A BLAZE that killed a 70-year-old pensioner started when she lit a candle during the Pope’s funeral, it emerged this week.
Committed Christian Irene Linnane was watching Pope John Paul II’s funeral on television when the fire started at her 12th floor flat in Newton Street, Holborn.
No smoke detectors or fire alarms had been fitted at the council block.
Her desperate call to the fire brigade – one hour into the three-hour service – revealed a candle she had lit on top of her TV was the cause, her nephew Douglas Walker said.
The call, recorded at 9.54am, came as billions of viewers around the world watched the late Pope’s funeral.
Desperate calls were also made to Camden Council and a gas firm after Ms Linane became trapped in her bedroom.
It is believed curtains in her sitting room caught alight from the candle and flared up when she opened a window. Fire investigators, who visited the charred site again on Tuesday, say their investigation continues.

A HUGE pile of election polling cards has been found dumped on a Highgate estate.
Camden Council officials last night (Wednesday) thanked the New Journal for intervening after reporters safely returned more than 250 ditched polling cards to election managers.
The rescue followed a tip-off from a resident at Makepeace Mansions in Makepeace Avenue, Holly Lodge where the cards were discovered in an easily accessible communal area.
The polling cards – to be used as a quick form of identification when polling stations open for the General Election on May 5 – had been meant for addresses elsewhere in the Hampstead and Highgate constituency. They were supposed to have been hand-delivered by council staff.

BANNED Thai chicken was found in a rodent-infested Camden school kitchen eight months after catering bosses promised it would never happen again, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal this week.
And Parliament Hill School has become the third school in the borough to pull out of the council’s contract with under-fire catering giants Scolarest.
The school, in Highgate Road, Parliament Hill, followed South Camden Community School in Somers Town and Brookfield Primary School in Highgate when it took control of its own kitchens at the beginning of the month after a string of complaints about the poor quality of food.

SHE first came to prominence in the 1950s when she ran out of her Hampstead home clad only in her dressing gown to save trees from a council axe in the gardens of Burgh House – and now Peggy Jay is at it again.
The life president of the Heath and Hampstead Society, 92, joined demonstrators yesterday (Wednesday) in bringing traffic to a standstill to tell workmen not to cut down a 100-foot horse chestnut tree on the corner of Well Road and Christchurch Hill, Hampstead.
Joined by school children from near-by New End and Christchurch primary schools, Mrs Jay asked council officials to think again on plans to fell the tree.

PROOF that politicians are getting younger could be seen at the Town Hall on Monday night when Primary school children took over seats normally reserved for stuffy councillors.
Schoolchildren from Brecknock School in York Way, Camden Town, made their case for a road safety improvement plan at a Town Hall meeting.