One grasped a pink Commons slip asking him to call Lady Thatcher urgently and said: I have a few other calls to make first

One grasped a pink Commons slip asking him to call Lady Thatcher urgently, and said: “I have a few other calls to make first…”But her message was having a telling effect “I have spoken to her,” one MP said. Have you got the name? Vote for William Hague to follow the same kind of government I led Vote for William Hague on Thursday. Have you got the message?”Tory MPs in the Redwood camp were also receiving the same treatment yesterday as Lady Thatcher tried to stop Mr Clarke snatching the leadership with the support of some Euro-sceptics.Tory MPs who voted for John Redwood in the second ballot seemed to be quaking in their shoes at the prospect of speaking to her. Remember his record.”
Dressed in cobalt blue, Lady Thatcher appeared outside the Commons to give her public backing to Mr Hague, in spite of earlier reports that she was unimpressed by the 36-year-old contender for the leadership, and preferred Peter Lilley or Michael Howard.Mr Howard and Mr Lilley looked on with Tory MPs as Lady Thatcher said Mr Hague would follow the style of leadership she had shown in office.Fixing her eye on a reporter who asked about the pact between John Redwood and Mr Clarke, she said: “I am supporting William Hague. The former prime minister was leaving no doubt in MPs’ minds that she was mounting a “stop Clarke” campaign, telling some of them: “Don’t touch Ken.

Baroness Thatcher was swinging wavering Conservative MPs behind William Hague last night in a decisive move to stop Kenneth Clarke from snatching the leadership with the support of Euro-sceptics. They would make it much easier for the evidence of frightened prosecution witnesses to be adduced.”Publication of the report coincides with the announcement of an interdepartmental review of the protection of witnesses, headed by Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, which will consider whether to let vulnerable witnesses provide written or video evidence to courts.. She was not called as a witness and the defendant was prevented from using evidence that she had initially described her attacker as “coloured”.Stephen Silber QC, the Law Commissioner responsible for the project, said: “We believe that our recommendations, if enacted, would be of assistance in many areas, including assisting in the prosecution of drug offenders. Because of the existing rule, evidence which tended to show that the defendant had not committed the murder he was charged with never reached the jury.In another case a white man was accused of assaulting a three-year-old girl.

But under the commission’s proposals, judges would be given the power to admit previous statements to the police as evidence. But the commission emphasises that the changes would help accused people as well as prosecutors and could help to avoid miscarriages of justice.Their report cites a 1994 case in which an eight-year-old witness had provided a statement to the police which contradicted the prosecution case The child was later unable to recollect the events. There should also be an additional discretion for the court to admit statements of absent witnesses in cases where the “interests of justice” require it, the commission says. The same rules would apply in rape cases where the victim is too traumatised to face her alleged attacker in court.The changes would operate as major new exceptions to the rule against hearsay evidence, which excludes evidence other than oral evidence from a person about what they saw or heard.The proposals are bound to attract criticism because the maker of a written statement cannot be cross-examined. Many prosecutions, particularly for drugs offences, are being dropped, wasting millions of pounds, because witnesses fail to turn up to testify, fearing reprisals from drug barons.
Under the proposals by the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform body, statements of witnesses later subjected to intimidation or the fear of intimidation would be allowable to be used by the prosecution in criminal trials in place of oral testimony.The changes would also enable more prosecutions to be brought against child sex abusers, abusers of mentally disabled people, and rapists.At present, prosecutions of alleged abusers often collapse or fail to get the go-ahead in the first place because the child victim is too young or a disabled person too disadvantaged to cope with the trial and cross- examination. Radical proposals to help frightened witnesses could mean a sharp increase in successful prosecutions of hard-drug dealers and sex offenders. They could also be driven into workplaces by one employee and taken home by another.Professor Ken Greenley, the course director, said: “We will design a vehicle that will perform a new role in London where most travel is concerned – with short runs at relatively low speed.”"Currently there is a lot of waste on the roads in terms of fuel used and the amount of space taken up.

A car is efficient when it is running along a motorway carrying four people. However, most of its life is spent parked outside the home or office, taking up space.”With such a radical re-design, much of the accepted wisdom regarding cars would need to be junked.The materials used in the car’s construction would have to be light enough to improve fuel efficiency but tough enough to withstand car crashes.The RAC believes that if a host of modern technologies were incorporated in one new “supermodel”, fuel consumption improvements of more than 200 per cent could be achieved without any loss of comfort, safety or performance.”Our vision for new improvements include `slippery’ composite cars with low air resistance, hybrid engines combining petrol or diesel and electric power, and a fast-acting catalyst to scrub out emissions,” said Richard Woods, the organisation’s campaigns manager.”The car we come up with may not become a reality for another 10 to 20 years, but we have to start somewhere.”We already know that people are less wedded to the idea of a car than they once were.”. It may not be everyone’s idea of motoring, but designers claim this is the shape of cars to come, writes Randeep Ramesh

Devised for the RAC by students on the Royal College of Art’s “vehicle design course”, the new car will be a cleaner, greener alternative to today’s roadsters.
According to the students’ short jaunt into the future, these beasts would be hailed by passing pedestrians on city streets which would then take them to their required destination. Dr Stephen Amiel of Islington, north London, said: “Penalising the sick because they are sick is to my mind an obscenitity.”. The vote in favour of charges was the highest recorded by the BMA for more then a decade.Dr Jonathan Reggler of Buckinghamshire told yesterday’s conference in London that billions of pounds poured into the NHS from taxation was not enough and never would be.Opponents of the proposal said the charges would be difficult to collect, expensive to administer and could threaten the doctor-patient relationship.

GPs said the NHS was seriously underfunded, but reluctantly conceded that charging patients pounds 10 a time for treatment, and more than double that for a home visit, was not the way to remedy the problem.
Responding to last week’s disclosure that the Government is considering extending patient charges as part of its review of the NHS’s hard pressed pounds 44bn budget, the British Medical Association’s annual conference of GPs yesterday reaffirmed its belief in a free service.However, almost a third of the 500 representatives backed a call for the imposition of new charges to raise extra funds and deter trivial demands. It’s an indication of what this type of research can achieve.”The greatest problem for people with cystic fibrosis now is the tremendous damage done over a number of years to the lungs.”This treatment reduces the inflammation which leads to further infection and eventually the lungs failing It could be a very, very significant treatment.”. Family doctors yesterday threw out proposals to charge patients for consultations, but cheered calls for measures to deter unnecessary visits to the surgery. A spokesman for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust said: “We are very excited indeed. It does not offer a cure, but it may prove to offer better control of lung disease.”Cystic fibrosis is the commonest serious genetic disease in Caucasian children, and it affects about one person in 2,000.The disease causes the mucus-secreting glands to go into overdrive, resulting in repeated attacks of bronchitis and affecting the pancreas Sufferers rarely live beyond the age of 30. However, the Dolly team was not involved in developing the transgenic cystic fibrosis drug.Phase one trials of the drug, which involved healthy volunteers, were successfully completed last month.Dr Ron James, the managing director of PPL, said: “We believe it is the first time that the UK authorities have examined a transgenically derived product, and it is a significant milestone for PPL.”The trial will be led by Dr Diana Bilton, consultant chest physician and head of the cystic fibrosis service at Papworth Hospital.She said: “This could potentially be very exciting news for cystic fibrosis sufferers.