Following Mark Cavendish's disappointment in the Olympic cycling road race, challengers are lined up for the crucial role of scapegoat. Who or what to blame for robbing Cav of his inevitable gold medal? Unsurprisingly, given that it can't possibly be put down to tactical error, the chief contender so far has been Johnny Foreigner. The problem, as Cav graciously pointed out, was the other teams' unwillingness to nurse him into a winning position. It was almost as if they were here to win, too, when etiquette demanded that they ride penny-farthings with stabilisers.

Outstanding on his podium

Man About Town

Greater love hath no media superman, as Jeremy Thorpe almost put it of Harold Macmillan, than that he lay down his newspapers for his corporate life. If News International employees awoke to the news of Rupert Murdoch's resignation yesterday feeling nauseous about the future, those who turned to his Twitter account for a show of regret were wasting their time.

Ed Miliband's campaign to charm political journalists continues. He threw a party at Labour's new headquarters on Thursday and worked the room meticulously, spending an especially long time with representatives of right-wing media. The liberal establishment, such as the BBC or Guardian, were curiously under-represented.

Ah free schools, David Cameron said last week, "symbolise everything that is good about the revolution that we are bringing to Britain's schools: choice for parents... free schools work and parents and teachers want more of them. So more is what they are going to get".

More than 50 years have passed since the mysterious aircraft crash which killed Dag Hammarskjold, a Swedish diplomat who some think was the best secretary general the United Nations ever had. He was fearless in his criticism of the great powers of the day, including the UK. When Katanga, a mineral-rich province of the Congo, declared independence from the government of Patrice Lumumba in July 1960, Hammarskjold suspected collusion by Western mining interests and was flying there to broker a peace deal on 18 September 1961, when the aircraft came down near the Katanga border. Eight months earlier, Lumumba had been kidnapped and taken to Katanga to be tortured and killed, evidence that it did not do to mess with Katanga's mining interests.

Before they were united in coalition, David Cameron and Nick Clegg agreed on one thing, that the Labour government was employing too many special advisers. There is a serious case for having more, not fewer, of these political appointees who serve their ministers without being restricted by civil service rules about impartiality, despite the controversy surrounding some of them, such as Alastair Campbell or Andy Coulson. But Cameron promised to cap their numbers, while Clegg's position was that there should not be any at all, unless their salaries were paid from party funds.

The Labour Party was founded more than a century ago with one purpose in mind: to get manual workers elected to Parliament. Tonight, Ed Miliband, pictured, will launch an appeal for capitalists to come forward and be Labour MPs. He will tell business people at Chartered Accountants' Hall in the City that the party badly needs more MPs with business backgrounds. Anyone showing an interest can apply to join a scheme and have a Labour MP as a mentor. They do not even have to be party members.

At the society event of the season, what a joy to meet Andy Murray. This lover of the sweet science was ringside at Upton Park on Saturday night for David Haye's fifth-round destruction of Derek Chisora. "Hi, I'm Andy," said the modest Wimbledon finalist at the proffering of a Diary hand.