PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Stand-up comedian Mr John Major, the Prime Minister, disowned Mr Stephen Darrell, the Secre- tary of State for Health, as unofficial spokesman on the British Constitution after he hazarded that a future Conserva- tive government might disband a Scottish Parliament if one had been set up in the mean time by a future Labour government. Lord Cranborne was taken up as a sort of Chief of Staff at Downing Street in prepa- ration for the next election. Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, resisted advice from the Governor of the Bank of England and from Treasury offi- cials to raise interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point lest inflation rise above the target level: 'It's not yet at the stage where we have to put the brakes on,' he said. The number of unemployed claiming benefit fell by 67,800 last month to 1,815,300, the lowest total for six years. The Labour Party's education spokesman, Mr David Blunkett, said that under his party's rule grammar schools would 'face no threat to their continuance, or to their ethos'; in 1995 he had said, 'Watch my lips. No selec- tion.' The Government announced changes in A-levels that would broaden the range of
subjects studied; it also proposed new tar- gets for children's success in tests at 7, 11 and 14 years old. MI5 warned the Serjeant at Arms of the House of Commons to expect an attack on the Palace of Westmin- ster by the Irish Republican Army; as a consequence he forbade entrance through the Carriage Gates on Parliament Square to journalists and secretaries. Two old ladies in a nursing home in Arbroath died of Escherichia coli food poisoning. More than 20 million people made telephone calls in an attempt to buy 200 tickets to America on Concorde for £10 in a British Airways publicity wheeze.
UNEMPLOYMENT in Germany rose by more than half a million in a month to 4,658,000. Unemployment in Switzerland rose by four-tenths of a percentage point to 5.7 per cent. The National Front won elec- tions for the town of Vitrolles in the south of France; the party now controls four town halls. There were riots in Coloured town- ships in South Africa sparked off by high bills for electricity supply. President Nelson Mandela made a speech promising action
on law and order and the privatisation of some state assets. Mr Viktor Cher- nomyrdin, the Prime Minister of Russia, attracted some criticism by shooting two bear cubs and then their mother as they came out of hibernation. The parliament of Ecuador dismissed President Abdala Bucaram, nicknamed El Loco (Madman) on the grounds of 'mental incompetence"; the Vice-President Rosalia Argeaga was allowed to take his place, though the Speaker of the Congress, Fabian Alarcon, also tried to take over, while the army stood by. Admiral Didier Ratsiraka was elected President of Madagascar; he had been to power for 16 years up to 1991. O.J. Simp- son, who had been found by a jury in a civil trial to be to blame for the death of his wife and her male friend, was ordered to paY $25 million in punitive damages. A man In New Zealand shot dead six and injured five in what seemed to be an incident of mad- ness in circumstances of family discord. A family at La Coruna in northern SpaM were found to have kept a daughter in a hole for 40 years, since she was four, but the author- ities initially remarked that otherwise she
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