PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Farce
Mr Nick Brown, the Chief Whip of the Labour party, began an inquiry into the suicide of Mr Gordon McMaster, the MP for Paisley South, amid a flurry of accusa- tions concerning malpractice, corruption and drug-laundering among Labour politi- cians in and around Renfrewshire. Although Mr Tommy Graham, the Mem- ber for Renfrewshire West, was accused of none of these, he was suspended by the Labour party. Mr John Prescott, the strangely styled Secretary of State for Transport, Environment and the Regions, and also Deputy Prime Minister, made a little joke by holding up a jar containing a Chinese mitten crab in front of a crowd of reporters and saying, 'You know what his name is? He's called Peter. Do you think you will get on the executive, Peter?' Mr Peter Mandelson is seeking a seat on the Labour National Executive. Mr Chris Smith, the strangely styled Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said that a planned British Academy of Sport would make no provision for cricketers or for other team games. Shares fell sharply: on the FT-SE index by 126 points in one day. In one weekend 118 Somalis arrived at Waterloo station on the Eurostar train without papers. Police found 10 lbs of Sem-
tex in a lock-up store in Fulham. The High Court ruled it unlawful to send girls to women's prisons. Asfordby coalmine, the last in Leicestershire, is to close after only two years in production; though £300 mil- lion was spent on its development, it is operating at a loss, largely because of geo- logical difficulties. The railway regulator threatened to impose penalties of hundreds of thousands of pounds if telephone enquiries about services are not answered better; in May only half the enquirers got through. Diana, Princess of Wales consult- ed a clairvoyant; she hoped to make her visit unobtrusive by landing in a helicopter with Mr Dodi Fayed, a friend, in the middle of a Derbyshire village, but she was noticed by a little girl with a camera whom she told: `Go away.' She then went off on her third sea-cruise of the month.
DURING the celebration of India's 50 years of independence, ten railway stations were burnt down by separatists from Naga- land, Assam and Tripura. Mr Inder Kumal Gujral, the Prime Minister of India, warned the Queen not to make a planned visit to Amritsar, the scene of a massacre by British troops in 1919. Israel agreed to release $12 millions of tax revenue to the Palestinians in return for their help in investigating last month's suicide bombing in a Jerusalem market, which killed 16. Mr Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the political face of the Irish Republican Army, is to be granted a diplomatic visa to visit the United States. The evacuation of the remaining 4,000 people left on the island of Montser- rat, where an erupting volcano began to exhibit increasingly dangerous behaviour, was announced by Mr George Foulkes, the British Minister for International Develop- ment; but the evacuees protested that no specific monetary arrangements had been settled by the British government. TWo Russian astronauts returned to Earth from the space-station Mir and two replacements joined Dr Michael Foale to find the leaks in it; then the station's computer failed, throwing it out of orientation and depleting its capacity to collect solar energy. A grain silo at Blaye, on the Gironde, exploded; there were 20 casualties. An American supermarket is suing a cash register suppli- er for allegedly providing computerised tills that cannot recognise the year 2000. All but one of the 12 penguins in Dublin Zoo died of a mysterious ailment.
CSH
Previous page
