Along with some 1,500 others he had gone at dawn to the square where labourers traditionally wait to be hired. Most of those who died were impoverished Shia workers from Iraq’s deep south who have come to Baghdad for jobs and sleep rough or in squalid hotels around Aruba. Severed heads and limbs were stacked beside burnt bodies inside the gates of the local hospital, its floor slippery with blood. “We gathered and suddenly a car blew up and turned the area into fire and dust and darkness,” said Hadi, a worker who survived the blast.

Together with three other bombings, today’s death toll in Baghdad rose to more than 30. Just 24 hours eariler, in Aruba Square in the Shia district of Qadimiyah, the crowd cried: “Why? Why? Why,” as the dead and dying were carried out. And as the hours passed with car and roadside bombs shattering the relative calm of the past few days, fears of civil war intensified.

A posting on the internet by al-Qa’ida in Iraq said: “To the nation of Islam, we give you the good news that the battles of revenge for the Sunni people of Tal Afar began yesterday.” Today the carnage continued when 16 policemen and five civilians were killed and about 20 injured when a suicide bomber drove his car into a convoy of police vehicles in Baghdad’s southern Dora district, police said. On a day when more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks thundered across Baghdad from dawn into the late afternoon – claiming 152 lives and wounding 542 – al-Qa’ida in Iraq said it was retaliating against a US-Iraqi operation directed at the insurgents’ northern stronghold of Tal Afar. But the Chancellor’s wife will also have had something to do with it.. A suicide bomber sparked Baghdad’s worst day of slaughter since the fall of Saddam 30 months ago when he lured labourers desperate for work towards his van by offering them jobs and then detonated explosives that killed 114 and injured 156 of them. Like them, she is regularly described as masculine, overbearing or disloyal – this last for the way she engineered the exit of her one-time patron, Helmut Kohl, the re-unifier of Germany, over a scandal about party funds.

She also gave an interview in which she was asked about not having children and answered that “it just didn’t happen and I don’t make a great thing about it”. But damage has been done.She is probably in a more difficult position than Margaret Thatcher or Hillary Clinton. Germany is still conservative in its attitudes towards women: fewer work, either full time or part time, than in Britain or France, and married women are expected to have children.Ms Merkel has responded by stressing her party’s family policies in her stump speech and announcing new tax breaks for children. And while some voters, especially women of the “women’s liberation” generation, have been repelled by this line of attack, Ms Schr?-K?s remarks have prompted others to question Ms Merkel’s credentials – as a woman, and thus as a politician. No less cheerfully, he has pointedly brought up the SPD’s family-friendly policies in words very similar to those used by his wife. As a many-times married man with no children of his own – Doris has a teenage girl by a previous marriage, and together they adopted a Russian orphan two years ago – he is hardly in a position to criticise Ms Merkel.But Mr Schr? has cheerfully let his wife’s comments stand, insisting that she had every right to voice her own opinions. Ms Merkel has no children.Gerhard Schr? himself has been careful never to comment directly on Ms Merkel’s private circumstances – in fact, she is married, for the second time, to a chemistry professor from Berlin, Joachim Sauer.

Now, chivalry, equal opportunities or political maturity – take your pick – have all been cast to the winds. The doubts many Germans secretly harboured about having a woman chancellor are surfacing in a nasty way.The lowest “below-the-belt” blow was struck by her chief opponent’s wife, Doris Schr?-K? who told Die Zeit weekly that Ms Merkel “does not embody with her biography the experiences of most women”.She went on to mention childbirth, bringing up children, and schools. For some it was a plus point, and a sign that Germany had come of age. Not only could a woman now head a major party, she could lead it into government.That was then. Boils half a litre of water in 90 seconds.”It’s the sort of technical-speak which should put my mind at rest, but somehow Sawyer projects an air of amiable uselessness.

Night after night, alone on a hill, a man with a soggy sleeping bag is sitting perfectly still His name is Hugh Sawyer You may have heard of him. It was where Sylvia Pankhurst called a great suffragette rally in 1906. The veteran socialist Keir Hardie spoke on workers’ rights there in 1910. After the First World War, a great wave of hunger marches brought people from as far away as Wales and Scotland.