2 |

April 28 - May 4 2010

News

The Telegraph

μNews

PAGES 2-13

μWorld News PAGES 14-17

μComment PAGES 18-21

μ Letters

PAGE 20

μObituaries PAGES 22-23

μ Features PAGES 24-26

μCulture

PAGES 27-28

μExpat Life PAGES 29-32

μBusiness PAGES 33-37

μClassified

μPuzzles

μSport

PAGE 38

PAGE 39

PAGES 40-48

NEWS P8

‘Brits are cool’ Dame Helen Mirren says Britons should not be cast as villains

FEATURES P26

Geneticist inherits a mystery Sir Paul Nurse reveals for the first time his search for his father

CULTURE P27

Ringo works it out The ex-Beatle on how he learned to cope with the band’s legacy

EXPAT LIFE P29

Investment trusts Far Eastern promise in China, India and Japan

LOTTO 21/04

LOTTO 24/04

10 2 16 19 33 45 1 4 12 23 33 40

Bonus Ball 30

Bonus Ball 35

There were five winners of Saturday’s £4.4m jackpot and two winners of Wednesday’s £2.4m prize

μEDITORIAL OFFICE: 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT. Tel (Int 44) 207 931 2000. Email weeklyt@telegraph.co.uk μADVERTISING: For details of local offices, contact Julie Bridge, Tel (44) 207 931 3290. Email julie.bridge@telegraph.co.uk. For further information from any advertiser in this issue, please email your contact details, the advertiser(s) and issue date to weeklytelegraphsubs@telegraph.co.uk μSUBSCRIPTIONS: Weekly Telegraph Subscriptions, 3rd-4th Floor, Victory House, Meeting House Lane, Chatham, Kent ME4 4TT. Tel (44) 1622 335080. Fax (44) 1634 815163. (Office hours: 09.00-17.00 GMT.) Email weeklytelegraphsubs@telegraph.co.uk μDELIVERY INQUIRIES: Australia: Network Services. Contact MAGSHOP. Tel: 136 116. Email magshop@magshop.com.au Canada: Vito Petrucci. Tel 001 416 585 3131. Fax 001 416 5855 476. Email vpetrucci@globeandmail.com Denmark: Bjarne Balle-Christiansen. Tel 0045 3296 8600. Fax: 0045 3296 8682. Email ipd@ipddk.dk Germany: Frank Blumhofer. Tel 0049 6105 925 573. Fax 0049 6157 804 599. Email fblumhofer@imd-delnet.de Hong Kong: Jeff Law. Tel 00 852 2756 8193. Fax 00 852 2799 8840. Email Jefflaw@foreignpress.com.hk Kenya: Shadrack Ochanda. Tel 0025 425 40280. Fax 0025 425 40295. Malaysia: Peter Lee. Tel (03) 7981 8563. Fax (03) 7981 9613. New Zealand: Netlink Subscriptions. Tel 0064 9 308 2871. Philippines: Denis Catangay. Tel 832 5383. Fax 831 3256. Email apcei@mnl.sequel.net Singapore: Doreen Tan. Tel 6282 1960. Fax 6382 3021.Email Doreen@carkitfe.com South Africa: Global News, 74 First Road, Kew 2090, South Africa. Tel: (011) 8872670/1. Fax 0865117067. Email: andy@globalnews.co.za Thailand: Khun Tai. Tel (02) 887 3331. Fax (02) 887 2259. United States: Marlon Johnson. Tel 1800 933 2147. μNEWSSTAND INQUIRIES: The Publisher, 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT. Tel (44) (0) 20 7931 3447 Š The Weekly Telegraph (USPS#006819) is published weekly for US$218 a year by Telegraph Media Group Ltd, 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT, England. Periodicals postage paid at Newark, NJ. POSTMASTER: Send all address changes to The Weekly Telegraph, c/o SDS Global Logistics, 263 Frelinghuysen Ave, Newark, NJ 07114-1539.

μDATA PRIVACY: When you respond to Telegraph Media Group Limited’s competitions, offers or promotions, we may use your information for marketing purposes. We will contact you by mail or telephone to let you know about any of our special offers, products and services which may be of interest to you unless you have asked us not to. We will only contact you by email, text message, or similar electronic means with your permission. We will only pass your name on to third parties if you have consented for us to do so. In some cases our special offers, products and services may be provided, on our behalf, by our partners. If you have agreed to be contacted by us, your personal information may be passed to our partners; however, in all such cases we remain a data controller of your personal information. When responding to competitions, offers or promotions by postcard, if you do not wish for your details to be used by us to send you special offers, please make this clear by stating “No Offers”. We respect your data privacy. You may modify your preferences or get further information by writing to us at Data Privacy, Telegraph Customer Service, Victory House, Meeting House Lane, Chatham, Kent ME4 4TT or by email to data. protection@telegraph.co.uk.

979

The Telegraph

By Andrew Porter and Robert Winnett DAVID CAMERON came back stronger in the second television debate last week as Nick Clegg again turned in an accomplished performance and Gordon Brown appeared to trail behind them.

Mr Cameron was more successful in engaging with the television audience than the previous week and repeatedly styled himself as a premier in waiting, beginning several answers with the words: “If I were your Prime Minister ...”

Mr Clegg again used the ploy of referring to “the old parties”, a line which inevitably seemed to lack the impact of the previous week. He also referred to President Barack Obama more than once in an attempt to assume the mantle of change.

However, the Liberal Democrat leader came under sustained attack over his policy not to renew the Trident nuclear missile system.

Mr Brown appeared more passionate than the previous week but spent less of the debate engaging with the audience and more of his time attacking his two rivals.

The debate, hosted by Sky News at an arts centre in Bristol, was more intense and the result harder to call. One early poll, by YouGov, put Mr Cameron in first place. However, another poll showed Mr Clegg to be the best performer and placed Mr Brown and Mr Cameron tied.

Mr Cameron was also forced to concede for the first time that he would be prepared to work with Mr Clegg in a hung parliament.

He said: “If it’s a hung parliament, we would do our best to make it work.” The Tory leader has previously refused to consider a hung parliament and said he was only concentrating on securing a majority.

With Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg appearing to pull away from Mr Brown, the prospect arose of the Liberal Democrats proving the main

Battling: David Cameron (left) and Nick Clegg at last week’s debate challenger to the Conservatives. However, because of the quirks of the electoral system, Mr Brown could come third in the vote and win the most seats.

Mr Clegg seemed unruffled by the pressure on him after the first debate and gave a dramatic lift to Liberal Democrat poll ratings.

An instant opinion poll, by ComRes for ITV, found that Mr Clegg won the debate, although by a smaller margin. The Liberal Democrat leader scored 33 per cent, with Mr Brown and Mr Cameron neck and neck on 30 per cent, with seven per cent undecided.

Both the Prime Minister and the Tory leader improved their standing on the previous week, when Mr Brown was said to have won by only 20 per cent of viewers, and Mr Cameron by 26 per cent.

‘Politics needs to change.

After a week I’ve had enough of Nick Clegg’

Mr Clegg’s performance was less impressive than during the first debate, which he won with 43 per cent.

But Mr Brown’s stronger performance failed to translate into support from voters, with only 24 per cent saying that they would vote Labour, the same figure as the previous week.

The Liberal Democrats continued to enjoy their extraordinary post-debate “bounce”. In the ComRes poll, 36 per cent of voters who watched the debate said that they would back Mr Clegg’s party on polling day, one per cent more than the previous week, pushing the Tories into second place with 35 per cent, down one point.

After a lacklustre performance at the first debate that has seriously threatened Tory chances of an outright majority at the election, Mr Cameron changed his tactics.

He was positioned to one side, unlike during the first debate, and was able to stand sideways on and refer to “the other two”, borrowing a tactic from Mr Clegg.

He became angry on several occasions, most noticeably when he accused Mr Brown of allowing Labour to peddle “lies” to scare pensioners about Tory policies for the elderly. He demanded Mr Brown withdraw the leaflets making the accusations.

The Tory leader rounded on Mr Clegg for his attempt to claim that Liberal Democrat MPs were less tainted by the

PA

expenses scandal.

He said: “Frankly Nick, we all had problems over this. Don’t anyone try to put themselves on a pedestal. We are all in this mess.”

Mr Clegg responded: “Of course, no one is blemishfree, people aren’t angels. But if you are to persuade people to invest trust in politicians, it is not enough to talk the talk and not walk the walk.”

All three said that there must be stronger rules to prevent abuses of parliamentary expenses. All three backed “recall” motions that would allow voters to sack MPs between elections.

Mr Clegg suffered a blow when he talked about Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. Real-time voter polls seemed to show they did not agree with his policy of scrapping Trident and replacing it with an unspecified weapons system.

That was the moment when one of Mr Cameron’s jokes finally worked.

In an echo of Mr Brown’s repeated refrain the previous week that he agreed with “Nick,” Mr Cameron said, “I agree with Gordon,” after the Prime Minister attacked Lib Dem defence policy.

On the issue of immigration, Mr Cameron accused the Lib Dems of proposing an amnesty for illegal immigrants. And he said Labour had failed to get a grip on immigration, saying that the Tory proposal for a cap on numbers entering the UK was the best solution.

The three leaders also clashed over Britain’s membership of the European Union. The Conservative leader said that voters had been “cheated” because there had not been a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty and promised a referendum on any future EU treaties.

Mr Clegg pointed out that Mr Cameron had also promised a referendum on Lisbon, but abandoned the pledge when the treaty was ratified.

Reports, pages 4-5 Comment, pages 19-21

Continued from page 1 the changing situation out there.”

There was increasing optimism in the Conservative campaign that momentum was returning to Mr Cameron. Opinion polls on Sunday showed the Tories on 35 per cent with the Lib Dems and Labour typically on 30 per cent or less.

This week is likely to see a return to a more traditional campaigning with the two main parties attacking one another. The Prime Minister accused the Tories at the weekend of being “morally wrong” and called on Labour supporters to “fight and fight and fight again”.

However, the party was hindered by disagreements between senior Cabinet ministers over the direction of the campaign.

There has been growing friction between Lord Mandelson, who is in charge of Labour’s election campaign, and Mr Balls, one of Mr Brown’s closest confidants. Mr Balls has urged Mr Brown to become far more forceful in his attacks on Mr Cameron while Lord Mandelson appears to favour building an anti-Tory coalition with the Lib Dems.

At the weekend, Labour was accused of a “desperate whinge” after it asked the other two main parties to sign a letter to television executives complaining about their election coverage.

Labour officials claimed that broadcasters have been devoting too much airtime to discussing the televised debates, in which Mr Brown has struggled, and not enough to dissecting the parties’ policies.

One Cabinet minister suggested that the party was at risk of a “historic defeat”. “The campaign is being run pretty badly by a small clique of people with very little input from anyone else. So what’s happening is that people are doing their own thing and the result is that we lack a coherent message,” he said.

In a BBC interview, Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, admitted to differences with Cabinet colleagues, including Mr Balls, on the key issue of electoral reform. “Not just Ed, there’s lots of my colleagues who are in a different place to me on things like electoral reform,” he said. telegraph.co.uk/expat

979

Matt Attack Check out our cartoon archive telegraph.co.uk/matt T

April 28 - May 4 2010

| 3

News

Going nowhere Stranded Britons stuck in Bangkok airport for nine days

By John Bingham and Laura Roberts VOLCANIC ash in the skies around Britain never reached dangerous levels during the crisis that stranded hundreds of thousands of air travellers, scientists said this week.

Researchers who analysed samples of powder collected during the six-day shutdown of British airspace confirmed that concentrations were only ever about one seventh of the

‘Do you think that pile of volcanic ash is our luggage?’

new safety limit agreed by aviation authorities. The blanket ban on flights was finally lifted on April 20.

The skies were closed after the Met Office published projections that appeared to show potentially dangerous levels of ash from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafyoll stretching as far as Russia. However, these included areas where the concentration of ash was as low as one tenth of

RESCUED BY WARSHIP

HUNDREDS of stranded Britons arrived back on home soil last week after two days on board HMS Albion with soldiers returning from Afghanistan.

Servicemen gave up their beds for civilians who were picked up in Santander, northern Spain, by the 570ft assault ship for the 40-hour journey back to Britain.

Among those who made it on to HMS Albion were a boys’ football team, a Girl Guide troop and the Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s parents, Stanley and Jenny, who had flown to Madrid after a trip to the Galapagos Islands.

Janis Brown, 58, who was returning from a holiday in Tenerife, said: “It felt like there was what has since been agreed to be dangerous.

One senior official in the Civil Aviation Authority admitted that the ash had often been “close to undetectable”.

Government agencies, including the CAA had agreed that planes should be allowed to fly unless ash concentrations reached a level of 2,000 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

But Prof Stephen Mobbs, the director of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, who was responsible for carrying out test flights, said that the highest level detected above Britain was around 300 micrograms in “patches”.

Jim McKenna, the CAA’s head of airworthiness, said: “At the start of this crisis there was a lack of definitive data. It’s also true that for some time the density of ash above the UK was close to undetectable.”

Airlines hoped to have collectively brought home 100,000 people by Sunday night but travel operators warned that up to 35,000 stranded British travellers could face another week abroad. Passengers stuck in destinations including Egypt, South Africa, Malaysia and Thailand – where there is also political unrest – were warned they could face longer delays.

A spokesman for the Department for Transport said: “Safety is paramount. The decision made by safety regulators to restrict airspace was made in line with long-standing international guidelines.”

a Dunkirk spirit on board. It was an experience we could never have bought.”

James Deacon, 33, and his girlfriend Sarah Scott, 29, made it home after spending five days travelling back from a two-day break in Hungary.

The holiday cost only £360 but the couple spent £800 taking trains from Hungary into Germany before finally catching a ferry from Dieppe to Dover.

Mr Deacon, a teacher from Brighton, said: “We have been sleeping in the aisles of carriages.”

Miss Scott, a GP from Haywards Heath, West Sussex, said: “We have spent the past days sprinting through German stations.”

Waiting game: the Foreign Office set up a desk for Britons delayed at Bangkok airport, where passengers found ways to pass the time

ANDREW CHANT

By Gordon Rayner and David Millward STRANDED air passengers were warned that they could face a lengthy battle to reclaim the cost of hotels and meals despite low-cost airlines agreeing to reimburse them.

Ryanair and bmi, which had previously said they would defy EU regulations by refusing to foot their customers’ bills, backed down after pressure from regulators.

However, the Air Transport Users’ Council, the official watchdog, said previous experience suggested that passengers caught up in the volcanic ash crisis might still end up out of pocket.

James Fremantle, the council’s industry affairs manager, said: “On previous occasions when we have had unexpected incidents we have had hundreds and thousands of examples where airlines haven’t paid out when they should do.

“We… have had hundreds of calls from people who are worried they won’t get their money back because they’re not getting any assurances from the airline staff.”

Even before the shutdown, airlines typically took four to six weeks to reimburse passengers for the cost of delays. Mr Fremantle also said that companies had failed to offer clear guidance on limits of what people could spend on meals and hotel rooms, with most saying only that “reasonable” claims would be repaid.

“The best advice we can give is for passengers to keep all their receipts, which they will have to submit when they get back,” he said. Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, who had previously said he would reimburse only the cost of the air fares, has now agreed that his company will reimburse the “reasonable receipted expenses of disrupted passengers”. He called the EU regulation “absurd and discriminatory” and blamed regulators for “wrongly” closing the skies.

It appears increasingly likely that the taxpayer will foot the bill for the £1.6 billion cost to the airline and tourist industries of the six-day shutdown. A letter to Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, signed by 12 of the most senior executives in the airline industry, said that, without taxpayer help, “serious long-term damage” was likely to occur, resulting in job losses.

telegraph.co.uk/expat

WTSUB09