Portrait of the week
Mrs Thatcher issued a statement celebrating five years in office which despite its vague phrasing was taken to mean she meant to spend another five years in office. A Commons Select Committee re- jected the idea of further cuts in the size of the steel industry, but steel workers from Ravenscraig in Scotland feared that irreparable damage would be done to their plant through lack of coal, and appealed in vain to the miners to allow a second trainload a day through. Mr Arthur Scargill urged strikers to 'raise the whole tempo' of the campaign against pit closures. Instead the Nottinghamshire miners demonstrated against the strike, and more miners reported for work than at any time since the strike began, 52 out of 173 pits producing coal. Mr Neil Kinnock nevertheless sup- ported the call by the Labour Party's Na- tional Executive Committee to constituency parties to back the strikers with a 50p week- ly levy of members, and said that if he were a Nottinghamshire miner he would go on strike. Teachers began 'industrial action' in 20,000 schools after rejecting a 4.5 per cent pay offer. Nurses booed Mr Fowler, Social Services Secretary, demanding information about their delayed pay rise. Mr Len Mur- ray, General Secretary of the TUC, an- nounced that he would retire in the autumn. Mr Tiny Rowland said he would withdraw all financial support from the Observer, but later changed his mind, patched up his quarrel with the paper's editor, and attack- ed the independent directors. The New Ireland Forum produced its long-awaited report. Mr Tam Dalyell was suspended from the House of Commons after accusing the Prime Minister of lying.
president Reagan went to Peking, his I first visit to a communist country ex- cept for a stroll in East Berlin, and made a broadcast for Chinese television. Before transmission his hostile remarks about Russia, and favourable ones about God, were censored. The Pope began a ten-day tour of the Far East. The Revd Jesse Jackson became the first black presidential can- didate ever to win an American state primary when he took the District of Col- umbia. Thirty British diplomats' wives and children left Tripoli singing Rule Britannia, followed the next day by the ambassador and his staff. Thirty Libyans were escorted from St James's Square to Sunningdale, where they were questioned by detectives before flying home to a heroes' welcome in Tripoli. MPs called for a public inquiry into events leading up to the siege, but Mrs Thatcher announced no more than an inter- nal review. The police narrowed the list of suspects in their investigation of the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher down to two Libyans: the Home Secretary told the Com- mons that both had diplomatic immunity.
A search of the embassy building revealed hidden weapons, and a spent cartridge in the room where the shooting occurred, which Libya accused Britain of planting. Eleven students hostile to Ayatollah Kho- meini entered the Iranian consulate, fought with staff, and were released with their hands tied. The son-in-law of the president of Bulgaria was found to have been in- volved in the shipment of huge quantities of Communist weapons to South Africa. David Kennedy, son of the assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy, died after an unhappy life aged 28.
/amount Basle, the great bandleader, died aged 79. The Queen opened the International Garden Festival in Liverpool. The English Tourist Board said the tourist potential of the M25 motorway had been underestimated, and called for a chain of tourist hotels, picnic sites and caravan parks round it. A bronze statue depicting Christ as a woman, criticised by senior clergymen, was removed from the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. Blonde secretary Shirlie Guy burst into tears after an industrial tribunal in Liverpool rejected her claim that she was groped 100 times by her boss. An inquiry opened into a property developer's plan to build a 20-storey tower block, designed by the late Mies van der Rohe, in the middle of the City of London. A librarian who killed his family and himself left a diary explain- ing that he had 'thought himself a poet', but had never succeeded in publishing a
The feminists aren't going to like this.'
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