UR TV CAST

Seven years after her fall, the Tory party still couldn’t manage to step out of Margaret Thatcher’s long shadow. Nobody yet knows how many MPs were influenced by her belated, and famously reluctant, 11th-hour backing for the new leader. But either way, the party has done her bidding: it defeated, much more decisively than most MPs, let alone the pundits, expected, a proven world class politician on a unity ticket. It elected instead an untried 36-year-old who comes into office, as only the fourth Tory leader in over 30 years, with youth, intelligence, energy and lots of problems. On Wednesday, its stock value slipped by barely a notch, in line with the rest of the market. The resolution urges “every Southern Baptist to take the stewardship of their time, money and resources so seriously that they refrain from patronizing The Disney Co and any of its related entities”.

The resolution is not a binding one and thus relies on all 15 million church members -which, by the way, includes President Clinton himself -hearing the message and acting on their consciences. Backers of the boycott believe that it will give church members a cause through which they will be able to express their concern not only about Disney but the erosion of public morality in general. “If Disney is under the misapprehension that this is only going to be a fly in their ointment, they are making a big mistake,” said Ted Baehr, who is chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission.So far, however, Disney is looking about as worried as Mickey Mouse on a spring picnic with Minnie. While Tony Blair’s enthusiasm was echoed by Nick Raynsford, the MP for Greenwich and minister for London, other senior ministers, seeing the business plan for the first time, wanted the project to be dropped. The review carried out in the past month by four consultants on aspects of the scheme such as transport, construction and visitor numbers was fundamental and could have led to cancellation.

A Hindu video shop owner’s plans to stock a controversial Bollywood film about the India-Pakistan war of 1971 prompted 300 Muslim youths to riot outside his shop, it emerged yesterday. Gewal Krishna, who has run Krishna Video, on Harehills Road in Leeds, West Yorkshire, for the past seven years, announced yesterday that he had decided not to stock the film, called The Border, which includes a scene where the Koran is shown in flames, after Wednesday night’s violence.
“It is not worth losing my business for and if I knew all this trouble would be caused I would never have considered it,” he said. The lingering memory will be of the bizarre Clarke-Redwood ticket, which had all the appeal that a Hattersley-Livingstone alliance to defeat Kinnock would have had back in 1983. In the public crannies of the House various spotty, pin-striped Tarquins with slicked back hair, cheered heartily as the result was made public. The panel also felt Japan could not guarantee that its ivory imports were received by licensed traders and ivory workers.Intitial proposals by the three countries to allow them to sell ivory to Japan were rejected in Harare earlier this week. Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana argued that they had healthy and growing elephant populations which needed to be kept in check. Her books continue to sell more than 8 million copies a year; Noddy alone has accounted for more than 100 million sales since his first appearance in 1949.Now his readers can relax in the knowledge that all charges against him are unjustified.

Those changes mean the Government now expects it will be forced to borrow pounds 7bn more from the money markets in five years time than the previous Chancellor, Ken Clarke, suggested in his final Budget last November.
Having fought the election campaign on a promise not to raise personal taxes, yesterday’s move increases the likelihood that business will bear the brunt of the Chancellor’s need to raise revenue. An attack on the tax credits enjoyed by pension funds now looks probable.The Government predicts similar but smaller shortfalls in all the next five years, providing ammunition for the Chancellor to clamp down on excessive requests from spending departments. His hard-line position was further bolstered this week by retail sales figures showing a continuing boom. Speculation is rising that interest rates will have to rise again to choke off demand.In a bid to present the changes as part of a move towards more open government, Mr Brown commissioned the independent National Audit Office to scrutinise the assumptions and received its endorsement yesterday.Mr Brown said yesterday: “Budgets must be built on honest foundations … It is the first time that any chancellor has opened up the Treasury’s forecasting assumptions to such open and independent scrutiny.”The main changes in the government’s assumptions are a reduction in its expectations for the long-term trend of economic growth, and a less rosy view of the savings that can be made from clamping down on social security fraud.The Government has also said it will not count on any privatisation proceeds until legislation is in place for any state sell-off, and it will use information from the financial markets to forecast interest rates rather than open itself up to claims of political interference by using Treasury experts to predict the cost of borrowing in future years.Finally, Labour has committed itself to using a more pessimistic assumption for the number of jobless than Mr Clarke who last year broke with tradition by forecasting a fall in the unemployment rate.Although presented as no more than a move towards greater transparency, economists in the City described yesterday’s announcement as “an exercise in public relations”.. With the staging a week ago of an electric parade through Manhattan to promote its newest animation feature, Hercules, the company ironically took brickbats from some New Yorkers for turning the city into a sanitised, middle-America themeland.At the same time, the exploitation for easy bucks of the offending episode of Ellen by ABC, which was bought by Disney 18 months ago, was flagrant. Every corporate stop was pulled out to foist the coming out of Ms DeGeneris on to the American public.