PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`Jump!'
Sylvia Heal won the Mid Staffordshire by-election for the Labour Party by a majority of 9,499, a swing of 21 per cent from the Tory party. It was thus registered as the largest Labour by-election victory for over 50 years, and caused something of an upset for the Government, leading to a number of murmurings about Mrs Thatch- er's suitability as Tory leader. Mrs Thatch- er's position was not thought to be im- proved by a speech by the ex-Chancellor Nigel Lawson urging the Government to join the EMS exchange rate mechanism as soon as possible to prevent the downward slide of sterling compromising the fight against inflation. On the tenth anniversary of his inauguration as Archbishop of Can- terbury, Dr Robert Runcie, announced he will be retiring on 31 January next year, eight months before he would have been forced out of the job by his 70th birthday. Vaclav Havel, the playwright and Czechos- lovak President, made a visit to Britian to lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and to meet the Queen and Mrs Thatcher. Mr Havel said in a speech that un- der the communist regime his country sold 1,000 tons of Semtex to Libya, enough, he claimed, to supply terrorists for 150 years. David Waddington, the Home Secretary, announced that the Devon and Cornwall police will reopen their investigation into the case of the Birmingham Six. Viscount Linley appeared in court in his libel action against News (UK) Ltd over an article that appeared in the newspaper Today claiming that he was banned from a pub in Chelsea for a 'childish beer-throwing incident'. Meanwhile, the Duchess of York gave birth to another daughter. Lord Roths- child, the polymath, secret agent and think-tanker died aged 79, and Allan Roberts, the Labour MP for Bootle, died of cancer at the age of 46.
PRESIDENT Gorbachev sent troop re- inforcements into Lithuania as the Lithua- nian President, Vytautas Landsbergis, re- mained adamant that his state's recent declaration of indpendence was valid. Moscow sent in paratroops, who occupied buildings claimed by the Communist Party. In addition, the Kremlin levied a ban on all foreign journalists entering the region ordered some diplomatic staff to return home and arrested Lithuanian deserters from the Soviet army. However, Mr Gor- bachev assured the West that force would not be used by Moscow in order to reassert its authority in Lithuania. At the same time the Communist Party of Estonia took the opportunity to disaffiliate itself from the Soviet Party. The first free elections to be held in Hungary since 1945 ended in an indecisive result with the Democratic Forum notching up around 25 per cent of the vote and the liberal alliance of Free Democrats registering about 22 per cent. In the Australian general election Bob Hawke was thought to have narrowly secured an unprecedented fourth term as Prime Minister. A riot in a township in Transvaal ended in the deaths of eight people when police opened fire on a crowd protesting illegally against poor living con- ditions. A fire in a nightclub in the Bronx district of New York killed 87 people; police arrested a suspect. Eight nuns sold their convent in the centre of Bruges, Belgium, bought a Mercedes and motored down to the Pyrenees, where they are believed to have bought a couple of prop- erties and a number of racehorses.
RJC
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