Double blow for Brown as polls suggest Conservatives' lead is growing

Behind the numbers

When Max Hastings's mother bumped into her husband in a hotel in Africa, she was furious; she thought he was in Berkshire looking after the kids. This was not "home alone", as they had a nanny devoted to young Max and his sister Clare, but it demonstrated again that this husband (for both it was the second of three marriages) was not exactly a family man. To be fair, she was not totally a family woman herself.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the Scottish Office had the justified reputation of being run by a group of formidable, if austere, civil servants of great calibre who had no hesitation in presenting awkward and sometimes unpalatable facts to ministers – with whom they had generally an excellent and mutually respectful relationship.

Michael Foot was a passionate politician and parliamentarian, but he was no less passionate a literary figure. Two or three rooms in his Hampstead home were stacked with books from floor to ceiling, all of them carefully annotated.

A political cartoonist on the Daily Sketch and News Chronicle in the 1950s and the proprietor of the Kingleo Studios cartoon art agency, which he and his wife ran for 30 years, Ian Scott will also be remembered as the founder and first Chairman of the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in April this year.

A French tennis tournament boss has called for British number one Andy Murray to be suspended.

Ref! The incendiary battle of the Rooneys versus their old management company, Proactive, is set to unfold over the next three weeks, with Proactive suing the Rooneys for £4.3m. What's more, it promises to pitch two of Fleet Street's most famous hacks-turned-PR gurus against one another.

This year's World Economic Forum in Davos is supposed to be a slimmer affair. Delegate numbers are down and media groups have been asked to send fewer journalists. Good to see that the licence-payer funded BBC is complying. Five different journalists from the Beeb – not even beginning to count production staff – had filed stories from Davos before midday yesterday.

'We will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,' Google challenges Chinese state censorship.

Step by step, the former spin-doctor was led through the build-up to the Iraq war – but he refused to buckle, says Michael Savage

Roger Beetham was a British diplomat who suspected that linguistic and managerial abilities, his own strengths, were somewhat undervalued in the modern Foreign Office. Born in Burnley, Beetham attributed his reputation for straight talking to his Lancastrian heritage, but he was educated at Ryde School, Isle of Wight, and Peter Symonds' School in Winchester, where he excelled in languages and performances in school plays.

Former England cricketer Geoff Boycott has urged Michael Owen to try the ancient Chinese art of feng shui in a bid to get his World Cup ambitions back on track, the Daily Express newspaper reported today.

Predictions are dire, but David Randall reckons this winter will have to get a whole lot worse to trouble the bad weather records of yesteryear