PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`Is it true you're drifting apart?'
Mr Nigel Lawson's autumn statement pleased Conservatives, upset the Opposi- tion, and left the City unmoved. The Chancellor revealed that tax revenues were buoyant, while government borrowing as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product was declining. There was word of possible cuts in income tax. The Chancellor had earlier announced, after much public speculation, that the sale of shares in BP would go ahead. The Bank of England had agreed to cushion investors by offering to buy back BP shares at their then current trading value. In the wake of the stock market crash in London it was revealed that a trainee accountant on a salary of £11,500 p.a., Mr Anil K. Gupta, had run up more than £1 million worth of debt with the investment subsidiary of the National Westminster Bank. Mr Peter Brooke is to be the next Chairman of the Conservative Party. At the Court of Appeal six Irishmen convicted of the Birmingham pub bomb- ings 13 years ago began their appeal against life sentences for murder. Sir Philip Woodfield, a former private secretary to three Prime Ministers, was appointed as part-time ombudsman for the security ser- vices. The Booker Prize for fiction was won by Penelope Lively for her novel Moon Tiger. French authorities seized a 150-tonne haul of arms, ammunition and explosives from a vessel off their coast believed to be in transit from Libya to the IRA. A cross-Channel ferry had to return to port to unload 238 people after it was found to have exceeded the limit on the number of passengers it may carry. Nigel Mansell's hopes of winning the racing drivers' world championship ended after a crash during practice for the Japanese Grand Prix. Lord Cobbold, Governor of the Bank of England from 1949 to 1961, died.
THE Soviet Union and the United States have agreed upon a date in early Decem- ber for their arms' control summit in Washington. Launching the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mr Gorbachev publicly de- nounced Stalin's terror and stressed the need for sweeping social and political reform. In Peking, the Chinese Communist party confirmed that Xhao Xiyang would be the new Communist Party General Secretary on the retirement of Deng Xiaoping, whose supporters succeeded in replacing the old guard with a much younger Politburo, the central five mem- ber standing committee of which now has an average age of 63; previously it was 77. Following President Reagan's failure to appoint Judge Robert Bork to the US Supreme Court, he announced a new nominee, Judge Douglas Ginsburg. Ten- sion continued to rise in Kuala Lumpur between the country's dominant Malays and the large ethnic Chinese minority. The Prime Minister, Mr Mahathiar bin Moha- mad, cracked-down hard on his political opponents, saying that they were testing the government's 'liberalism' at a bad time. Hundreds of climbers and tourists were trapped in the environs of Mount Everest following a series of violent storms. Woody Herman, the celebrated band-leader, Andre Masson, one of the last survivors of the Surrealist movement, and Rene Leves- que, former Premier of Quebec and ardent
Previous page
