PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The Conservative party manifesto promised tax relief for couples one of whom stayed at home looking after a dependant. Earlier, Lady Thatcher, the for- mer prime minister, had said, in an article in the Daily Telegraph: 'The whole of Mr Blair's strategy in creating the boneless wonder that calls itself "new" Labour is to reassure the electorate in its illusion. But illusion it remains. The only real choice at the next general election is between Con- servative policies and soft socialist policies.' Until then the Conservative election cam- paign had been submerged by newspaper accusations under the indiscriminate head- ing of sleaze. The Labour candidate for the constituency of Tatton said he might stand down to annoy Mr Neil Hamilton, who has been accused by Mr Mohamed Al Fayed and by the Guardian of taking money from Mr Al Fayed to ask questions in the Com- mons. Mr Tim Smith stood down as Con- servative candidate for Beaconsfield because he had taken money from a lobby- ist to ask questions. Mr Piers Merchant was accused of a brief dalliance with a 17-year- old nightclub hostess; pressure from Mr Brian Mawhinney, the Conservative party chairman, and from Mr Michael Heseltine, the First Secretary of State, as he likes to be known, was put on his constituency party to ditch him as their candidate, but the attempt backfired. The chairman of the Scottish Conservative party did resign, and then said he might have had a brief homo- sexual encounter some years ago. Mr Allan Stewart withdrew his candidacy for the con- stituency of Eastwood after having been driven to a breakdown by tittle-tattle about a heterosexual friendship. A 1,000-lb bomb was planted by the Irish Republican Army in Co. Down. An IRA training camp with an underground firearms range was discov- ered in Co. Monaghan, in the Irish Repub- lic. A policeman was shot in the leg by a sniper in south Armagh. A 90-lb bomb in a beer keg was left by loyalist terrorists in the back of a hijacked taxi outside a Sinn Fein office in Belfast. Cambridge won the Boat Race.
THE United Nations is to send a force to guard food being given to Albania. Twenty people were killed in one gun battle in the country and an uncertain number died when one of the many ships carrying refugees to Italy collided with an Italian warship. In response to new Jewish settle- ments in East Jerusalem, two suicide bombers killed only themselves in Israel. Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians. Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, said he was considering forming a government of national unity. In Cambodia 12 were killed and more than 100 injured by a grenade attack on an opposition rally led by Sam Rainsy, head of the Khmer National Party, outside the National Assembly in Phnom Penh. President Alex- ander Lukashenko of Belarus promised in a television broadcast to make his rule stricter: 'People are saying: Mr President, give us dictatorship. Give us Stalin's times.' Thirty-nine members of a cult were found dead in a house north of San Diego, Cali- fornia, after eating poison mixed with apple sauce; they had expected to reach a higher level than the human with the help of beings from a UFO whose coming was marked by the Hale-Bopp comet; they had a web-site called Heaven's Gate on the Internet. The defence counsel for Timothy McVeigh, who is charged with blowing up offices in Oklahoma in 1995, killing 168, said that the detonator had been supplied by Sinn Fein; Mr Gerry Adams, its presi- dent, said that was 'preposterous rubbish'. The 194 inmates on death row at Isanya prison in Tanzania, some of whom have been awaiting execution for 15 years, asked to be hanged immediately or set free. Ethiopian cattle-thieves killed 80 Kenyans including 19 policemen in a cross-border raid. In Strasbourg a demonstration by 40,000 against the French National Front ended in a riot and looting spree. Fifty workers died when a dormitory collapsed at a Hong Kong-funded electronics factory in
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