He addresses the Welsh Conservative Party conference on Friday then a week later a

He addresses the Welsh Conservative Party conference on Friday, then, a week later, a local government conference in Birmingham. Tory sources see this second speech as an increasingly likely springboard.The two parties have the same number of Commons seats following the death last month of Labour MP Martin Redmond. Only if Labour wins in Wirral South will the Conservatives again be a minority.Campaigning continued yesterday when Mr Blair told his party’s local government conference he would reverse “the mismatch between spending on education and unemployment”.By-election report, page 4. The Conservative election campaign suffered an embarrassing set- back last night after revelations that one of the Prime Minister’s top advertising men has privately described him as the Tories’ “weakness”, writes Stephen Castle. Steve Hilton, an executive with M&C Saatchi and a leading force in Conservative campaigning, made the comments to a politics student. Mr Hilton is quoted as saying: “Major is undoubtedly our weakness. I expect Labour will go for Major in a big way portraying him as a wimp”.
He added: “Private polling is a myth about the Conservatives We often lie …

because it’s private no one knows anyway”.Mr Hilton is known to be on the right of the Tory Party and took part in John Redwood’s challenge against the Premier.Last night he said said he has “no recollection of this three-year-old private conversation”. Ironically he cited the party’s polling which, he argued, shows “that the prime Minister is trusted and respected for his leadership while Tony Blair is widely seen as a phoney untrustworthy charlatan”.. For anyone sitting ringside at the Las Vegas Hilton early yesterday morning, British time, it was an unnerving spectacle

Big boys are not supposed to cry, or so we are told. But Oliver McCall knocked that old chestnut on the head when, weeping buckets, he apparently had some sort of nervous breakdown and stopped fighting Lennox Lewis for the WBC heavyweight championship of the world.
Never has there been a more bizarre end to a boxing bout. The first sign that something was wrong with McCall, an American with a sorry history of drug abuse, came in the second round. Lewis caught him with a sharp left jab and followed up with some thunderous blows. McCall’s response was to drop his arms and whoop at Lewis.A round later, he burst into tears and turned his back on his opponent.

At the bell he refused to go back to his corner and instead spent the interval striding around the ring, grinning dementedly.It was deeply disturbing stuff. In the fourth, McCall repeatedly dropped his hands and walked away from a perplexed Lewis. The referee, Mills Lane, waved him on, so Lewis continued to throw punches at McCall, who just stood there.Incredibly, he did not succumb, but at the end of the round, Lane led him to his corner and ordered him to sit down. McCall told his corner team he did not want to go back out, then changed his mind.Once Lewis started to hit him again, he still made no attempt to fight back and Lane stopped the contest. A crying McCall then ran from the ring, ignoring his promoter, Don King. The Nevada authorities immediately said the purse of around $3m (pounds 1.9m) would be suspended, pending an inquiry.At a press conference without McCall afterwards, all the doubts surfaced about whether the boxer, who has been in rehabilitation since being arrested in December, had been physically and mentally fit to fight.”All I can think is that withdrawal symptoms suddenly caught up with him,” said George Benton, his trainer.Others accused King of pushing his boxer into the ring too early. King’s response was to turn on McCall, claiming he conned the WBC into letting the fight go ahead: “He bullshitted everybody and we’re mad about that.”n Prince Naseem Hamed added the IBF world featherweight title to his WBO crown when he overcame Tom “Boom Boom” Johnson at the London Arena last night.Hamed finished off Johnson with a right uppercut after two minutes 27 seconds of the eighth round when the referee stopped the fight, to give the remarkable young boxer his 25th straight victory as a pro.Reports, Sport, page 24.

Senior security sources believe the IRA is intent on at least one high-profile “hit and run” attack in Britain in the run-up to the general election, writes David McKittrick, Ireland Correspondent. With the IRA’s “England department” hard hit by a series of important arrests and seizures of material last year, they believe attacks will come not from terrorists based in England but in quick strikes from across the Irish Sea.
While today marks the anniversary of the Canary Wharf bomb which killed two men and ended the IRA cease-fire last February, the IRA has little record of marking such dates with more attacks. Nonetheless, security forces are on a high state of alert in Britain and in Belfast, where a stream of IRA attacks on army and police have, in recent weeks, narrowly missed inflicting casualties.Meanwhile, considerable police resources in Northern Ireland are being diverted into dealing with public order problems posed by loyalist protests. In the most prominent dispute, loyalists have picketed Catholic mass-goers in the mainly Protestant Co Antrim town of Ballymena for more than 20 weeks Focus, page 17. The European Commission is set to abandon its planned blanket ban on the sale of cosmetics that have been tested on animals, because of fears that it would break international trade rules.

Animal-rights campaigners have been angered by the move, accusing Brussels of putting commerce before the prevention of suffering caused by experiments, which are generally known as vivisection, on a range of animals.
David Bowles, RSPCA European officer, said: “We’re obviously disappointed that they are not going ahead with the ban. This shows that trade has won a battle over the raising of animal welfare standards.”Matthew Davis, head of campaigns for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, said: “This would be a backward step and very disappointing. It flies in the face of public opinion right across Europe and would be against the wishes of the European Parliament. It would be an undemocratic decision.”A European directive was passed in 1993, telling member states to remove animal-tested cosmetics from shops by 1998, and the commission was supposed to confirm the ban by the end of last year.