Village People: Davis makes a clean breast of it. But has he boobed?

The cosmetics firm Rodial obviously cares about its reputation, having sent a solicitors letter to Dr Dalia Nield, of the London Clinic, for expressing doubts about its product "Boob Job", a cream costing £125 a bottle, which they say can raise a woman's bust size by half a cup.

Her comments appeared in the Daily Mail on 1 October, and can be accessed online, but it appears no legal letter has been received by the newspaper. The Conservative MP David Davis, who is trying to get libel laws reformed, sees this selective use of the law as a way of getting "the maximum intimidation for the minimum risk".

He said this during a speech in the Commons, in which he complained that the libel laws threaten not just free speech, but scientific inquiry. "The proper response of any self-respecting company," he said, "would be to publish the detailed composition of its product and the data supporting its claims and engage experts to test those claims and carry out safety tests. That would be the approach of a respectable company, but I am afraid that Rodial has not taken such an approach – it has taken instead the approach of a charlatan and a bully." Bully? Charlatan? I thought Rodial might like to rebut this parliamentary tough talking, and sure enough a call to their press office soon elicited a strongly-worded solicitors letter of our own.

Clegg escapes to Kazakhstan...

Nick Clegg has been getting used to cameras since his rapid rise from being merely the leader of the other opposition party, but never in his life has he had exposure to match this week's coverage of his appearance at the security summit in that strange, modern city of Astana, with a population that has doubled in a few years to more than 700,000, in the vast, empty grass steppe of northern Kazakhstan. The facilities were such that he held his bilateral with Silvio Berlusconi in a windowless side room measuring 12ft by 12ft. No, you did not catch any of it on British TV, but there was round-the-clock live coverage and punditry on all five Kazakh channels. In Kazakhstan, Mr Clegg is better known than Borat.

...thus avoiding a tricky cup tie

Perhaps it is for the best that the Kazakhstan summit kept Mr Clegg away from Zurich while David Cameron, David Beckham and the rest were lobbying Fifa. What with his wife being Spanish, his mother Dutch and his paternal grandmother Russian, the Deputy Prime Minister would not have known which bid to back.

Like father? Like son?

Having stood beside Prince William for England's humiliation in Zurich, David Cameron travelled back to Blighty to deliver a speech that same evening to a meeting of Prince Charles's charity, Business in the Community, above. Having seen the first and second in line to the throne in action on the same day, the Prime Minister must surely have a view on which Prince would make the better King. I would ring up Downing Street and ask, but I just know I would not get an answer.