PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Night falls on Clapham Common Mr Ron Davies, the Secretary of State for Wales, resigned because he said he had made 'a serious lapse of judgement' in accepting a lift from a stranger on Clapham Common in London, a notorious haunt of homosexual men; in Mr Davies's case no sexual encounter was involved, but he was robbed at knife-point and had his car stolen. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, agreed that he was quite right to resign. President Carlos Menem of Argentina visited Britain; he regretted but did not apologise for the Falklands war, and Mr Tony Blair announced he did not want to discuss the Falklands; Mr Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, said he hoped one day that Britain might allow herself to sell arms to Argentina. General Augusto Pinochet, the former President of Chile, spent another week languishing under arrest in the Lon- don Clinic while lawyers wrangled about a writ for his extradition to Spain on charges of genocide; Switzerland also attempted to extradite him. Mr Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, admitted he had failed to tell the Commons in an answer to a question that the General had visited Britain last year when Labour was in power. The Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles denied that they had 'authorised, solicited or approved' a book by Penny Junor which made disobliging claims about the late Diana, Princess of Wales, not only repeating rumours that it was she who was the first to commit adultery but also claiming that the Princess had telephoned Mrs Parker Bowles at night saying: 'I've sent someone to kill you. They're outside in the garden. Look out of the window. Can you see them?' Mr Stephen Byers, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said that he hoped that the Bank of England would make 'significant' inter- est-rate cuts, and earned for his pains criti- cism by the Opposition for interfering with the Bank's independence. Mr Alan Meale, now a junior environment minister, was said to have intervened in a planning application when he was parliamentary private secretary to Mr John Prescott. Nicholas Budgen, the Tory MP most proud of having had the whip withdrawn for his opposition to the Maas- tricht Treaty, died, aged 60. Eric Ambler, the thriller writer, died, aged 89. Lord Sains- bury, who saw the family grocer's chain introduce supermarkets, died, aged 96. Mr Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize with his novel Amsterdam. Floods and gales swept the land. Three buildings in the fashionable Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge, worth millions, fell down. A chip shop in New Cross, south London, exploded, injuring eight.
MR BENJAMIN Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, signed another peace treaty with Mr Yasser Arafat, the President of the Palestinian entity after talks at the Wye Plantation, Maryland, arranged by President Bill Clinton of the United States, helped in the last stages by the cancer- stricken King Hussein of Jordan; the agree- ment restates arrangements for turning over bits of land in Israeli-occupied territo- ry to Palestinian administration. Unarmed observers from the Organisation for Securi- ty and Co-operation in Europe began arriv- ing in Kosovo to see if the mainly Serbian armed police and soldiers of the Yugoslav army had stopped killing civilians and driv- ing them from their homes. In Zagreb a woman was stripped of the title 'Miss Croa- tia' that she had just won when it was dis- covered she was a Muslim. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, suffering from exhaus- tion, was ordered by doctors to cancel a trip to Austria and rest. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission pro- nounced the African National Congress during the apartheid era guilty of torture and unlawful killing, sometimes by 'punitive starvation'. An abortionist in Buffalo, New York state, was shot dead with a high- velocity rifle as he stood in his kitchen. China Central Television screened a docu- mentary showing dealers buying the bodies of dogs that had died of disease or acciden- tal poisoning in the countryside and selling sausages made from them in boom towns. CSH
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