The singer Joss Stone, Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes, magazine editor Jefferson Hack and My Summer of Love actress Natalie Press were out in force on Monday night for the private view of Rankin's exhibition Destroy at London's Phillips de Pury Gallery.

The news that the London Evening Standard is to be given away free from next Monday is mind-boggling. It will be the first time any publisher in this country has offered readers what is, after all, a pretty good newspaper for nothing. All existing freesheets are fairly downmarket, and do not have any pretensions to be complete newspapers.

David Cameron plans to replace his controversial chief spin doctor, Andy Coulson, at the next election. The former News of the World editor, who has masterminded the Tory leader's slick communications strategy for the past two years, will not continue in his role even if the Mr Cameron gets to Downing Street, senior party insiders have revealed.

His brother Lucian was noticeably absent, but Britain's artistic and literary elite turned out in force yesterday for the funeral of Sir Clement Freud, who died last week.

Can you tell anything about the state of our culture by the current vogue for Twitter? For those of you who don't know, Twitter is a social-networking site that enables users to post regular updates about whatever it is they're doing – cooking a meal, playing a video game – or whatever happens to have caught their eye on the web. These messages are called "tweets" and they must be no longer than 140 characters.