She is 49 years old, a reluctant third-choice candidate at best, and reduced to careering around the mean streets of Labour's third-safest seat in Scotland in a desperate attempt to prevent the "earthquake" that would follow if it slipped out of the party's hands.

In 2002, John Darwin, who, with his wife Anne, owned a portfolio of properties in the North-east, went canoeing off the coast and disappeared. No body was found; he was presumed drowned, and his wife collected insurance and pension payouts worth about £250,000. Then, last December, Mr Darwin turned up at a London police station. It emerged that Mrs Darwin had known of his faked death all along.

After more than a decade, Paul Dacre, the powerful and long-serving editor of the Daily Mail, finally signalled what has long been speculated upon – a shift in his support from Gordon Brown to David Cameron.

Your debts are piling up; the job's getting on your nerves, and maybe your partner doesn't look as hot as he or she once did. It's that John Darwin canoe moment – when you think the unthinkable and wonder if life would be better if you ended it all for the old you and started over with a shiny new one. Not a real death, of course. But a phoney – staging, perhaps, your own personal Mary Celeste, with canoe or dinghy abandoned on the briny, or, like ex-minister John Stonehouse and television's immortal Reggie Perrin, a neat little pile of clothes left on the beach with their owner nowhere to be seen. Many are tempted, and a good few, like Mr Darwin of Seaton Carew and Panama fame, succumb. Faking death and having a second bite at life's cherry is a difficult area in which to give guidance, since we never, by definition, get to hear of the successful, only the failures. But their errors and weaknesses can be our instruction manual. And so, as a reader service, we've combed the record for dos and don'ts so we can present Disappearing for Dummies, or How to Do a Reggie Perrin – the 1970s sitcom character who staged a suicide in order to build a new life.

David Cameron has upset members of his frontbench team by preparing to promote more women to the Shadow Cabinet in a reshuffle expected this week.

Every bride dreams of feeling like a princess on her wedding day. Now, thanks to Disney, the multinational conglomerate that "makes dreams come true", she can look like one, too. From this week (starting tomorrow), British brides will be able to float down the aisle in wedding dresses inspired by Disney's seven princesses.

Britons who still have any wealth to invest are turning their backs on the property portfolios, stocks and shares, and sports cars that have long constituted conventional investments, and pumping their savings into old-fashioned gold bullion and coins.

Elliot Guy, the 27-year-old who died in the early hours of yesterday morning after he was stabbed in the neck at a north London party, was the father of a new-born baby who was visiting his mother to help her decorate her house.

Seeing things with your own eyes does not necessarily make them any clearer. Like everyone else, I have followed the spate of recent stories about knife crime – at first with sorrow, and later with grim resignation at how inevitable it is that another one will happen, and with another set of heartbreaking personal details driving home how terrible it is.

Sue Moisey looks in dismay over the building site that was once her family home. It is exactly a year since gallons of flood water poured into her house in Tewkesbury, leaving a trail of destruction.

So, there's this group of men from all over the world, and they're having a fortnight away together. They like to wear long, flowing robes and are very fond of the colour purple. Some have ostentatious rings, others go for flamboyant hats or blingy crosses on long chains. Right now, they are staying on a university campus, living in halls like the old days. What's on their minds? Sex. Particularly gay sex. They are obsessed with homosexual intercourse. They think about it all the time, and the rows they have over it are tearing them apart. But only one of these men, at least in public, is gay. And guess what? He is the only member of their club who has not been invited to this great big house party. Sometimes the Lambeth Conference does look very queer indeed. So much attention has been given to this gathering of bishops, but what is really going on? Is it really a huge moment in the life of the Anglican church, part of the biggest change in English religious life since the Reformation? Or is it just a series of incomprehensible hissy fits? And why should unbelievers care, anyway? In the immortal words of Cilla Black's camp classic...

The Tory candidate in a marginal seat resigned yesterday after he was bailed by police investigating allegations of harassment against political opponents.

Building more prisons will result in a huge rise in the proportion of criminals who reoffend, a criminology expert has said.

A police officer, who was cleared of wrongdoing after CCTV cameras showed him punching a woman he was trying to arrest, has died after being found on a mountainside in North Wales.

One of the stars of a highly controversial film is to look into lifting a long-standing ban on it in the town where she is now mayor.

The living room was flooded with the white blaze of arc lights, illuminating men in silver suits as they dusted down the car of the shadow minister for Justice. They were looking for forensic evidence. So it was very difficult to believe the good news on crime figures emanating at that very moment from the television. The bit about the irrational rise in fear of crime, against the British Crime Survey's backdrop of civil calm, sat particularly badly. Just a few hours earlier, 18-year-old Frederick Moody had been stabbed to death outside his home down the road, by one of a group of children who had, witnesses say, been gathered in the area for some while. The bereaved family of the dead young man have, it transpires, lived on my street for some years. Until Thursday night, though, I didn't know that any of them existed. I doubt if Edward Garnier, the Conservative MP, whose Peugeot across the street now glimmers with iridescent fingerprint dust, knew them either.

Heroin or crack cocaine addicts will be forced to seek treatment or lose their benefits and the long-term unemployed will be forced to work for their dole under the most radical reform of the welfare state in more than 60 years.

An attempt to introduce Europe-wide rules to prevent restaurant staff being denied customers' tips by their employers will be made in the autumn.

Friends of the murdered teenager Ben Kinsella wore fancy dress to his funeral yesterday, as his sister renewed her pleas for an end to knife crime.

The killers of Frederick Moody, Thursday's victim of knife crime in London, fled the scene shouting "leaving him for dead", witnesses said. The teenager was stabbed in the stomach just yards from his home in south London.

Gordon Brown was accused of "moving the goalposts" yesterday as he prepared to relax his fiscal rules to prevent them being breached.

Labour is to delay repaying its "cash for honours" loans for up to a decade as it attempts to plug a £16m black hole in its finances.

Dwain Chambers' last-ditch attempt to force his way into the British team for next month's Beijing Olympics came to an abrupt halt yesterday. The 30-year-old sprinter lost his High Court action seeking an injunction against a life ban from the Games.

Anne Darwin claimed yesterday that her husband reappeared after pretending to be dead for five-and-a-half years because he wanted to be reunited with his sons and pay back the £250,000 that the couple had fraudulently claimed. She denied that she had "lied at length" as a "last-ditch defence" against charges of fraud and money laundering.

An international coalition of bishops is rallying to the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury in a move that appears likely to ensure Anglican unity as the church enters one of its most crucial weeks since the Reformation. In all, 650 bishops from around the world are gathering at the University of Kent in Canterbury for this week's Lambeth Conference. Apocalyptic scenarios have been predicted, but it now appears that the broader Anglican family will hold together thanks to a series of sermons by Rowan Williams appealing for unity and the desire among bishops – including many from Africa – not to be seen to be the wreckers of the communion.