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She added that although Hutchence was depressed, their baby Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily was his great reason to live. “He wouldn’t have left her – never, never, never, never, never.” New South Wales Coroner Derek Hand found in February that Hutchence, 37, committed suicide while in a state of depression, partly over Ms Yates’s child custody dispute with Bob Geldof, her former husband. Ms Yates was speaking during a trip to Australia, in which she visited suite 524 at Sydney’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel where Hutchence died.. BRITISH lorry drivers who were caught up in French farmers’ strikes have been told they will finally receive compensation for their loss of earnings, it was revealed today. The news could mark the end of a year-and-a-half battle by the Road Haulage Association to gain compensation for the lorry drivers affected by the industrial actions in 1996 and 1997. But in a press statement today, the RHA said it remained “cautious” about the news despite negotiating a new compensation formula with French officials in January this year.
The negotiations followed December’s landmark judgement by the European Court of Justice against the French government for breaching the rules of the single market and failing to stop protesting farmers. More than 1,000 British truck drivers were stuck in the week-long disputes which brought France to a standstill.

It cost haulage firms millions and 24 independent drivers went bankrupt as a result of the action. So far the French Government has only paid-out four payments totalling pounds 800 to four individual British companies. It has been estimated that total compensation will exceed pounds 1.5m.. CONCERN is growing for the safety of a 16-year-old boy who disappeared after the boat he was sailing in capsized in the freezing waters of Loch Lomond. A police air-and-sea search for Stephen McCallum, of Kirkintilloch, has so far failed to trace the teenager who has been missing since 1am yesterday morning. His friend Stephen Smith, 17, who was also in the dinghy, managed to swim to shore to raise the alarm. Yesterday Inspector William Brown of Strathclyde Police, who is co-ordinating the search, said: “We are continuing an extensive search of the area.” The boys had been camping with about 20 friends on the west shore of the loch near the holiday village of Tarbet..

JACK STRAW, the Home Secretary, yesterday ordered an immediate inquiry after sensitive documents about Tony Blair’s constituency home were made available to the public in an apparent security blunder. Complete files on plans to protect the Blairs’ Victorian home in Trimdon, County Durham, have reportedly been available at the public records office at Sedgefield District Council.
The Sunday Times said yesterday it had seen a planning application detailing proposed security arrangements at the Blairs’ home, made within days of Labour’s general election victory last May. For pounds 11.75, a reporter was able to view this security “blueprint” at the records office and was even allowed to draw sketches. The application revealed a secret route so the Blairs could escape a terrorist attack and the location of almost a dozen infra-red cameras and motion sensors to detect intruders in the garden. Yesterday a Home Office spokesman said Mr Straw had asked for the material to be withdrawn.John Stalker, former deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester Police and an expert on terrorism, said detailed security arrangements on the Blair family home would be “absolutely priceless” to a terrorist cell.. AS IF the Cornish do not have enough to cry about, it now looks as though they may suffer the final indignity of seeing their trademark clotted cream being whipped by the French.

No self-respecting holidaymaker returns home from Cornwall without a quantity of the exquisitely rich and calorie-laden Cornish clotted cream. But a French proposal to the European Union, which insists that the term “Cornish clotted cream” should not be limited to cream made in Cornwall, may result in Cornish cream being made anywhere in the world.
The Cornish cream industry supports hundreds of jobs and, in the light of recent rulings on fish quotas and beef, it has – until now – been one of Cornwall’s safest sources of income.The county is feeling the pinch. A huge contingent of Cornish men and women travelled to London for the recent countryside rallies in Hyde Park, not only to defend their hunting, shooting and fishing rights, but also to ram home the depth of feeling among local farmers about how proposed legislation hits particularly hard in the south-west of England.The loss of its exclusive rights to Cornish clotted cream would feel like the last straw and the relationship with Brittany is beginning to turn sour.The French are arguing that since there is a small region at the south- west tip of Brittany known as Cornouaille, limiting the terms “Cornwall” and “Cornish” to products from a part of England would be unjust.The EC’s 1992 regulation on the “Protection of Geographical Indications and Designations of Origin for Agricultural Products and Foodstuffs” states that unless a name such as “Stilton” is registered in Brussels, anyone can use it – as in the case of the much-abused Cheddar cheese.Two days before the recent registration deadline, the French agriculture minister lodged a protest against the idea that “Cornish clotted cream” could be made only in Cornwall.So great is local ire that even Cornwall’s traditionally Europhile Liberal Democrat MPs have felt constrained to support the protests. Andrew George, MP for St Ives, warned that the row could “severely damage the inter-Celtic relationship between Cornwall and Brittany”.The Cornish must be wondering where it’s all going to end. Surely not even the French would have the nerve to nick their sacred Cornish pasty..

PENSIONERS over 75 are likely to get an extra bonus to deal with poverty, Frank Field signalled yesterday, but the social security minister did not support a restoration of the link between pensions and earnings. Mr Field, who is due receive a report on the review of pensions within days, will disappoint pensioners’ campaigners, led by Baroness Castle, the veteran Labour peer, who are calling for all state pensions to be raised substantially. The increase in state pensions well above the inflation level for those aged over 75 will be a cheaper way of tackling hardship where poverty is greatest. “If you look at who are the poorest pensioners then in fact the older we get not only the frailer we get, the lower our income gets,” Mr Field said.
Government sources also confirmed ministers were looking at special help for the over-75s. In the long term, there are signals ministers will seek to move most people on to compulsory top-up `stakeholder’ pensions, requiring contributions of at least pounds 1-2 a week extra to increase the payout in retirement.Mr Field yesterday also said on BBC On The Record that he and Harriet Harman received letters from Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, “telling both of us off” for personal clashes over the green paper on the reform of the welfare state.Mr Field, who unveiled the document last week, yesterday said he believed it was “quite serious” to get a letter about the leaks from someone as senior as Mr Campbell.”He certainly wasn’t happy that briefing was going on and I think he had every right to say so and to write those letters,” said Mr Field.The reform package will help the Government to answer a warning yesterday by the independent think tank, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, that in spite of efforts by the Blair government to tackle social inequality, the gap between rich and poor remained wide.. ROBIN COOK and his lover, Gaynor Regan, yesterday posed for photographs after confirming they are to be married on 19 April at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s grace and favour residence in Kent.