Police have begun an investigation after burglars staged a daring double heist at two of London's most upmarket jewellery shops, getting away with jewels estimated to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Jewellery was stolen in a smash-and-grab raid from two shops at an exclusive shopping centre, police said today.

Jewellery worth tens of thousands of pounds was stolen when raiders broken into Europe's largest urban shopping mall, west London's Westfield Centre, in the early hours of yesterday.

A rare internally flawless blue diamond is expected to fetch up to £3.8 million when it is sold at auction next month.

A Hong Kong jeweller paid a record price for an uncut diamond yesterday when it bought the egg-sized "Cullinan Heritage" for $35.3m (£23m).

De Beers, the world's largest diamond miner, is set to launch a rights issue to raise up to $1bn (£601m).

John Rudd was born to a dynastic connection with De Beers, the South African diamond mining giant founded by Cecil Rhodes and C.D. Rudd, John's great-grandfather. His father, Bevil Rudd, had not followed C.D. Rudd's son into De Beers but had achieved fame by winning a gold medal at the 1920 Olympics and breaking the 400 metres world record a year later. Born in Kimberley, where the family home is now a museum called Rudd House, John and his younger brother Robin were sent to Eton, where John became captain of athletics and played cricket against Harrow at Lord's, as did Robin, the Eton captain in 1945.

In the Disney version of The Jungle Book, four vultures vaguely resembling the Beatles bemoan to Mowgli that they are outcasts. They were, after all, members of a species known as Nature's Undertakers.

In Tuesday's Pandora, 'Time to polish off De Beers ,Stephen', we referred to a letter from the charity, Survival International, to Stephen Webster urging him to distance himself from De Beers.

Stephen Webster has asked us to point out that although a design of his is in the current De Beers collection this was designed several years ago and he is not currently working for De Beers.

The only surprising aspect of Peter Hain's resignation yesterday was that it took so long to come about. The Work and Pension Secretary's departure from the Cabinet was inevitable the moment it emerged he had failed to declare to the Electoral Commission the extraordinarily large donations he had received to fund his deputy leadership campaign last year.

A leading union has accused diamond giant De Beers of treating its miners like "neglected stepchildren".

The upcoming expiry of a key diamond licence in Botswana could wipe more than $500m (£285m) from Anglo American's profits, according to City analysts.