The Week V. 1016

What happened Campaigning in Britain’s most unpredictable election in decades formally began on Monday. After informing the Queen of the dissolution of Parliament, David Cameron gave a statement outside No. 10 in which he declared that voters faced a “stark choice” on 7 May: they could let him see through the job of “turning the country around”, or let Ed Miliband take it back to “square one”. Labour, he warned, would raise the tax bill for “every working family” by £3,000 – a figure the Tories were later forced to admit was a guess. Miliband launched Labour’s campaign by warning that the Tories’ EU policy threatened business (see page 43). Both parties came under pressure to be more forthcoming: Labour was asked to spell out its spending plans, the Tories…

What happened A Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes on Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen last week, heightening fears of a new proxy war between two of the Middle East’s military superpowers. Warplanes pounded targets in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, captured by the Houthi insurgents last year. But the raids failed to halt the rebel advance on the country’s main port, Aden, where fierce fighting was reported. President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who represents Yemen’s Sunni majority, fled to Saudi Arabia. Responding to the crisis, Arab leaders agreed to create a joint military force to intervene in states fighting armed rebellions. The announcement came at a summit of the Sunni-dominated Arab League, where Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi warned that the Arab world was facing “an unprecedented threat”. He blamed Shia “stooges…

Controversy of the week Long after the servants at Clarence House have gone to bed, said Richard Kay in the Daily Mail, the heir to the throne can often be found at his desk scratching away in black ink. Passionate words pour from his pen: letters to ministers and civil servants on issues dear to his heart – hunting, architecture, homeopathy. But until last week we, the public, never thought we’d get to read these “black spider memos”. Well, we soon will. For ten years The Guardian tried to get 27 memos that Prince Charles sent to ministers in 2004/5 released under the Freedom of Information Act, to no avail: when an information tribunal demanded that they be published three years ago, the then attorney general, Dominic Grieve, simply overruled…

Paris Sarkozy triumphs: France’s ruling Socialist Party took a drubbing in the second and final round of the French local elections on Sunday, while the conservative UMP and its allies triumphed, winning two-thirds of the country’s 101 départements. “The French people have massively rejected the policies of President François Hollande,” said UMP leader and former president Nicolas Sarkozy (above). Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front, which had secured one in four votes in the first round, failed in the end to capture a single département, though it did win 62 of 4,108 council seats, whereas before it had only held one (see page 15). Berlin Privacy laws under scrutiny: German MPs are calling for reforms to the country’s strict privacy laws, in the wake of last week’s fatal air crash…

Fort Bragg, North Carolina Desertion charge: The army sergeant who was freed last year from Taliban captivity and returned home to the US, has been charged with desertion and misbehaviour. In June 2009, Bowe Bergdahl had walked away unarmed from his post in Afghanistan when he was captured by Taliban troops. Five years later, to the fury of Republicans, President Obama secured his release in exchange for letting five Guantánamo inmates go free. But the circumstances of his capture have always been unclear: some former army colleagues say he’d grown disillusioned with the war and was deserting his post, whereas his lawyers claim he had been seeking out a US general officer to report a “disturbing situation”. Following a lengthy investigation, he is now awaiting court martial. If convicted, he…

Sympathy for the coalition James Graham wants to do the near-impossible: make politicians seem human again. The British screenwriter – whose current hits include the film X+Y and the Broadway musical version of Finding Neverland – was also behind Coalition, the TV drama about the frantic political dealmaking that took place after the May 2010 election. In it, he portrayed David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown with rare sympathy. “The public handed these people an impossible situation,” he told Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. “We don’t know what we want. You’ve got five days to sort it out. I want you to compromise, but when you do I will consider that a betrayal and I’ll be angry.” Graham wants audiences to empathise instead. “I think it’s the easiest thing…