PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Man with hornets' nest British Airways made a surprise bid of £237 million for their arch-rival British Caledonian. The chairmen of the two airlines shook hands on the deal and waited to see if the Government would clear it. Lord King, BA's Chairman, said that the new 'mega' airline would be able to compete with the American giants. Ian `Mr Goldfinger' Posgate, the former Lloyd's underwriter, was arrested as part of an investigation that the City police have been undertaking for the past five years into an alleged £55 million fraud. Five policemen were sentenced to jail after having conspired for almost three years to cover up an attack that they made on five innocent schoolboys. The South Yorkshire coalfield was again the scene for 'pit anarchy', as British Coal put it. Miners at the Frickley colliery went on strike and `picketed out' ten other pits while miners in North Yorkshire were busy establishing a productivity record of tonnes per man shift. British Coal has decided to grant sole negotiating rights for the new Midlands `superpit' at Hawkhurst Moor to the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Iranians in London asked for greater protection fol- lowing a bomb attack on the car of a leading opponent of the Khomeini regime. Nick Faldo won the Open golf cham- pionship at Muirfield by one stroke. He is the sixth Briton to win the championship since the war. The Leonardo 'Cartoon' in the National Gallery in London was dam- aged when a shotgun was fired at it. The actor Alfie Bass, Bootsie of the television series 'Bootsie and Snudge', died. In Kingston, Jamaica, Mrs Thatcher said that she understood why young people were so moved by a song of Bob Marley's called `Get Up, Stand Up', with 'its call to people to believe in their own dignity and effort'. Mr Jeffrey Archer's play Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, is solidly booked more than a month before it opens in Bath.
IT IS now 38 days since Charles Glass, a regular contributor to the Spectator, was seized by gunmen in Beirut. Another hostage, Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy, has been missing for exactly six months. Political and military tension in the Middle East increased dra- matically: France and Iran broke off di- plomatic relations; an American naval convoy was made ready outside the Straits of Hormuz to defend Kuwaiti tankers flying the US flag in the Persian Gulf; the three Royal Navy warships in the area — Active, Broadsword and Cardiff— have been given orders to defend them- selves. Iran announced that it would turn the Gulf into a 'graveyard for the Amer- icans or any other aggressor forces'. At the United Nations the Security Council voted for a mandatory ceasefire in the seven-year war between Iran and Iraq. In Washington Admiral John Poindexter took full blame for the illegal diversion of profits from the Iran arms deal to the Nicaraguan Contras: `The buck stops here with me. I made the decision,' he told the congressional investi- gating committee. It remains to be seen how far he can draw fire from the Presi- dent. Mrs Thatcher visited the United States where she explained to American television viewers that their country is 'the flagship of freedom and must sail into the sunrise and not look back to what may or may not have happened'. Recently pub- lished research into the origins of the universe has suggested that four to six billion years needs to be lopped off the currently accepted date — 16-18 billion years — for the 'big bang'. A Syrian astronaut being sent into space by the Soviet Union will carry with him a copy of the earliest known alphabet, found at
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