Well, as James Miller (who spotted it) says, you couldn’t make this up.

Police have forced London Mayor Boris Johnson to hand over a cigar case belonging to Iraq’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz.

The ex-MP, who obtained the red leather case from Mr Aziz’s bombed-out home while visiting Iraq as a journalist in 2003, said the situation was “stupid”.

He said: “The police have no choice but to investigate this ludicrous affair.”

Under the Iraq (UN Sanctions) Order 2003, anyone possessing Iraqi cultural property must give it to the police.

Mr Johnson deposited the case into custody on Monday afternoon, following instructions from the police…

Thomas Friedman is annoyed.

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.”

Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can’t totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”

Hmmm… And Gordon Brown’s energy is significantly better, is it?

Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet, in lecturing mode.

Guess who I came on the other day in the University Library? None other than Lord Acton, the celebrated Catholic historian, who in 1887 wrote to Bishop Creighton:

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Spot on. But didn’t these Victorian grandees have weird facial hair? How did they eat soup? I’ve seen a photograph of his Pa and he was just as bad.

Later: Bill Thompson emails with the information that,

The children’s writer Philip Ardagh has a similarly long and bushy beard and his party trick when he is talking to schoolchildren is to take a pencil case and hide all of its contents in his beard – pens, pencils, protractors, the lot. It’s very impressive. Perhaps Acton did something similar in the House of Lords…

Britain’s only world-class practical joker has died, aged (improbably) 80. The Economist ran a fine obit.

He also attempted to take a grand piano on the London Underground, and persuaded a crowd of tourists that Nelson’s Column needed holding up. He set up pyramids of plates to crash when people passed them, and rigged a mirror in a hat shop so that, when each matron posed simperingly before it, the glass cracked from side to side. His notion of a day’s work was to ask a passer-by for tuppence for a cup of tea and, having got the money, produce Thermos, milk and sugar for the astonished benefactor and inquire whether they wanted one lump, or two.

Mr Routh played pranks all his life. Uppingham ejected him for hanging a banner reading “Vote Routh, Communist” in the school chapel, and Cambridge parted company with him after he gathered hundreds of signatures to stop an imaginary motorway across Bletchley Park. In 1957 he put an ad in the Times: “Practical joker with wide experience of British public’s sad gullibility organises, leads and guarantees success of large-scale hoaxes.” He hoped never to do anything else…

Nice to see that Ros and Steve Edwards have given £30 million to New Hall, one of Cambridge’s most distinctive (but poorest) colleges. It was founded in 1954 by Dame Rosemary Murray with one shilling and no name. The intention that it would eventually be given a name when someone endowed it properly. Which is what has now happened. As a result, New Hall will become Murray Edwards College.

This is the biggest single benefaction that I can remember (of course there’s the £200 million Bill Gates donated to set up the Gates Scholars Trust — Cambridge’s answer to the Rhodes Scholars scheme in Oxford — but that doesn’t really count because it’s such small change to Billg) since the Radio Rentals tycoon David Robinson endowed Robinson College in the 1970s.

Ros is a former New Hall student.

Hmmm… Just remembered that New College, Oxford — which was founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham — still hasn’t found a proper name. They really ought to get a move on.