Mr Mears however insists that if he is defeated he will be a gracious loser

Mr Mears, however, insists that if he is defeated, he will be a gracious loser. “There is a kind of anarchy setting in,” he says.If that is the case, the victor may find himself presiding over a rather smaller Law Society than might have been hoped. The City, which has traditionally been indifferent to the activities of the society, is “at the end of its patience”, according to one of its number. The boy was accused of hitting and kicking a male teacher who tried to prevent him from being trampled by other children while leaving assembly.Mr Cram said his son’s actions were simply a defensive response and that he had been shaken and rugby tackled “We are getting Graham’s name cleared,” he added.. Ministers must pledge up to pounds 50m to make schools secure in the wake of the Dunblane tragedy and the killing of head teacher Philip Lawrence, head teachers said last night. As a report on school security, commissioned after the stabbing of Mr Lawrence outside his north-London school last December, was published yesterday there was growing controversy over the government’s willingness to pay for the measures it suggests.
Gillian Shephard, the Secretary of State for Education, accepted all the recommendations of the report and promised that money would be made available in due course, but the heads said emergency funds should be found immediately.The working group reviewed its report after the shooting of 16 pupils at Dunblane primary school in March.The report calls for police powers to search for weapons on school premises, a move already before Parliament as an addition to a Private Member’s Bill, and for carrying a weapon in a school to become a criminal offence.

It also suggests a change in the law which would allow intruders in schools to be arrested. New schools, it says, should be built with extra attention to security and Home Office funding for closed-circuit televisions should be considered sympathetically.However, any new money is likely to come under the Grants for Education Support and Training programme, Gest, in which local authorities must supply 40 per cent of the funds. It would not be available until the 1997- 98 financial year.David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said last night that the cost of implementing the report could come to between pounds 500 and pounds 2,000 per school. Between pounds 25m and pounds 50m should be made available immediately, he said, adding: “I am very disappointed that the Secretary of State has back-pedalled and is hiding behind the Treasury by repeating the age-old rubrick that it depends on competing priorities.”Mrs Shephard said the Government would provide a “substantial sum” of “new” money, though it would not be available immediately. “I believe we shall be able to meet what the working group on school security wants to see,” she said.. The son of Malcolm Thornton yesterday described how he heard his father scream as he was stabbed to death by his wife Sara while he lay in a drunken stupor.

Martin Thornton said that he did not hear any argument before his stepmother stabbed his father with a kitchen knife in the living room of their home in Atherstone, Warwickshire.
He told Oxford Crown Court: “I heard my father scream so I came downstairs and I got halfway down and Sara was standing at the bottom and she looked at me and just said, ‘Martin, I have killed your father’.”Mr Thornton was giving evidence on the second day of the retrial of his stepmother which was ordered by the Court of Appeal. Mrs Thornton, 41, denies murdering her alcoholic husband in 1989. She says that she stabbed him accidentally after a row and that he regularly beat her up.At the time of the killing Martin Thornton, now 27, was living with his father and stepmother while he helped the former run a shop in Atherstone.Mr Thornton said yesterday that two days before the stabbing his stepmother threatened his father, who was drunk, with a knife during a row and warned him not to touch her daughter Luise. We have already had a taster of what to expect in the shape of a bizarre and probably libellous “election briefing” paper, sent anonymously to some newspaper offices. Among other things, the paper purports to reveal the innermost thoughts of Mr Mears’s potential opponents.