PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK M iss Ruth Kelly resisted pressure to
resign as the Secretary of State for Education after it was learnt that a minister had approved the employment in a school of a man who had been put on the sex offenders register after being cautioned by police for gaining access to child pornography on the internet. Other examples emerged, and it became clear that the categorisation of offenders and the clearing of them for work in schools was complicated and uneven. One man, aged 59, who was allowed to teach at a boys’ school by Miss Kelly, had been convicted for the indecent assault of a 15year-old girl in 1980; he said, ‘I am not a paedophile. I am not a risk to children.’ There was a general game of hunt the issue, since Miss Kelly is also engaged in pursuing the Prime Minister’s educational reform policies against the opposition of Labour backbenchers. The government then decided to take decisions about the employment of sex offenders away from ministers and ask experts instead. The government published proposals to legalise two or three prostitutes working in one brothel. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech that the Union flag should be planted ‘in every garden’. Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, paid a few thousand pounds in council tax that he had inadvertently overlooked as due on the flat allowed him in Admiralty House, Whitehall. The number of unemployed rose by 111,000 to 1.53 million between last September and November. A solicitor was stabbed to death by two young black street robbers near his home at Kensal Green in London. Mr George Galloway, the Respect party member for Bethnal Green and Bow, spent his time locked in the Celebrity Big Brother studio undertaking tasks such as remaining in a cardboard box for quite a long time and pretending to be a cat licking milk from the hands of Miss Rula Lenska, 58, the actress. The government said it was considering lifting the ban on tapping MPs’ telephones that was brought in by Harold Wilson.
Members of the Security Council of the United Nations expressed ‘serious concerns’ about Iran pursuing nuclear capability. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, said, ‘Nobody mentions that Israel has 100 nuclear weapons in stock.’ The Iranian President, Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said his country would hold a conference on the evidence for the wartime Nazi genocide of Jews. Austria sold Iran 500 HS50 Steyr-Mannlicher rifles, which can fire armour-piercing incendiary bullets. Israel agreed to allow Palestinians in east Jerusalem to vote in the elections on 25 January, but would not let candidates for Hamas stand. Mr Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader with a fortress in the Chouf mountains of Lebanon, called on Syrians to overthrow their president. Judge Rizgar Amin resigned from hearing proceedings against Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. ‘Surely God is mad at America,’ Mr Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, said on Martin Luther King Day. ‘He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane.... Surely he doesn’t approve of us being in Iraq under false pretences. But surely he is upset at black America also.’ An aerial attack sponsored by the United States Central Intelligence Agency killed 17 people, including women and children, at the village of Damadola in Pakistan, four miles from the Afghan border; it was intended to have killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the reputed second in command of al-Qa’eda, who had been invited to dinner there for Eid al-Adha. In Afghanistan, a suicide-bomber on a motorbicycle drove into a holiday crowd watching a wrestling match at Spin Boldak, a crossing point into Pakistan, killing at least 20. The Emir of Kuwait since 1977, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, died, aged 79. Chile elected a socialist, Miss Michelle Bachelet, aged 54, as president. A fourth child died of avian influenza in Turkey out of 20 cases there among humans. CSH
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