Nicolas Sarkozy

PETER HITCHENS: Lord Slippery of Tripoli proves almost daily that he is the man in this country who is most strongly unqualified to be Foreign Secretary. Last week he annoyed the Americans by telling them to shower money for munitions on to Ukraine. I think Baron Cameron has done this three times since he took on his new post, twice by flying at our expense to Washington DC and once by penning an article for a political website in the American capital. The main response has been nothing. But last week the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, squelched our former premier by refusing even to meet him. There were immediate sad cries of, 'What about the Special Relationship?', but as I keep telling you, there is no such thing. We matter to the Americans slightly more than Bulgaria, and much less than Ireland.

Although there isn't much to admire about the French beauty mogul, it's still an uphill battle for any billionaire to dethrone the 70-year-old whose fortune has risen to an estimated $99.5 billion. Bettencourt Meyers - the granddaughter of L'Oreal founder Eugene Schueller's - has inherited a large share of the French beauty behemoth, which she and her husband Jean-Pierre Meyers and their two children own. Jean-Pierre is the grandson of Rabbi Robert Meyers, who was assassinated in Auschwitz in 1943, and the couple's children, Jean-Victor and Nicolas Meyers, were raised Jewish. Their marriage ignited controversy during the Second World War as her L'Oreal founding grandfather was charged with 'economic and political involvement' with the Nazis during the Second World War, although a postwar tribunal later cleared him. According to the annual Forbes list, Bettencourt Meyers came out on top after L'Oreal's share price increased 20% this year as she increased her fortune by a massive $19 billion.

LORD BLUNKETT: The trade in human misery, which has tens of thousands of undocumented migrants being abused across the Channel every year, is a tragically avoidable tragedy. When people smuggling became a serious issue for border control, we had the solution practically in our pockets. And we could also make the product work. Identity cards are a simple, cost-effective, and inexpensive alternative, and they will destabilize the corporate model of multinational gangs profiting billions from human trafficking.