Portrait of the week
Despite almost universal agreement that .1-,President Reagan's Middle East peace plan had collapsed with the breakdown of negotiations between King Hussain of Jor- dan and Yassir Arafat, plus the assassina- tion of PLO moderate IsSam Sartawi while attending a meeting of the Socialist Interna- tional in Portugal, the President insisted that all was not lost and that he intended to persevere with his plan. Spain expressed ex- treme displeasure over a visit to Gibraltar by a flotilla of ships headed by the carrier HMS Invincible, with Prince Andrew aboard, and threatened to send its own ships to patrol the Straits of Gibraltar. After 80 circuits of the earth and five days in space, the second version of the US space shuttle, the Challenger, landed safely in California. A soldier was killed and his companion severely injured when their car, standing outside a pub in Omagh, Northern Ireland, was booby-trapped. France expell- ed 47 Soviet officials for spying, and Russia simultaneously ejected a British diplomat and the correspondent of the Financial Times in a tit-for-tat move against the earlier expulsion of a Soviet journalist and two diplomats in London. In the Argentine, former President General Leopoldo Galtieri was ordered to be confined to an army barracks for 60 days for criticising General Menendez, the commander on the Falklands, for failing to offer stronger resistance to the British counter-invasion of the islands last year. Meanwhile, relations of the British dead in the Falklands war at- tended a number of religious services hav- ing been transported to the islands in the chartered liner Cunard Princess, which is to be refurbished at a Maltese dockyard. The Ministry of Defence revealed that no ac- tion would be taken against a sergeant who had shot an Argentine prisoner to put him out of his misery when he was engulfed in flames as ammunition exploded after the action at Goose Green.
No progress was reported by police searching for the missing racehorse Shergar, owned by a syndicate led by the Aga Khan, nor was there any sign of the £7 million stolen from a Security Express depot in the City of London, despite an of- fered reward of 000,000. The Chief Con- stable of Manchester caused a sensation when he revealed that armed police patrols were mobilised in the city, although he later conceded that there had been no departure from the practice of arming police only when considered operationally necessary. After two men held up a bank in Bristol, a policeman was shot in the mouth, saved from more serious injury by his teeth, and a chase ensued in a stolen milk lorry along the M4 motorway until it was halted by a road block at Maidenhead: one man was charg- ed, and another was receiving hospital treatment. Staff of Sotheby's reacted angri- ly to a takeover bid by two American fur- niture manufacturers, who offered more than £60 million for the auction house. Chaos occurred in London when main line and Underground stations were closed and roads and bridges cleared of traffic during the rush hour while a wartime German bomb was dredged from the Thames near Waterloo bridge. Fourteen Ulster Protes- tant activists were gaoled for terrorist of- fences on the evidence of a 'supergrass' after a 21-day trial.
Hopes for a Laker-style regime of low transatlantic air fares were raised by an application from a US airline called the People Express for a £99 fare between Gat- wick and Newark, New Jersey. Members of a gang of robbers who employed a version of the Trojan Horse to rob trains were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment , at the Old Bailey. A bitter dispute broke out when the Minister for Consumer Affairs decided to withhold half the £6 million grant to the Citizens' Advice Bureaux until it had 'put its house in order': the threat was apparently not unconnected with alleg- ed activities by Mrs Joan Ruddock, chair- man of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarma- ment, and a part-time CAB worker. The prospective Conservative candidate for Cambridgeshire South-west, Mr Hugh Sim- monds, was rejected because of his wife's membership of the League Against Cruel Sports. Mrs Thatcher fuelled speculation that a general election might be held in June by holding a special meeting at Chequers to discuss the Tory manifesto, and•by arrang- ing to meet prospective Parliamentary can- didates, other, presumably, than Mr SO' monds. Corbiere won the Grand National at 13-1, the first winner to be trained by a
woman, Mrs Jenny Pitman. r
'He says he'll only throw his gun out if we agree to disarm.'
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