Just as England invariably believe they can win the football World Cup, Lancashire almost always think they can win cricket's County Championship, even though they have not done so in their own right since 1934.

GORDON BROWN is a politician, so he's bound to put the most positive gloss he can on international reaction to his various initiatives on African poverty. There he was at the World Economic Forum in Davos a week ago claiming that Germany and France had swung full square behind his international finance facility (IFF) for the doubling of aid to Africa. The G7 meeting in London last weekend was meanwhile hailed by the Chancellor as another breakthrough that would go down in history as the "100 per cent debt write-off summit".

He is full of nervous energy but likes to keep things firmly in their own compartments and, while aiming high, is struggling to maintain control in a confusing world full of major problems. And he is not a natural leader, but more of a spiritual person, like a vicar.

Charles Piggott hears a call for the UK to re-invent itself or lose more ground to foreign rivals

THE UNITED KINGDOM has dropped down the world competitiveness league table because of the strong pound, new employment regulations and its weakness in science and technology.

THERE IS something irresistible about league tables. Everyone loves peer group comparison. So it is with the annual competitiveness report from the World Economic Forum, which runs the annual Davos forum for the great and good in business. The same countries tend to cluster at the top and bottom year after year, but the UK is one of the those which moves up and down the international hit parade.

THERE WAS a session at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Switzerland last January on "global institutions" in which the representatives of a number of these organisations got up and congratulated each other on the quality of leadership at the international level, which, they said, had never been higher.

Conducting takes up half Benjamin Zander's life. The rest is spent inspiring politicians, moguls, children. Anyone.

Valentine's Day comes at a time when a rash of new Darwinist thinkers are claiming that love is controlled by evolution. Do we have to listen? Of course not.

THE MILLENNIUM bug could prove to be the shock that ends Wall Street's 12-year bull market, a senior US economist warned yesterday.

GEORGE SOROS, the international financier, yesterday gave the struggling Brazilian currency a helping hand when he argued that the recent sell-off of the real had been overdone.

`The most likely thing that will happen to the world economy will be a series of patches to the system'