment.

The Department of Prices and Consumer Protection warned do-it-yourself enthusiasts and everybody else of the dangers of asbestos causing lung cancer and asbestosis.

Britain won the Eurovision Song Contest with a rendering by the Brotherhood of Man of 'Save your kisses for me.' The French were second but seventeen points behind. The Turks inserted a patriotic song for domestic consumption in place of the Greek entry, which they found insulting.