Labour is demanding that Chris Patten, the Government's choice as the next chairman of the BBC, must resign from the Conservative Party and give up some of his other business and voluntary roles before he takes up the post.

Chris Patten, the former chairman of the Conservative Party and Governor of Hong Kong, is expected to be appointed as the next chairman of the BBC Trust, the organisation's governing body.

Against all odds (and we'll come to the betting below), the race to chair the BBC Trust is shaping into a belter. This is not, despite its occupancy by nebbish quangocrat Sir Michael Whatshisname, a trivial post. The winner will be instrumental, for one thing, in deciding who succeeds Mark Thompson as director general, and is faced with hauling the Beeb out of the post-Hutton abyss of cringing cowardice. Paradox attends the two most distinguished candidates. Chris Patten, although a Tory peer, has the confidence and cussedness to resist a Tory-led government. Jonathan Powell, although ineffably New Labour as Mr Tony Blair's long-serving chief of staff, is an archetypal apparatchik whose mission is to speak emollience to power.

In Getting Our Way, Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to Washington, argues for a rejuvenated Foreign Office, based on a clear-eyed vision of the national interest. With some candour, he decries the "daft utopianism of global values" that has diminished the role of British diplomacy.

Lord Heseltine is not on the list. John Major is out of the country, and Nick Clegg has "another engagement". But Lord Howe, whose resignation speech ended Margaret Thatcher's reign in Downing Street, will today be a guest of honour at the former prime minister's 85th birthday party in Downing Street.

Lord Taylor of Warwick, a prominent Tory peer, is to be prosecuted over his expenses, the Crown Prosecution Service announced yesterday.

In the year 2000, Gordon Brown set out to destroy the 800-year tradition of academic self-government at Oxford and Cambridge. The man he chose to execute his policy was Sir Victor Blank. Sir Victor is the chairman who severely damaged the share price of Lloyds Bank, and on that evidence he is less than competent – as of course is Gordon Brown. So how did those two men position themselves nearly to destroy the governance of two of the greatest universities on the globe?

It is the deepest instinct of those marooned in the darkest of dark days to search for the light at the end of the tunnel, and with help from The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, I believe I may just have found it.