He sat on the select committee, belonged to and worked for a number of organisations, including the London Drug Policy forum and the Steering Group on Drugs, and was chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drugs Misuse.A cultivated man who had enjoyed being, as he put it, “bag man to the Arts Minister”, Rathbone was also a happy traveller who belonged to a string of inter-parliamentary associations: Anglo-Japanese, Anglo-Jordanian, Anglo-Cuban (another piece of cheek to the Establishment) and to several groups involving the Middle East.By the 1990s Rathbone’s views had become unreserved. He held the noisy right-wing anti-Maastricht people, whose hostile briefing of the press and periodic rebellions did so much to undermine John Major’s government, in freezing and open contempt. His political career effectively ended with defeat in the 1997 general election at the hands of the voluble Liberal Democrat Norman Baker. The Liberals had been making progress in West Sussex for some time, having taken the county council in 1991.Rathbone became estranged from his party not long after.

Always a strong European, he carried this to the point of openly sponsoring the pro-European Conservative breakaway group of John Stevens, incurring a howl of displeasure form William Hague. In the excellent company of Julian Critchley, late of Aldershot, in 1999 Rathbone was expelled from the Conservative Party, but declined a pressing invitation to join the Liberal Democrats.Tim Rathbone’s death attracted real grief among people who had worked with him. “One of the nicest and most thoroughly pleasant people you could ever hope to meet,” said a fellow Tory MP (a Thatcherite). “The most wonderful chairman a small company could have, delightful, sensible, endlessly right in his judgements, could be tough but always charmingly,” said Wendy Stephenson, Managing Director of Sponsorship Consultancy, where Rathbone had been chairman since 1997.Edward Pearce. So, the Dome is not only the most publicised waste of public money in living memory, it has now been condemned, in a poll of architects and businessmen, as the ugliest building in the world.

No one is ahead of the third leader department in condemning the unimaginative exhibition the Dome once hosted, nor have we been enamoured of the inept management of the Millennium Experience. And along with every other observer not on the Government payroll, we have lamented the failed search to find a buyer for this prime piece of property. Its spike-punctured plastic shell has given birth to a thousand metaphors and made it a landmark on the Thames as the river winds its way from the Ferris wheel at the South Bank to the hooded winches of the Thames barrier. Ignore the spiteful comments of other architects, and celebrate this world-famous folly.. The British-born and educated Omar Sheikh has been found guilty of the murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and then killed by having his throat slit by a razor, after uttering the words: “My father is a Jew, my mother is a Jew, and I am a Jew.”

The British-born and educated Omar Sheikh has been found guilty of the murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and then killed by having his throat slit by a razor, after uttering the words: “My father is a Jew, my mother is a Jew, and I am a Jew.”
Mr Pearl, of course, was much more than that. He was a fearless and fair journalist who had a genuine curiosity about the Muslim world – a desire to understand it and to explain it to his readers.

His murder was more than the destruction of a single human being; it was an assault on the values of objectivity and fairness that underpin the best of Western journalism. It was also committed, in Mr Sheikh’s own words, in pursuit of “a decisive war between Islam and infidels”.What captures the interest of a British reader is that Mr Sheikh was born and educated in this country. Members of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee will get the chance to question the BBC’s leaders as soon as the report is published on Wednesday. “One of these, clearly, is journalists, some of whom are very knowledgeable about the BBC,” he said. The BBC was accused last night of dodging public scrutiny of its annual report after cancelling a press conference that last year embarrassed senior executives with questions on their pay.