• The court of appeal is on Wednesday expected to overturn the ruling of the judge who stopped a costly fraud trial. He did so after hearing from Alexander Cameron QC that coalition budget cuts on "very high cost cases" (VHCCs to m'learned friend) have made it impossible for defendants to hire expensive briefs like him to match the prosecution's expensive ones. "Equality of arms" is an important principle at the bar, as well as a lucrative form of closed shop, which Chris Grayling is undermining with a 30% cut in the VHCC budget. Militant lawyers at the Lidl end of the trade have been staging RMT-style strikes against Grayling for months. Obviously, it is in the public interest to prosecute complex fraud cases, not just benefit scamsters. But Cameron QC's grandee intervention made it personal: the cuts were instigated by his little brother, Dave.
• BBC Newsnight regulars were disappointed at the soft treatment meted out to Nigel ("Mine's a pint") Farage when Romanians as neighbours was discussed on Monday. Perhaps Paxo felt there was no Ukip blood left to spill after James O'Brien's duffing up of Nigel on LBC. Then again, Farage may have waved a cutting from 2008, when Paxo was found to have hired two Romanian servants off a website and installed them in rooms above his garage.
• Dave was on the airwaves talking himself out of trouble again on Tuesday. Europe? Of course we can renegotiate Britain's relationship, he insisted. Maybe, but one subplot of this week's Euro elections is the choice of the commission president to succeed José Manuel Barroso. In a "who picks whom?" battle of the kind that enraged medieval Europe's popes and emperors, the Strasbourg parliament wants to impose its shortlist on Brussels. Will it be German leftie Martin Schulz or Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's Tory PM for 18 years and a handier stooge than Shulz for tough-guy Angela Merkel? Cameron will oppose both, but majority voting (thanks, Maggie) means he can't veto either. As Mr Brexit he has a weak hand and needs Berlin's goodwill to see off Ukip. It may suit Merkel to use Dave as an excuse to reject both.
• Sceptics watching Philip Roth's "last interview" on BBC1 on Tuesday night must have wondered whether the grand old man of American letters (81) really means "no more books, no more interviews" this time. For one thing, Alan Yentob's programme is a two-parter. (Can you make it overpaid Yentob's last interview too, ask online brutes.) For another, Roth is famously an autobiographical novelist, hard to imagine him not typing away. But literary buffs do concede that their hero wrote early about masturbation in Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and has ended up less jolly, obsessed with prostate cancer: "He's come full circle." Quite so.
• Oh, how pop history could have been so different if PF Sloan, famous for his doom-laden 60s protest song Eve of Destruction, had been fobbed off with a carved Hawaiian coconut when babysitting in West Hollywood as a teen. Offered the coconut or a ukelele with only one string, "I thought carefully. The coconut was pretty cool, but I chose the ukelele. How different my life would have been," he recalls. Not the first man to underrate the musical potential of a coconut.
• Could it get worse for Ed Miliband after an FT pundit accused him on Tuesday of confusing "intellectual self-confidence" (copyright E Miliband) with rigid ideological blinkers? It could. On BBC Radio Wiltshire he was caught not knowing who is Labour leader on Swindon council (Jim Grant), or that the Tories run Swindon. Ouch.
• A small, uncynical round of applause for Arts Council England. A Ukip-unapproved grant has enabled the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra to give autumn concerts in Cardiff, Bristol, Manchester and London. OSK was founded in 1994 in the wartorn Democratic Republic of the Congo, European colonialism's most shameful legacy, and its members are mostly self-taught, some on home-made instruments. It will not stop them tackling Beethoven.
Twitter: @michaelwhite
