The grand old man of Tory politics has pronounced his party dead. BBC News 24's Nick Robinson persuaded Sir Edward Heath to give a valedictory interview after five decades in parliament. Before the grilling on One to One, the production team tried simultaneously to put the ex-prime minister at his ease and tease out of him a promise to be free with his trenchant views on the present state of the Conservative Party. "Oh no, I couldn't do that," Heath snapped at his panicking interviewer. "I couldn't talk about it." Then, shoulders heaving: "The Tory party doesn't exist any more!"

It is verboten to write anything about the Prime Minister's children not officially approved by Feldwebel Campbell, but this story can scarcely be described as intrusive. It seems that Euan Blair has taken to visiting the set of Have I Got News For You? every week, in the company of a pal whose father is a friend of Angus Deayton's, the diminutive compere. Two young lady friends accompany the pair, and after the show they are royally accommodated in the Green Room. What does this tell us? Not a lot, except that he must find withering sarcasm against new Labour funnier than his father does.

Family trouble is heading from a different direction, however. Tony Booth has written a book about life, love and politics. His son-in-law doesn't come out of it very well, according to a publisher who rejected the proposal.

Obliged, as one is, to run the quid-a-bet Annie's Bar sweepstake on how many votes Arthur Scargill will take in Hartlepool against twice-disgraced Peter Mandelson, it is striking how many Labour MPs believe he will do well. One even wagered that Scaggsie would poll 5,000 votes. If that comes true, Mandy is in serious trouble. My pound is on 500. But let's assume the returning officer announces to a shocked world that Arthur has taken the seat. Would Scargill take the loyal oath at Westminster? Or is the revolutionary zeal phonus-bolonus? To adapt the immortal Times headline over a leader on the hunger striker Bobby Sands: Arthur would be able to stand, unable to sit.

John Booth, the journalist once hired and fired by Mandy as a party press officer, has also entered the Hartlepool lists. Pouty Peter doubts whether his former employee can afford the cost of standing, but he seems to have forgotten that Booth took £10,000 in libel damages from the publishers of Don Macintyre's hagiography of Mandelson, causing the first edition to be withdrawn and pulped.

To the Radio 5 Live party for Sunday Service, where the right-wing Tory frontbencher Alan Duncan, quondam landlord of William Hague (who paid his rent in champagne), is deep in conversation with Peter Tatchell, the old-left gay-rights campaigner. What can these two possibly have in common?

A new book, Stabbed in the Front (published by the University of Kent's Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature), chronicles postwar elections through political cartoons. It discloses the curious story of a cartoon by Dave Brown that was drawn for the Independent in 1997. It invited readers to cut out and pin the head on the Tory. Blair and Major both qualified, and Brown's last sentence, "The winner? Don't be silly. We all lose", appeared minus the final three words in the first edition. In the second edition, the cartoon had gone altogether.

I know the Conservatives are a bit short of cash, but this is the limit. A Labour voter and print trade unionist, C Orton of Hemel Hempstead, received a thick envelope through the post, correctly addressed but without a stamp. It cost him 69p to the Royal Mail's Revenue Protection Service to get the letter, which turned out to be a wodge of junk political mail from the local Tory candidate, Dr Paul Ivey.

Paul Routledge is chief political commentator for the Mirror and a biographer of Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson

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