A fascinating story of the extent to which Earl Spencer attempts to manipulate his image in the press, despite purporting to despise such behaviour, emerges from the background to a biography of him by the journalist Richard Barber. Like sister, like brother, it seems. The book is unauthorised. Barber decided not to seek Spencer's approval, on the grounds he would almost certainly say ''no'' - but that it could have been even worse if he had agreed. ''It might have been a very slim volume I feel,'' says Barber now.

When Spencer learned the book was in preparation, publishers Andre Deutsch received a ''not very threatening'' letter from his lawyers. Subsequently, they were informed that in fact His Lordship would be prepared to cast his eye over the finished manuscript - as long as nobody knew he had done so.

Barber is not exactly sure what happened next, but he thinks he may have inadvertently revealed to someone from whom he was seeking material that the person need not be too concerned about speaking out of turn because Spencer would see the book before it was published. This was immediately relayed to Spencer and the previous suggestion about him looking at the book swiftly withdrawn.

There has been a rash of stories about how MPs who lost their seats in the last election have been filling the vacant hours, apart from looking for another seat that is. Here is another: Sir Donald Thompson, a bluff former Yorkshire butcher, has been checking up on the nation's war memorials. The majority date from the First World War and are just hitting one of the problems about being 80 years old, that nobody much cares any more. Thompson found out, even before he lost his seat, that nobody was really responsible for maintaining war memorials either, not the Ministry of Defence, not the Department of the Environment, not the Imperial War Museum, not the Royal British Legion, not anybody. And so the Friends of War Memorials was born.

There were thought to be about 16,000 different sorts of war memorials around the country, many of them suffering from neglect and vandalism of different kinds - or merely just being sold off as part of now redundant churches. It turns out, however, there are at least 50,000 and they come in a variety of forms: plaques, rolls of honour, statues in the market square, seats in parks, bridges over streams and rivers, homes, churches, village halls, cottage hospitals, a peal of bells in the North-east of England, and even, at Malvern, Worcestershire, a bus shelter. In my neck of the suburban woods we have a crescent of houses. The Queen Mother is much involved. A great many old people write to her, identify with her, remember her role in the Second World War, and ask her to do something about it. Sir Donald is very busy. So much so that, unlike most of them, he's not even looking for another

seat.

I owe my local authority an apology after complaining last week it had done nothing to compare with Gateshead's horticultural replica of the Angel of the North statue for the Chelsea Flower Show. On the contrary. A total of #100,000, no less, has been spent planting palm trees on the Hogarth roundabout, on the approach to London from Heathrow - ''to turn the drab junction into a Gateway to London'', according to my local paper. I know about global warming, but palm trees?

Another sign of the times. A visitor from out of London who spent an afternoon in the city for the first time for years remarked afterwards that he had been astonished by the return of hundreds of prostitutes to the streets of the capital. ''Everywhere,'' he said. ''Women standing in doorways. And not just in Soho either. It was everywhere. What's happened? It's not legal now, is it?'' When he reported this observation, everyone was initially rather puzzled. And then the light dawned - or, rather, was struck. ''Were they all smoking?'' asked someone.

The extent to which life is about to be disrupted for those of us who do not watch football becomes ever more depressingly obvious. A London taxi firm has distributed a list of dates on which it anticipates forthcoming problems, ''due to the popularity of the national game among taxi drivers''. The company is actually planning to introduce a number of different schemes - they say ''including financial incentives'' but I suspect that they are all financial incentives - in order to encourage drivers to work, rather than to watch the matches live. A precise schedule of the expected trouble is attached, including the dates and times of the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and final. Now there's optimistic.

If Jonathan Aitken was working for MI6 he wasn't very good at keeping secrets, according to one of my most discreet sources. There is an organisation among unaspirational Tory MPs at Westminster known as the Naafi. The acronym stands for No Aims, Ambitions or Other Interest and the object of membership is to stay out of ministerial office or a position of any political responsibility. The group is limited to 12 members, meets regularly for lunch, and has done so in secret without a whisper of publicity since the 1920s. Or it did. Until Aitken joined some years back. ''He blew the gaff,'' one of the others reported bitterly.