PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Lord Archer withdrew as the Conser- vative candidate for Mayor of London, and had the whip withdrawn from him, after admitting he had persuaded a friend, Mr Ted Francis, to lie for him during his libel suit against the Daily Star in 1987 by saying they had dined in a restaurant when Lord Archer had been dining there with a close woman friend, who was not the prostitute with whom Lord Archer had falsely been accused of sleeping but a former girlfriend of Lord Lucan. Mr Fran- cis sold the story to the News of the World, through the publicist Mr Max Clifford. The Labour party agreed to let Mr Ken Livingstone go on to the shortlist from which its candidate for mayor will be selected, but Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, immediately attacked him as a past 'extremist'. Londoners heard the bad news that mobile telephones will in future function in the Underground railway. Mrs Cherie Blair said that she was expecting a baby in May, at the age of 45; Mr Blair admitted, under embarrassing question- ing, that the child might have been con- ceived at Balmoral. Someone leaked details of a Tory party bank statement showing donations by Mr Michael Ashcroft, its treasurer, at a rate of £1 mil- lion a year, paid from his bank account in Belize, prompting the Times to claim it was a 'foreign' donation. Mr Mohamed Al Fayed caused some hilarity in the High Court, where Mr Neil Hamilton, the for- mer MP, was suing him for libel. Senator George Mitchell, the convenor of talks in Northern Ireland, returned to the United States convinced that the Ulster Unionists would sit in the same executive as Sinn Fein members even before any decommis- sioning of arms by the Irish Republican Army. The George Cross was awarded corporately to the Royal Ulster Constabu- lary, 302 of whose members have been killed in the last 30 years. Profits of the lottery operator Camelot for 24 weeks fell by 40 per cent to £22 million; the amount raised for good causes fell from £696 mil- lion to £633 million. Sainsbury's profits fell by 30 per cent. The European Union agreed to let British beef be labelled to show its country of origin. Quentin Crisp, the author of The Naked Civil Servant, died, aged 90.
RUSSIAN troops entered Grozny as thousands more Chechen refugees suf- fered in the cold weather; Chechen guer- rillas fought among the ruins of the city. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia told the Western powers not to interfere when he met President Bill Clinton of the United States of America and Other leaders at a conference on European security held in Istanbul. Mr Gerhard Schroeder, the Chancellor of Germany, condemned the hostile takeover bid by Vodafone for Man- nesmann; Mr Blair rebuked him. A Tai- wanese company advertised around Taipei German-made electric heaters with posters bearing the image of Hitler and the slogan beneath: 'Declare War on the Cold Front'. China launched and recov- ered its first spacecraft capable of carrying a man. A recorder aboard the EgyptAir flight that crashed on 31 October, killing 217, picked up the phrase 'Tawakilt ala Allah' CI put my trust in God') repeated 14 times, probably by the relief pilot, shortly before the aircraft went into its fatal dive. A Japanese airforce training jet crashed through a power line killing the two crewmen and cutting off electricity for three hours to 800,000 homes in Tokyo, where the stock exchange was suspended. Amintore Fanfani, six times prime minis- ter of Italy, died, aged 91. The Pope canonised 10 Spaniards and two Italians to bring to 296 the number of people he has declared saints in his 21-year reign. Israel ordered the slaughter of a million geese infected with Nile fever, which can be transmitted by mosquitoes to human beings with fatal consequences.
CSH
Previous page
