PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Relaunch Mr Robin Cook, the Foreign Secre- tary, was said by his ex-wife in a book to have drunk too much, have had half a dozen affairs and like Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, have sold his soul to the Devil to get elected in 1997. Mr Blair was said earlier to have saved a man from drowning off the Seychelles by hauling him into his dinghy, but the man, a Dane, said he merely asked for a lift because he was `lazy'. Mr Peter Mandelson was made Mr Blair's 'personal representative' to meet a delegation of Germans. Mr Mandelson's successor as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Mr Stephen Byers, was said on television news to have fathered a son 28 years ago; but this was neither new news nor said to be of any significance. Interest rates were cut another quarter a percentage point to 6 per cent. British American Tobacco is to pay £5 billion for Rothmans to form the third largest cigarette manufac- turers in the world. The Marquess of Bris- tol, who sold his estate to buy drugs, died, aged 44. Brian Moore, the novelist, died, aged 77. Naomi Mitchison, the novelist, died, aged 101. A slice of Beachy Head 50 feet deep and 200 yards long fell into the sea.
THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT con- sidered the future of all 20 European Corn-
missioners after wide-ranging accusations of fraud and mismanagement at the Euro- pean Union executive. But in a move to save the commissioners by promising action against future fraud, Mr Jacques Santer, the president of the commission, made an alliance with Mr Gerhard Schroder, the Chancellor of Germany, which is serving for six months as president of the EU. The United States Senate convened for the trial of President Bill Clinton and began by debating how to proceed. Mr Clinton was found, by a deoxy-ribonucleic acid test, not to be the father of a baby of a black prosti- tute. American warplanes fired on missile batteries in northern Iraq. In St Charles, Missouri, a judge, sentencing to life impris- onment a man who injected his own son with HIV-infected blood, said: 'I believe when God finally calls you, you are going to burn in hell from here to eternity.' After having been asked if it was to blame for the deaths of three British tourists killed in a shoot-out with kidnappers, the government of Yemen arrested five men with British passports on terrorist charges; meanwhile another Briton was abducted. The Kosovo Liberation Army abducted eight Serb sol- diers; Serb tanks shelled positions held by the ICLA in the mountains. Poland has recorded 172 deaths in the cold this year, mostly men who had drunk too much; the
total for the whole of last winter was 54. The Philippines called for a meeting between the claimants for ownership of the Spratly islands in the South China Sea; these are the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei. Dublin Cor- poration, which introduced wheel-clamping three months ago, now has 30 unclaimed motor-cars on its hands.
CSH
❑ The family of the late Patrick Gordon Walker, Labour foreign secretary, 1964-65, has asked us to point out that Peter Pater- son's article, 'Harold was a toper too', last week, was in error in stating that all three foreign secretaries in the 1964-70 Labour government were convicted of drunken driving after leaving office. A newspaper item around the time of the other ex-for- eign secretaries' convictions said that were Patrick Gordon Walker to be convicted of drunken driving, this would make a 'full house' of convicted Labour ex-foreign sec- retaries. The Gordon Walker family sug- gest that 'it would have been easy for this piece to have lodged in the subconscious of Peter Paterson — normally scrupulously accurate and well-informed — as an impression that Patrick Gordon Walker had been convicted.'
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