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Question to a worried man. Are you now or have you ever been the election agent for Nick Griffin?
• Don't panic was the advice to old timers in Dad's Army, and it's the advice we would share with the no less chaotic sorts who follow nasty Nick Griffin and his dwindling band in the BNP. Don't worry. Even if the Electoral Commission is looking at the party's documentation, amid claims that it played fast and loose with the finances. The commission was assured that the party had no outstanding debts following Nick's failed attempt to oust Margaret Hodge from Barking at the last election. This wasn't true. There was the matter of an unpaid £16,500 bill from the printer who supplied the far-righters with newsletters and leaflets. Don't panic. Even if it is the case that Richard Barnbrook, the London Assembly member who acted as Griffin's agent, has now approached the high court seeking a declaration that he was not personally responsible for misleading the commission over election expenditure. This is a serious business. He attested to the accuracy of the accounts, and could be prosecuted. None of it was my fault, Barnbrook tells m'lud in his court application … I signed in good faith following assurances from the treasurer. Will that be enough to get him off the hook? Too early to say, for there is a hearing set down for 28 March. Our advice? Don't panic.
• And here's a good topic for debate. "Autonomous weapons and morality in war are incompatible." Just the sort of thing military types should be talking about now that we rule the skies over Libya and are dropping munitions, some of which might even hit their targets. And with drones all the rage in other theatres, if not yet in Libya, military types will indeed ventilate the matter as part of the Air Power Studies Debates being organised by King's College London. But the event won't have the formal stamp because we are told that plans to advertise it with an RAF logo were agreed by the RAF and then vetoed by the Ministry of Defence at ministerial level. Not the time to be talking about morality in warfare, perhaps. We quite understand.
• After Tuesday's revelations about the tug of war between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown over living space in Downing Street, more thoughts on the living arrangements above the shop at No 10. Lord Powell, the rather grand apparatchik who gave rather grand advice to Margaret Thatcher, saw how PMs were supposed to live. He didn't think much of it. "Above the staterooms in No 10 you come to the attic, which is where the prime minister lived in a flat," he tells Michael Cockerell in the documentary The Great Offices of State, which airs tonight on BBC4. "These days I doubt many councils would offer [it] to asylum seekers, really very small and pokey." These things are relative, but certainly Lord Powell wouldn't have lived there. He and Lady Carla have a super nice villa outside Rome.
• And unforeseen difficulties trouble the pioneering US geneticist J Craig Venter, who will be smarting, having been slapped down for copyright infringement by the estate of the writer James Joyce. The geneticist fell foul of the notoriously touchy Joyce estate after using a quotation from the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in DNA composed artificially on computer. His team at the J Craig Venter Institute used the quotation "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life" as a watermark to distinguish the synthetic DNA from that occurring naturally in the bacterium into which it was transplanted. It would never have been visible to the human eye, indeed it was written in code, but no matter. Even for those who play God, rules are rules.
• Finally, a warm welcome for Tariq Ali in New Zealand. No, really. How to explain this? Masochism? "New Zealand is not a country one thinks of greatly when one doesn't live here," he told one interviewer. "Politically, psychologically and mentally, the Australian and New Zealand elites are firmly attached to the United States. Essentially there is no such thing as a New Zealand foreign policy." Close the foreign ministry, is his advice. "You could save money and have little offices in American embassies all over the world. You don't have any weight at all, you are a small country." And yet the adoration flows. Only Tariq Ali can do this.