If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a great-crested grebe. That's how it seems in the wacky world of tax avoidance – sorry, "tax planning" – as John Dixon, of Ernst & Young, preferred to describe it during today's grilling of his client Google by the Public Accounts Committee.

John Baron can seem like a Mafia operative offering you the sort of protection that it would be unwise to refuse

Oh, how they laughed. Explaining George Osborne’s absence from Treasury Questions, Chief Secretary Danny Alexander was on side-splitting form. “My right honourable friend the Chancellor is in Brussels today at the Ecofin council,” he told MPs, “exercising the considerable influence that Britain enjoys as a full member of the European Union.” Boom, boom!

In a long, and, by current standards, less than politically correct description, Raymond Chandler has his private detective hero Philip Marlowe describe different types of blondes, including the “perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way…and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder…”

Consternation! Twitter storm! Chris Grayling, or “Lord High Chancellor” to give him his Mikado-esque title, turned his back on the Queen! 

Wherever the truth lies in Syria, Israel’s intervention has inevitably eclipsed the other potential development in her relations in the Arab world

His party was dubbed a bunch of clowns – but they emerge as serious nationwide threat to three main parties

The man in the Brookings Meat caravan who mics up to advertise his wares – “£10 pounds for a chicken, beautiful bit of beef” – gracefully fell silent to allow Ed Miliband to stand on a pallet and promote his own product in Long Eaton’s Market Place: “One Nation Labour.” Carmella Barbero, selling ice creams on the Mr Whippy van, went even further and told the Labour leader: “Business is no good, because people have no money.”

Pensioner Angela Hay was in shock. She had been sitting on a bench in South Shields’ King Street, enjoying the sunshine, when Nigel Farage and Ukip’s parliamentary by-election candidate Richard Elvin, along with assorted TV crews, descended on her.

The party remains far clearer about what it stands against than what it stands for