Miliband won't be straying from the primrose path

When she was sacked in June, Margaret Beckett dragged her high heels over moving out of the Foreign Secretary's grace-and-favour London residence at 1 Carlton House Terrace.

She has finally gone, however, and the splendid £20m Georgian house off the Mall - one of the grandest on the Government's books, its five bedrooms and ballroom bedecked with antiques and paintings - is ready for David Miliband to move in.

Except he doesn't want to. The flip-flop-wearing, kaftan-clad mums of Primrose Hill will be chuffed to hear that Miliband, 42, "the thinking woman's crumpet" who has lived in the area since the days when he had a pudding-bowl haircut, has decided to stay in his £1.5m period home so that his violinist wife, Louise, and son Isaac, two, can have a more normal life. Jack Straw took the same decision in 1997 and installed a shed in his garden for his gun-toting security detail.

Neighbours such as Alan Bennett, Gwyneth Paltrow, opera director Jonathan Miller and Bond actress Eva Green will continue to see him cycle past on his way to Arsenal matches.

As for the Foreign Secretary's 1620s Kent country house Chevening - the 115-room and 3,500-acre property adored by Robin Cook and his mistress (and later wife) Gaynor for the "rare intervals of privacy" it afforded - Miliband will use it to entertain foreign dignitaries.

And, one suspects, for the odd weekend retreat.

* At the Brompton Oratory requiem mass after his death last month, Nigel Dempster had, the priest said, been accepted for membership of the Kingdom of Heaven - following a fleeting million-year spell in purgatory.

The gossip columnist's earthly comrades, meanwhile, grapple with arrangements for a memorial service to be held this October. Convention dictates that they congregate in St Bride's on Fleet Street - the Christopher Wren-designed journalists' church - followed by a reception at an Aldwych bar, courtesy of the Daily Mail. The obstacle, Dempster would be delighted to know, is his popularity. St Bride's, capacity a trifling 300, is thought unlikely to accommodate the legions of socialites who wish to attend.

St Luke's in Chelsea and St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square have been mooted, but lukewarmly received. Short of St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey or - given his late conversion to Catholicism - Westminster Cathedral, what to do?

* After 13 years' delay, filming has begun on Diane English's remake of the 1939 Hollywood classic The Women. The entire cast of 130 was female, as were the animals. Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Joan Fontaine starred.

In the renovated oestrogen fest, produced by Mick Jagger, Meg Ryan plays a New York society woman who discovers her husband is cheating. The flick's scheming dames are Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Annette Bening, Candice Bergen and Jade Pinkett Smith. And in a peculiar casting, the French maid role is rumoured to have been offered to Nicole Richie, right.

Richie, 25 and five months pregnant, is famous for wearing big sunglasses, being the adopted daughter of Lionel Richie and driving under the influence. In September she will complete a four-day jail sentence.

Scripts are also said to have been sent to Sharon Osbourne, Trudie Styler and Victoria Beckham. To the male film crew: good luck.

* Correspondents were excited to be invited to a Foreign Office briefing on Afghanistan by an unnamed "senior Foreign Office official". Who might the wallflower be?

Ta-dah! None other than the swashbuckling junior minister "Mad Mark" Malloch Brown, who threw off his anonymity once the hacks assembled. The former UN deputy has emerged from his month of purdah - the result of describing himself as the "wise eminence behind the young Foreign Secretary" and unilaterally announcing a cooling in the special relationship.

Slapped down by his boss David Miliband, and loathed by Washington for his defence of Kofi Annan over the oil-for-food scandal, Malloch Brown is lucky it's too early in Gordon's premiership for him to be found swimming with the fishes.

* The foppish class warrior Lord March has complained that "too many chavs" come to the Glorious Goodwood horseracing festival on his estate. Flesh-baring visitors "dress as if they're going to a nightclub", not in summer frocks or pale linen suits and panamas.

The entrepreneurial earl has curried further favour with the cigar-chomping classes by declaring that the forthcoming Goodwood Revival - a fancy dress hark-back to 1950s and 60s motor racing - will be a "pro-smoking event". March remarks, of the "golden, less politically correct" age: "Competitors and spectators alike smoked. A cigar, cigarette or pipe is the perfect period accessory." Guests will be sold fine Cubans and encouraged to light up in all outside areas - with the polite exception of the fuel bins in the pit lane.