PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
'We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' Oscar Wilde Athe Conservatives met in Blackpool for their annual conference, Mr William Hague, the Leader of the Opposition, placed his hopes in a reorganisation of the Conservative party, with a single, national structure and a place for members in choosing the leader. These plans were, he said, justified by a poll of party members; about 350,000 ballot papers had been sent out, of which 143,299 came back with votes in favour of Mr Hague's retaining office, 34,092 against, and another 12,000 sent in their ballots too late. Mr Hague disowned remarks by Lord Tebbit against a multicul- tural society. 'The reason I went to the Not- ting Hill Carnival was to demonstrate from the outset that the Conservative party wanted to bring people from ethnic com- munities into our party.' He had sent a message of support to the Gay Pride march, which Lord Tebbit opposed. Mr Hague was given a national popularity rat- ing in a Gallup poll even lower than that of Mr Michael Foot when he became Labour leader in 1980; only 6 per cent thought he would do the best job of the three main party leaders, 66 per cent preferred Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. The result of the poll at Winchester during the general election was declared void by the High Court; Mr Mark Oaten, who sits in the Lib- eral Democrat interest, had been declared the MP on a count that gave him two more votes than Mr Gerald Malone, a Conserva- tive. Now there will be another election in the constituency. Mr Blair went to Russia and appeared on a wireless soap opera called Dom 7, Podjezd 4 Mouse 7, Entran- ce 4'). The Queen flew to Pakistan, where she wore navy-blue socks in a mosque, and then planned to go on to Amritsar. Mr Mohamed Al Fayed strangely insisted that Diana, Princess of Wales had spoken last words in a hospital in Paris, despite the denial of a hospital executive and the nature of her fatal injuries. A report by the European Commission on Human Rights found that English law contravenes the European Convention by fixing the age of consent for homosexual acts higher than that for heterosexual acts; the government is now to give MPs a free vote on whether an age of 16 should be set. AL. Rowse, the historian, died, aged 93. Lady Brook, the founder of contraceptive clinics, died, aged 89. Headline inflation rose to 3.6 per cent, its highest for two years; the government target is 2.5 per cent.
ISRAEL freed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Hamas terrorist group, after eight years of his life sentence, and 22 other Palestinian prisoners in a deal intended to secure the release by Jordan of
two Mossad agents who had been captured during a botched attempted assassination of another Hamas leader in Amman. Islam- ic extremists attacked a town in Algeria with rockets. Turkey destroyed bases belonging to the Kurdistan Workers' Party in northern Iraq. The 23-member national board of the Basque nationalist party, Herri Batasuna, went on trial in Madrid on charges of co-operating with an armed group by using a video featuring members of Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, the Basque ter- rorists. The Canadian ambassador to Mexi- co resigned after having called Mexico's war on drugs 'a joke'. A million men belonging to the Promise Keepers, an evan- gelical Christian organisation, gathered in Washington in an act of witness. King Birendra of Nepal swore at Prime Minister Mr Surya Bahadur Thapa, whom he had previously jailed for eight months for pub- licly criticising the monarchy. The Romanti- ca, a Cypriot-owned cruise ship, caught fire off Cyprus and the 693 passengers and crew (including 120 Britons) were saved before she was gutted. In an effort to regain mone- tary stability, banks in the Philippines agreed to halt trading whenever the peso depreciates by more than 2 per cent in a day against the US dollar. The skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex was auctioned for $8 mil-
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