• Coulson willing to discuss phone hacking with police
• Theresa May to answer urgent Commons question
• Detectives studying fresh claims from ex-reporter
• Read Andrew Sparrow's lunchtime summary

3.48pm: Frank Dobson says the police are not allowed to intercept MPs' telephone calls. So why should it be acceptable for journalists to intercept their calls?

He also says the police showed "a distinct lack of zeal" when it came to investigating this.

3.45pm: Alan Johnson, the shadow home secretary, says he was told last year that the Met had taken "all proper steps" to alert individuals if there was a "suspicion" that they were the victims of phone hacking.

In the light of the new allegations, the Met needs to be subject to more scrutiny, he says. Does May know how many of the 3,000-odd people who may have had their phones hacked have been alerted?

Johnson says David Cameron and Nick Clegg have warned MPs about the dangers of the surveillance state. Now they seem to have their own expert in surveillance in government.

Johnson quotes Chris Huhne, who before the election suggested that if Gordon Brown was right to sack Damian McBride, Cameron should sack Coulson. Does May agree with "her cabinet colleague"?

May refers to John Yates's interview this morning. Yates said that the fact that a name was on a private investigator's list did not mean their phone had been hacked. She also says that Alan Johnson was satisfied that the original investigation was carried out properly when he was home secretary.

3.39pm: Theresa May explains the background to the phone hacking case. She says the investigation into the original News of the World allegations has been reviewed. That review concluded that it was fair. New allegations have come to light. They are being considered by the police, but that is an operational matter and so it is a matter for them.

Watson responds with a string of criticisms. He asks a series of questions, including asking May to confirm suggestions that Tony Blair asked Scotland Yard if he had had his phone hacked. He urges May not to join the conspiracy and not to allow the investigation to be seen "as a laughing stock".

3.35pm: Tom Watson asks his question. It just consists of asking if the home secretary will make a statement on the phone hacking affair.

She will. She's making it now.

3.29pm: In the Commons Home Office questions is coming to an end. We'll get the urgent question about phone hacking at 3.30pm.

3.19pm: David Cameron will take part in the vote on the parliamentary voting system bill tonight. He's supposed to be on paternity leave until tomorrow, but Downing Street said he would be coming to the Commons for the 10pm division because "it's a reasonably short trip". It's a scenario that will be familiar to any dad with a newborn baby. Any excuse to get out of the house is worth grabbing ....

3.13pm: John Yates, the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner, is giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee tomorrow. He is due to speak to them at 12.30pm about specialist operations, in particular counter-terrorism and royal protection. But Keith Vaz, the chairman, has said some members of the committee will put a few questions about the latest evidence that has emerged relating to phone hacking.

2.50pm: Here's the statement from Tony Blair explaining why he has cancelled his book signing.

I very much enjoyed meeting my readers in Dublin and was looking forward to doing the same in London.

However, I have decided not to go ahead with the signing as I don't want the public to be inconvenienced by the inevitable hassle caused by protestors. I know the Metropolitan police would, as ever, have done a superb job in managing any disruption but I do not wish to impose an extra strain on police resources, simply for a book signing.

I'm really sorry for those – as ever the majority – who would have come to have their books signed by me in person. I hope they understand.

2.46pm: Before the election, the Liberal Democrats were quite happy to attack Andy Coulson. Now some of them are more reticent. Adrian Sanders, a Lib Dem MP on the Commons culture committee, told the BBC earlier this afternoon that there should be an inquiry into the affair. But, according to PoliticsHome (paywall), the Lib Dem Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne played down the whole affair when he appeared on the Daily Politics show.

We've had select committee enquiries [into the affair]. A range of politicians from all parties looked at it and came to the conclusion that the situation was satisfactory.

2.43pm: Tony Blair has cancelled his book signing in London on Wednesday, according to the Press Association.

2.19pm: MPs are voting on the parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill later this afternoon. The debate will start around 4pm, after the phone-hacking question. It's the bill that will set up the referendum on the alternative vote and equalise the size of parliamentary constituencies, cutting the number of MPs in the Commons by 50. There's a very detailed briefing note on it from the House of Commons library here (pdf). It's a very contentious piece of legislation, and at some stage some Tory MPs are likely to rebel against the plan to hold a referendum next May, although, as the Financial Times reports (subscription), the Tory revolt is not expected to happen tonight.

I've got the bill on my desk. It's 153-pages long and I don't claim to have read it. But I see that it shows us what the ballot papers are going to look like in the referendum.

1.34pm: Michael Gove, the education secretary, has given a speech this morning. My colleague Jessica Shepherd has been covering it. She's sent me this:

The education secretary, Michael Gove, said the UK needed to restore faith in its "battered" qualification system today.

Speaking to teachers at Westminster academy on the first day of the school year, Gove said the UK had fallen down international league tables of school performance and had "one of the most unequal educational systems in the world".

A white paper, to be published this autumn, will propose changes that give teachers more protection against false and malicious allegations from pupils and parents. This is a growing problem, he said, particularly for male primary teachers.

The exam regulator, Ofqual, will be asked to measure the questions 16-year-olds in the UK are asked in tests and compare them with those asked to their peers in Asian countries. "There is justified concern" about qualifications from parents and teachers, he said.

"We want to change the law so that the regulator can stop the progressive devaluation of our exams," he added.

Gove announced this weekend that he would consider introducing a baccalaureate featuring a minimum of five subjects for 16-year-olds. This would ensure pupils received a rounded education and took sciences, languages and a humanities, as well as maths and English.

Meanwhile, a written ministerial statement has revealed that of the 16 new free schools that are likely to open next year, four are faith schools.

1.31pm: Theresa May, the home secretary, will be responding to the urgent question about phone hacking on behalf of the government (see 12.46pm).

1.20pm: I've just had Downing Street on the phone. The prime minister's spokesman isn't particularly happy about the way I reported his reluctance to say that David Cameron "believes" Andy Coulson's denials (see 11.51am).

The spokesman is not contesting any of the quotes, but thinks I'm reading too much into them. He said he told the briefing that Cameron "accepts" Coulson's statement, and "that means the same thing".

12.46pm: Here's a lunchtime summary:

• A Labour shadow minister has said that Andy Coulson, the prime minister's communications chief, should "step aside" while fresh allegations that he encouraged phone hacking when he was the editor of the News of the World are investigated. Alan Campbell, a shadow Home Office minister, told the Journal in Newcastle: "Andy Coulson should step aside while the investigation is taking place and, if he doesn't offer to do that, the prime minister should show some leadership and tell him to step aside."

Coulson has strongly denied the claims, and this morning Downing Street said David Cameron had "full confidence" in him. But the prime minister's spokesman refused to say whether Cameron "believes" Coulson's denial.

John Yates, the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner, has confirmed detectives will look at the new allegations that have been made about phone hacking at the News of the World. But he did not accept that the police had failed to investigate the affair properly in the past.

• Ministers have been ordered to answer an urgent question on phone-hacking in the Commons this afternoon. It will happen at 3.30pm. The question was tabled by the Labour former minister Tom Watson, a member of the Commons culture committee.

• Tony Blair has said that he may cancel the book-signing event in London planned for Wednesday because he does not want to create extra trouble for the police. "The book is selling fantastically, the BNP apparently are now saying they want to get in on the action, and you end up causing a lot of hassle for people – and cost – when there are better things for the police to do," he said. "It's not as if we need to do it," Blair said this morning.

12.21pm: Here are some more developments in the phone hacking case.

• John Whittingdate, the chairman of the Commons culture committee, has just told the BBC that he does not think his committee should re-open its inquiry into the affair. He said the committee had already looked at this twice and that he would only be in favour of a fresh inquiry if something "really remarkable" came up. He also said that select committees worked best when they did not get involved in party political dispute.

It's not the job of select committees to go on conducting this sort of inquiry. If the police consider that it is worth re-opening, that's a matter for them.

You can read the report that the committee published in February covering this here.

• The New York Times has said that it will not provide the police with the background material it collected when it was investigating phone hacking at the News of the World. This is from the latest NYT news story.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said, "Scotland Yard has declined our repeated requests for interviews and refused to release information we requested months ago under the British freedom of information law. After our story was published, Scotland Yard expressed renewed interest in the case and asked us to provide interview materials and notes; we declined, as we would with any such request from police. Our story speaks for itself and makes clear that the police already have evidence that they have chosen not to pursue."

• Tom Watson, a Labour former minister, has criticised the police for not investigating the suggestion that John Prescott had had his phone hacked. He was responding to the interview John Yates gave this morning. (See 8.46am)

I thought it was incomplete. He could not answer the question why did he not tell the country's deputy prime minister that there was a strong suggestion that his phone had been hacked. He said there was no evidence. There was no evidence because he did not investigate it. And yet we saw that we had a private investigator with Mr Prescott's private phone numbers on a target list. And a financial transaction had taken place. I'm not a policeman. But if I had seen that evidence, I would thought that was a pretty clear case to investigate.

12.04pm: All five Labour leadership candidates are on Mumsnet for the next hour answering questions.

11.51am: I'm just back from the Downing Street lobby briefing. It was dominated by questions about phone hacking. The prime minister's spokesman said David Cameron had full confidence in Andy Coulson.

But, when I asked the spokesman if Cameron believed the statement Coulson has issued denying knowledge of phone hacking at the News of the World while he was editor, the spokesman was unable to say that the prime minister did believe his communications chief.

Here's the exchange I had with the prime minister's spokesman.

Q: Does the prime minister believe entirely Andy Coulson's denials?
A: [No verbal response, although the spokesman did appear to nod faintly.]
Q: I didn't hear that.
A: That's what I said.
Q: But does the prime minister believe Andy Coulson?
A: Andy has made the position clear, and there have been a number of reports over the past few days but none of those reports change anything as far as the prime minister is concerned.
Q: Just to confirm ... I'm asking you if you can say he believes Andy Coulson.
A: Obviously he accepts the position, obviously.
Q: Does he believe the statement?
A: Obviously he accepts the position.
Q: I note that you're not saying he believes Andy Coulson's statement.
A: This has been gone over many times in the past. The prime minister accepts the position. He has full confidence in Andy Coulson. And he continues to do his job.

While the briefing was going on, a spokesman for Coulson put out the statement that featured in Press Association story (see 11.29am post).

Interestingly, this statement was not read out at the lobby briefing.

11.29am: Here's some more on the phone hacking story from the Press Association:

Downing Street communications chief Andy Coulson told police today that he would be happy to meet them voluntarily to discuss fresh phone-hacking allegations.

Friends stressed that he had not been contacted by police, but a spokesman for the former News of the World editor said he would be prepared to co-operate with Scotland Yard following claims by ex-NoW journalist Sean Hoare.

A spokesman for Mr Coulson said: "Andy Coulson has today told the Metropolitan police that he is happy to voluntarily meet with them following allegations made by Sean Hoare.

"Mr Coulson emphatically denies these allegations. He has, however, offered to talk to officers if the need arises and would welcome the opportunity to give his view on Mr Hoare's claims."

Mr Hoare has claimed Mr Coulson knew of eavesdropping tactics used at the newspaper during his time in charge, something he has consistently denied.

11.09am: You can find all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all yesterday's, including some that are in today's paper, are here.

And here are all of the best politics stories and articles from the rest of the papers.

• The Times in a leader (paywall) backs David Miliband for the Labour leadership.

The choice that the party ought to make is the only candidate who has shown even an inkling of understanding the gravity of the situation the country faces. David Miliband is not a perfect answer to Labour's needs. His campaign has also flirted with policies on taxation that he will find have little resonance outside the party. But Mr Miliband understands that Labour needs a credible line on the deficit; he has tried more than any other candidate to appeal to the electorate as a whole. He is the only candidate who commands the personal authority to be a credible Prime Minister and Labour can be a serious Opposition only if it is seen as an alternative government. There is only one candidate who comes close to answering that description: David Miliband.

• Steve Richards in the Indepenent interviews David Miliband. Miliband says Labour lost the election because it did not open up politics.

This is where Tony is not right about why we lost the last election. We lost because we didn't open up politics ... Discipline and openness are not the opposite. The challenge for Labour is to have discipline and openness. Labour has to go on a journey beyond the state and at the same time the centralisation of Labour is a pre-devolution view of how to run a party.

Miliband also explained why his relationship with his brother was so close.

If you're a small family it makes you very close. There's our mum, Ed and I. and that's more or less it [their father, Ralph, died in 1994]. This is not an extended family and you learn unconditional support. In a BBC interview the other day the presenter said to me, 'we had your brother on and he told us private conversations the two of you had held on Iraq'. I said I'm not discussing private conversations. They then played the tape of Ed's interview and he said the same and I said what a good bloke. We were brought up to believe that you don't breach the most important bonds you've got.

• Tony Blair tells the Daily Telegraph in an interview that he "powerfully disagrees" with Kenneth Clarke's attempt to cut prison numbers.

I powerfully disagree with the trends the Government is establishing ... You've got to put in prison those who deserve to be there, but it's a much bigger problem than that. I went through the same journey as the Conservatives, thinking this is a symptom of a broken society.

Blair says some emerging countries have a better approach to law and order.

People are operating outside the law, yet we sit here with the political and legal establishments saying, 'That's our system and if you challenge it, you're destroying the rule of law' ... It's fascinating that some of the emerging market countries have tried to adopt law and order systems that get ahead of this. In some of those societies, they don't have these levels of criminality. They just don't accept them, and they're not going to accept them, and we need a debate about what we do about it here. It may involve being a great deal tougher.

• Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph says that he is concerned about the possibility of a doube-dip recession. The headline on the web version (but not the paper version) says "Ed Balls is right to foresee a train crash".

The consensus around drastic and immediate deficit reduction is in danger of breaking down. That is because one of the key arguments no longer looks as strong as it did. You may remember that during the election and in the run-up to the June Budget, we were told that it was necessary to avoid a Greek-style sovereign debt crisis. We were told we would have to slash the deficit or else the markets would punish us with cripplingly high interest rates. Well, the deficit is still more or less what it was, and yet interest rates and bond yields are at historic lows.

In other words, he is saying that Ed Balls may be right about the economy. Johnson says in the article that he still thinks that, on balance, Balls is wrong. But this piece will join the long list of Boris columns deemed "unhelpful" to David Cameron.

• The Financial Times says George Osborne is going to scrap the pre-budget report (subscription), the annual autumn mini-budget introduced by Gordon Brown.

The chancellor's decision to ditch what had become a second annual Budget will save resources at the Treasury; in its place a slimmed-down autumn statement, with new forecasts, towards the end of the year.

• The FT says David Cameron has urged Lady Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, to cut spending on the EU's new diplomatic corps (subscription).

• Tom Peck in the Independent on how Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, spent a night in a mud hut on a fact-finding trip to Ethiopia.

11.08am: Apologies for the lack of updates. We've been having technical problems.

10.12am: I'm going through the papers now. There's plenty of good stuff in them today. I'll post the highlights shortly.

9.30am: Damian Green, the immigration minister, has been giving interviews this morning ahead of the speech he will deliver later today (see 8.03am). Here's an extract from the Press Association story previewing his announcement.

Immigration minister Damian Green will promise today "smarter" controls on entry to the UK, as he releases research showing that tens of thousands of people admitted on student visas were still in the country five years later.

In his first major speech since the coalition government took office, Green will acknowledge that the annual cap on economic migrants from outside the EU will not be enough on its own to deliver the target of reducing net immigration to the tens of thousands.

He will promise to look at "all routes into the UK" and set new rules to ensure that only the "brightest and best" migrants enter the country to study and work.

And he will give priority to improving controls over foreign students and their dependants, more than 300,000 of whom were granted visas last year.

And, from PoliticsHome (paywall), this is what Green said about his plans on Radio 5 Live.

I'm going to see if [visas] are benefiting university students. We've found people calling themselves colleges but instead had a room above a kebab shop ... I recently came back from India where I saw rows of shops where literally every other shop was offering visas to study in England. The authorities in India want to cooperate, as they don't want their students conned by unscrupulous agents there.

9.20am: There was another interesting snippet in Blair's interview on Sky; he suggested that he has not ruled out a return to British politics.

It came when he was asked if he was "finished with British politics".

I should imagine it's more like British politics is finished with me, but I don't know. You never know. But don't take that as a great sign I've got some plans in mind, because I don't really.

Dominic Lawson wrote an interesting column on this subject in the Sunday Times yesterday (paywall). Here's his key point.

I was more intrigued by a passage almost at the end of Blair's 700-odd-page "journey" – just when some accompanying the author to the summit might fear they would run out of oxygen altogether – in which he declares: "Personally, I have never felt a greater sense of frustration or indeed a greater urge to leadership." Combine that with his unprompted remark to Lesley White in today's Sunday Times Magazine that "I feel a great urge to participate in my country's political life", and it adds up to a disarmingly open expression of continued ambition to return to the highest level of domestic political power.

Blair's comments today suggest that Lawson's onto something.

9.08am: More from Blair. On Daybreak he was asked if he would rather have David Cameron as prime minister, or Ed Balls. Blair said that he would always support the Labour leader and, that if Balls won the leadership, he would "support him 100%".

But would he? Blair's book makes it clear that he agrees much more with Cameron's approach to tackling the deficit than Balls's. And, in his interview with Radio 5 Live broadcast on Thursday last week, suggested that it was accepted to be disloyal to a party leader if you thought he or she was doing the wrong thing.

My people used to say to me: "Gordon and his folk are being disloyal to you." I used to say, if they believe they've got a better idea of how to lead the Labour party, they are perfectly justified in saying: "You should go and I should take over." My worry was always what the idea was.

8.58am: Tony Blair is on Sky now. I missed most of his Daybreak interview, but PoliticsHome (paywall) were listening and they say that Blair said he was having a rethink about the book signing planned for Wednesday in London in the light of what happened in Dublin.

To be frank, I am concerned... we have to be aware of putting people through unecessary extra cost and trouble. In Ireland on the whole, people remember the peace process and are incredibly nice. In a meeting of a 1,000 people, five get up and shout and get all the publicity.

On Sky Blair has just said that he will take a decision later today about whether to go ahead with the London event.

8.52am: The News of the World issued a new statement about the phone hacking affair this morning. Here it is.

The News of the World repeatedly asked the New York Times to provide evidence to support their allegations and they were unable to do so. Indeed, the story they published contained no new credible evidence and relied heavily on anonymous sources, contrary to the paper's own editorial guidelines. In so doing they have undermined their own reputation and confirmed our suspicion their story was motivated by commercial rivalry. We reject absolutely any suggestion there was a widespread culture of wrongdoing at the News of the World.

8.46am: John Yates seems to be the Met's assistant commissioner for the investigations that no one else wants to touch. He seems to get all the politically sensitive ones, like cash for honours, and this morning he demonstrated why he's considered a safe pair of hands. He confirmed that Scotland Yard is taking a new look at the case, but he did not accept that it had failed to investigate it properly in the past. Here are the key points from the interview.

• Yates said the Met would be considering the new allegations from Sean Hoare. "It is new, and we will be considering it, and obviously consulting with the Crown Prosecution Service before we do," Yates said. Yates said Hoare was not interviewed originally by Scotland Yard because he was not part of its inquiry.

• Yates claimed there was a "misunderstanding" about who might have had their phones hacked. Yesterday the Observer reported that John Prescott was calling for the investigation to be reopened because the Met has two invoices that appear to show News International paying an investigator to work on stories relating to Prescott. But Yates suggested that this did not mean Prescott's phone had been hacked.

There's a misunderstanding here to suggest that just because your name features in a private investigator's files that your phone has been hacked. It is not an offence, that I am aware of, to be a private investigator ... The fact that John Prescott's name appeared on an invoice does not mean that his phone has been hacked. It means he is of interest to a private investigator. That's what private investigators do.

Yates also said there was "no evidence" that Prescott's phone was hacked.

• Yates suggested that Prescott should have been warned earlier about his name appearing on the invoices. Asked if Prescott should have been told, Yates said: "That may have been the case, but at the time we did not do so."

• Yates said there was "no evidence" that Scotland Yard had an improper relationship with News International. The relationship between the police and the news organisation was "quite proper, quite normal".

• He denied suggestions that the inquiry had been mishandled. "This was a very, very thorough inquiry," Yates said. "It resulted in the conviction of two people, it resulted in a very complex area of law being clarified and it sent an extremely strong deterrent to other people."

8.22am: Asked about the allegation that Scotland Yard did not tell politicians like John Prescott that their phones had been hacked, Yates says the fact that a name appears on a list compiled by a private investigator does not prove that that person's phone has been hacked. All it means is that the individual is "of interest" to a private investigator. And there's no law against being a private investigator, he says.

Yates also denies that Scotland Yard had an "improper relationship" with News International that encouraged detectives not to pursue these allegations too forcefully.

Justin Webb, who is interviewing Yates, asks about the anecdote in the New York Times article about a press officer telling a detective that the phone hacking inquiry could damage the Met's relations with News International. Yates says that the story is attributed to an unnamed source and that the press officer named in the article has denied the allegation.

8.15am: John Yates is talking now. He says the Met has always said that, if new evidence emerges, it will consider it. He says the New York Times information counts as "new" information, and that Scotland Yard will now be looking at it.

Asked about Sean Hoare, the former News of the World journalist who spoke to the New York Times and who gave an interview at the end of last week accusing Andy Coulson of lying, Yates says he was not interviewed as part of the Met's original inquiry.

8.03am: Parliament's back today. The holiday season is well and truly over and there's plenty on the agenda. Here are some of the things coming up later.

8.20am: Tony Blair is interviewed on Daybreak (the new ITV breakfast programme).

9.15am: Michael Gove gives a speech on education.

2.30pm: Theresa May answers Home Office questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: MPs debate the parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill.

6pm: Damian Green gives a speech on sustainable immigration.

But before all this, at 8.10, the Today programme is interviewing John Yates, the assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, about the News of the World phone hacking affair.

The Guardian and the Independent are both leading on the story. The Guardian says there could be a new parliamentary inquiry into what happened. The Indie says David Cameron is under growing pressure to defend Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who is now Cameron's communications chief.

Inside the Guardian Nick Davies explains how Scotland Yard detectives sought to limit their inquiry into the affair. We'll hear what Yates says about that in a moment.

Former PM cancels scheduled appearance at Waterstone's store in Piccadilly days after eggs and shoes were thrown at him in Dublin

Tony Blair today cancelled a high-profile signing of his new memoirs in central London amid warnings that he would face a hostile reception from anti-war protesters.

The former prime minister scrapped the event on the day he signalled a desire to return to domestic politics as he conducted a round of interviews to promote his book, called A Journey.

He cancelled his appearance at the flagship Waterstone's store in Piccadilly, which had been scheduled for Wednesday.

Days earlier, eggs and shoes had been thrown at him as he attended a signing in Dublin. Four men were arrested and charged with public order offences.

Blair said he had decided to scrap the London signing because he did not want to subject the public to the "inevitable hassle" the protests would cause or strain police resources.

Announcing the decision in a statement, he said he would provide signed copies to the store for those who had planned to attend.

"However, I have decided not to go ahead with the signing as I don't want the public to be inconvenienced by the inevitable hassle caused by protesters," he added.

"I know the Metropolitan police would, as ever, have done a superb job in managing any disruption, but I do not wish to impose an extra strain on police resources simply for a book signing.

"I'm really sorry for those – as ever, the majority – who would have come to have their books signed by me in person. I hope they understand."

Waterstone's confirmed that a limited number of signed copies of A Journey would be available from the Piccadilly store from 9am on Thursday.

The managing director, Dominic Myers, said these would be sold on a first come, first served basis, with one copy per customer.

"Our job as a bookseller is to bring books to our customers, and where possible enable them to meet authors as well," he said.

"It is a matter of regret that, because of the likely actions of a minority, our customers are now not able to meet a three-times elected prime minister of the United Kingdom whose book has become our fastest-selling autobiography ever."

Blair told ITV's new breakfast programme, Daybreak, it was "sad" that people wanted to disrupt such events and admitted he was "concerned" the BNP would be involved in protests.

He hinted that he was seeking to make a return to British political life, but admitted it would be "very difficult" for him to do so.

His comments followed an interview published in the Sunday Times magazine yesterday, in which he said: "I feel a great urge to participate in my country's political life."

Blair, who was PM for 10 years before quitting in May 2007, said he would "love to" be involved in some way.

Asked on ITV about his apparent hints at a comeback, he said: "What did I have in mind when I said that? I don't know, actually, because I am sure it would be very difficult for me to play a part here.

"But what I really wanted to say was that I remain deeply committed to the country. I love this country and I want to see it do well."

His "new life" outside domestic politics had shown him that Britain had "a lot that we need to do to prepare for the future", he said, adding: "Frankly, I doubt there is a way I can play a part – but if I can, I would love to."

In an interview with Sky News, Blair admitted he feared that British politics had probably "finished with me" rather than the other way around.

"I don't know. You never know, but don't take that as a great sign that I've got some great plan in mind, because I don't really," he said.

He underlined his commitment to domestic policy in an interview in today's Telegraph, in which he said he saw himself as "basically a public service guy" and added: "If the right job came up, I'd definitely do it."

Blair used the newspaper interview to mount his first direct policy attack on the coalition as he criticised the liberal prison policies being pursued by David Cameron's government.

The former prime minister, who once promised to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime", said he "profoundly disagrees" with the approach of Kenneth Clarke, the justice secretary, who has rejected the "prison works" mantra of previous administrations.

Clarke has challenged the trend towards larger prison populations and questioned the need for short sentences, suggesting the government could save money by locking up fewer offenders and focusing more on rehabilitation.

But Blair called for "a far tougher, more targeted way" of tackling crime. "You've got to put in prison those who deserve to be there," he said.

He said "dysfunctional families who produce 14-year-old kids stabbing one another to death" are "making people's lives hell" and suggested Britain could learn from developing countries that "just don't accept" criminality.

Gareth Williams pictured at tube station nine days before body was found, as police seek man and woman seen at flats

Police investigating the unexplained death of the MI6 officer Gareth Williams, whose decomposing body was found padlocked in a holdall in his bath, today released CCTV footage of him at a tube station last month.

Scotland Yard want to identify a man and a woman, aged between 20 and 30, who were let in to the communal entrance of his flat in Pimlico, central London, late one evening in June or July.

The CCTV images show Williams, wearing a red T-shirt, entering Holland Park station at 3pm on Saturday 14 August.

Police also released details of Williams's movements after he returned from a holiday in the US the previous Wednesday. He went shopping "on a number of occasions" in the West End and Knightsbridge areas, including in Harrods on Sunday 15 August. At about 2.30pm he was filmed in Hans Crescent, heading towards Sloane Street.

A police spokesman said that no drugs or indications of drug or alcohol use were recovered from the flat in Pimlico. There was no sign of any forced entry, no signs of disturbance inside and no property was believed to be missing.

Williams, a codebreaker on secondment from GCHQ Cheltenham, was discovered on Monday 23 August, eight days after he had last been seen. An inquest heard that his body was in "an advanced state of decay".

A postmortem examination established no obvious cause of death and police have denied a number of speculative reports about what was found in the flat.

Detective Chief Inspector Jacqueline Sebire, who is leading the inquiry, said: "This remains a complex unexplained death inquiry. I would appeal to anyone who may have seen or had contact with Gareth in the period between 11 and 23 August to come forward."

Rev Alex Brown married hundreds of African men to eastern European women who were paid up to £3,000

A Church of England vicar who conducted hundreds of sham marriages in an immigration fraud was jailed today for four years.

The Rev Alex Brown married hundreds of African men desperate to obtain permanent residency rights in Britain, to eastern European women who were paid up to £3,000.

The fraud was detected because of the extraordinary surge in the number of marriages at the church of St Peter and St Paul in St Leonards on Sea, East Sussex. Brown presided over 383 marriages between July 2005 and July 2009, a 30-fold increase over the previous four years.

He was found guilty in July at Lewes crown court of conspiring to facilitate breaches of immigration laws, along with a solicitor, Michael Adelasoye, and Vladymyr Buchak, an illegal immigrant from Ukraine who recruited the brides.

Brown and Adelasoye both denied knowing the marriages were false, but at the trial jurors were told that some couples could not speak the same language, others produced rings that did not fit, and some applied to marry one person and then the following week applied to marry somebody else.

Brown was suspended from his duties by the church after his arrest.

The judge, Richard Hayward, also handed Brown a five-month sentence, to run concurrently, after he pleaded guilty to solemnising a marriage according to the rites of the Church of England without the banns being properly read.

London mayor says consensus around drastic and immediate deficit reduction is in danger of breaking down

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, today became the highest-profile Tory to raise doubts about the government's deficit reduction plan as he hailed the "compelling argument" put forward by the Labour leadership contender Ed Balls.

Johnson – who just six months ago wrote that he wanted to "headbutt" Balls, then the education secretary, over his views on the teaching of Latin in state schools – switched to praising his "old friend".

The mayor claimed Balls was "a man of ideas" with a grasp of economic history, highlighting his warning that the government's rapid deficit reduction programme risked tipping the country into a double-dip recession.

Johnson, who has been pressing the government not to cut funding for major infrastructure projects in the capital, concluded that the consensus on drastic and immediate deficit reduction was "in danger of breaking down".

In his Telegraph column, Johnson said one the key arguments put forward by the coalition government "no longer looks as strong as it did".

At the weekend, a poll for ConservativeHome suggested the Labour leadership contender most feared by the Tories was David Miliband, followed by his fellow frontrunner and younger brother, Ed.

But Johnson dismissed the brothers as "amiable north London intellectuals" who have never said "anything memorable about anything".

He turned instead to the argument Balls made in a recent speech, in which he warned that rapid deficit reduction was both unnecessary and "economically very risky indeed".

Johnson wrote: "You may remember that during the election and in the run-up to the June budget, we were told that it was necessary to avoid a Greek-style sovereign debt crisis. We were told we would have to slash the deficit or else the markets would punish us with cripplingly high interest rates.

"Well, the deficit is still more or less what it was, and yet interest rates and bond yields are at historic lows. Of course it is a good thing to bear down on wasteful public spending, and the deficit must certainly be reduced.

"The question is how far and how fast this can be done without provoking a double-dip recession – and the risk is that if there is a serious downturn at the end of the year, it is the coalition that will cop the blame. Balls will be jubilant."

Johnson went on to hedge his bets on the economy, insisting he still "hopes and believes" it will continue to recover.

But he warned that banks needed to act to avoid a "combustible contrast" between public sector workers losing their jobs as a result of the cuts, and the doling out of hundreds of millions of pounds in Christmas bonuses "to the very people who, collectively if not individually, were responsible for the financial crisis".

Johnson said banks still had time to work out a way of showing restraint to stave off regulatory or fiscal action by the government in order to appease public indignation, which he said would do long-term damage to the capital.

"If they fail," he wrote, "there will be many who find an unbearable contrast between the fortunes of the bankers and those of the wider public. As John Prescott might put it, we need to nip this train crash in the bud."

Johnson highlighted Balls' thesis on the economic recovery just a week after he was rumoured to be threatening to quit as mayor over transport spending cuts in the capital.

The chancellor, George Osborne, is committed in principle to the £16bn Crossrail project, which will link east and west London, but has indicated that it could be scaled back, leaving Johnson with a multimillion-pound shortfall.

Johnson – who has no tax-raising powers as mayor and is dependent on central government, councils and fares revenue for funding – last week denied he had threatened not to stand for re-election in 2012.

Despite insisting he had no plan to make his way back into parliament via a byelection, supporters have subsequently been canvassed on www.Boris-Johnson.com for their views on whether Johnson, a popular figure among the Tory rank and file, should ditch a second mayoral term in favour of a return to the Commons.

A spokesman for the mayor said Boris-Johnson.com was an independent website.

Ministers rule out immediate talks with Basque separatist group, saying it is regrouping after arrests of senior members

Spain's socialist government today ruled out negotations with the armed Basque separatist group Eta, claiming the organisation had announced a ceasefire purely because it was too weak to carry out terrorist attacks.

"Eta kills in order to impose itself, so that means one cannot dialogue," said the interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba. "Eta has stopped because it cannot do anything ... and also in order to rebuild itself."

The government declined to comment officially, but was busily repeating the message that it did not believe in Eta's ceasefire. "The Eta terrorist group is very weakened," said the transport minister, José Blanco. The government was only interested, he said, in "a definitive laying down of arms and end to violence".

The momentary excitement caused by yesterday's video message from Eta had almost entirely dissipated today, although some radical separatists in the Basque country welcomed what they called a "unilateral, unconditional and indefinite" ceasefire.

Analysts gave little credence to the idea that the ceasefire might mark the end of four decades of violence that have claimed more than 800 lives. They said the group had been forced to stop planning attacks six month ago after a series of arrests left it leaderless and disorganised.

"The statement aims to give political meaning to a strategic rest decreed by Eta's leaders six months ago in order to reorganise internally to cope with police pressure," wrote Florencio Domínguez, an Eta expert, in La Vanguardia newspaper.

Dominguez pointed to the arrest in February of Ibon Gojeaskoetxea, a senior Eta commander, as the key moment. That arrest was hailed as the fifth time in two years that police had detained the person directly in charge of Eta's handful of remaining armed units.

At the same time, police had prevented new units from being formed in several parts of Spain, and discovered Eta's latest bombmaking laboratory and had dismantled its new bases in Portugal, to where Eta had hoped to move its support infrastructure that historically had been based in France.

The killing in March of a French police officer, who discovered members of the gang trying to steal cars at a showroom near Paris, was the result of a panicked attempt to escape arrest and came despite the decision to stop carrying out attacks, according to Rogelio Alonso, of Madrid's Rey Juan Carlos University.

"Eta is selling smoke," he said. "Even during their ceasefires, they continue to kill."

The immediate result of that killing, in any case, had been to increase the intensity of French police pressure on the group.

Observers saw the ceasefire statement – read out by a masked woman – as a response to pressure from former leaders of the banned Batasuna party, who have been urging Eta to call a permanent ceasefire so that the party can be legalised once more. But the announcement fell short of meeting the demands of the Batasuna leaders, with Eta failing to indicate whether its ceasefire was permanent or temporary.

A group of spokesmen for the radical Basque separatist movement that is close to Eta nevertheless hailed the ceasefire as "a valuable contribution to the construction of peace and the consolidation of democratic process".

Attempts by radical separatists to guide Eta towards abandoning violence were being "sabotaged" by the government, columnist Ramón Sola claimed in the Basque-language newspaper Gara.

"The announcement that there will be no attacks provides a secure zone where the socialist government can resolve an armed conflict that has outlasted two different regimes and dozens of governments," he said, referring to the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco and the democratic governments elected after his death in 1975.

Kim Jong-un expected to be named next leader as Pyongyang hosts first party summit in 30 years

Members of North Korea's ruling party were gathering in Pyongyang for a rare meeting that could see the country's leader, Kim Jong-il, name his youngest son as his successor.

Although the exact date of the congress, the first of the Korean Workers' party for 30 years, had yet to be announced, reports in South Korea said troops had moved into the capital, apparently in preparation for a parade to mark the event.

In recent days, North Korean schoolchildren have taken to the streets to sing Footsteps, a song many believe was written for Kim's third son, Kim Jong-un, who is tipped to become the third member of the dynasty to rule the communist state. In addition, thousands of people waving plastic flowers spent the weekend rehearsing for a parade, according to China's Xinhua news agency.

The city is reportedly decked out in posters announcing the meeting. "Let's make this a festive event that will shine in the history of our country and people," read one seen in footage from AP Television News.

The Rodong Sinmun, the party's newspaper, said delegates from across the country were poised to approve key policies and personnel changes at the heart of the regime's leadership. The meeting coincides with the 62nd anniversary, on 9 September, of North Korea's founding by Jong-un's grandfather, Kim Il-sung.

In a typically colourful commentary, the Rodong Sinmun said: "The people's hearts awaiting the revolutionary, festive occasion heat up due to their joy and happiness."

Speculation that Kim Jong-un will eventually succeed Kim Jong-il has intensified since his 68-year-old father suffered a stroke two years ago.

Kim Chan-gyong, an assistant professor at the North Korean academy of social science, said the conference signalled a turning point for the regime. "I think it will serve as an important occasion amid our efforts to build a powerful socialist nation ... at a time when there is historic demand for a new turning point," he told APTN.

The international community will use what information it can glean from reports of the secretive meeting to piece together an idea of how North Korea might behave under a new leader.

"I am aware of the news reports, but all I can say is that we are collecting information from various fronts and rushing to analyse it," Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yoshito Sengoku, told reporters in Tokyo. "Japan's biggest interest lies in whether the meeting produces a regime that could help pave the way for breaking a stalemate in the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear programme."

The meeting is the first party congress since 1980, when Kim Jong-il was confirmed as Kim Il-sung's successor, although he did not become leader until his father's death in 1994. It comes at a time of rising tensions in the region: relations with Seoul quickly deteriorated after international inspectors said a North Korean torpedo had sunk the Cheonan, a South Korean naval ship, in March.

While Pyongyang has indicated it is willing to return to nuclear talks – with conditions – the US, Japan and South Korea say they will only consider reopening negotiations if the regime apologises for the Cheonan sinking. North Korea denies involvement in the incident, in which 46 sailors died.

Little is known about Kim Jong-un. He is thought to be aged 27 or 28 and was educated at the prestigious International School of Berne, in Switzerland. A widely circulated, but unconfirmed, photograph of him appears to have been taken when he was in his teens.

Kim Jong-il's recent visit to China is being seen as part of efforts to win support for the power switch from North Korea's only ally and biggest aid donor. There has been no confirmation of rumours that Kim Jong-un accompanied his father on the trip.

Reports from the South say the country's fearsome propaganda machine has already begun building a cult of personality around Kim Jong-un, including the release of poems and songs extolling his virtues as a leader. His ascent to the Workers' party hierarchy is thought to have begun last year when he was reportedly rubber-stamped as a member of parliament.

North Korea experts believe Kim Jong-il will place his son in a key party post, giving him a base from which to emulate his father's rise through the ranks of the country's military and political elites.

While little progress has been made in resolving the Cheonan incident or restarting nuclear talks, North Korea has made what it called "humanitarian gestures" that analysts say are intended to improve its international standing. Last month, it released aUS man who had entered the country illegally, following an intervention by the former US president, Jimmy Carter. Today, it said it would release seven members of a South Korean fishing vessel, including three Chinese, who apparently strayed into North Korean waters in early August. The state-run Korean Central News Agency said the fishermen would be sent back to South Korea after they "admitted the seriousness of their act and gave assurances that they would never repeat it".

St Comgall's pupil brings in device found on Ballymena Road, and second school searched in security scare

An eight-year-old boy walked into a Northern Ireland primary school today carrying a viable pipe bomb.

The pupil found the device on Ballymena Road, in Antrim, and took it into St Comgall's primary school. Army bomb officers were called in and 400 pupils and staff were moved to a nearby church.

Security sources believe the bomb was left in the area by a group aligned to dissident loyalist terrorists opposed to the peace process.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland said there was another security alert at a school in the Greystone Road area of Antrim. A search of the school was under way.

The eight-year-old boy, Brendan Shannon, said he had spotted a "golden pipe bomb" while arriving to school on his bike. He brought the device in to a teacher who called the police.

His father, Gerard, said: "I am trying not to think of the consequences that could have been."

The school's principal, Hilary Cush, said it was "despicable that anybody would put children at risk".

Chief Inspector Simon Walls, the area commander for the district, said: "I cannot express enough my disgust at the cowards involved in these alerts today. To target the general public is never acceptable by any means but to take away the secure feelings of innocent children and to put them at risk like this is beyond despicable."

The SDLP said those responsible for the two alerts were trying to stoke up sectarian tensions. Thomas Burns, an assembly member, said: "There is obviously a group which is determined to cause mayhem in our town with these regular pipe bomb incidents, and until we know otherwise, we have to operate on the basis that they are prepared to cause murder as well.

"This is an attack on our whole community and the whole community must respond by working with our community policing service."

Kidnapped Austrian schoolgirl Natascha Kampusch's autobiography reveals details of her 3,096 days in captivity

Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian woman who was kidnapped and held captive for more than eight years, has told of how she tried to kill herself after being beaten up to 200 times a week by her captor.

In her forthcoming autobiography Kampusch, 22, said Wolfgang Priklopil called her "my slave" and demanded she perform household tasks semi-naked after he kidnapped her as a 10-year-old in 1998.

Kampusch escaped from Priklopil's house in August 2006 and became a talk show host in Austria less than two years later, although a year ago she spoke of having almost reverted back to the life she had as a prisoner – suffering from anxiety attacks and spending most of her time in her Vienna flat.

Priklopil killed himself hours after Kampusch managed to escape while he was cleaning his car.

In her autobiography, 3,096 Days, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail, Kampusch told of how she was bundled into a van by Priklopil on 2 March 1998.

"Everything happened very fast. At the very moment I lowered my eyes and started walking past, he grabbed me by the waist and threw me through the open door of his van," Kampusch writes.

"Did I scream? I don't think so. Yet everything inside me was one single scream. It pushed upwards and became lodged far down in my throat."

Kampusch says during the early days of her captivity she was treated well by Priklopil, but in the book she reveals for the first time the violence to which she was later subjected. She talks of how after she reached puberty around the age of 12 her captor "started treating me as if I were dirty and disgusting", and would kick her in the shins or punch her when she walked past him.

"He also subjected me to minor sexual assaults as part of my daily harassment," she writes.

Priklopil began allowing her upstairs to do housework from the age of 14, Kampusch says, but she would be subjected to beatings if her work was deemed to be of poor quality.

"He hated it when the pain made me cry," Kampusch remembers. Priklopil would push her head underwater in the sink and throttle her when she sobbed.

In the extracts published today, Kampusch insists Priklopil's relationship with her "wasn't about sex" – although she says he would tie her to him and force them to share a bed.

"When I was 14, I spent the night above ground for the first time. I lay stiff with fright on his bed as he lay down next to me and tied my wrists to his with plastic cuffs.

"But when he manacled me to him on those many nights, it wasn't about sex. The man who'd beat me and locked me in the cellar had something else in mind: he simply wanted something to cuddle."

Priklopil also insisted that Kampusch shave off her hair, and used food deprivation to keep her under his control, she writes. The book also reveals that she was "never fully clothed" while working in the house – a strategy Kampusch says was designed to prevent her from running away.

"Usually, I wore just a cap and knickers – though when he eventually started letting me work in his garden, it was always without my knickers," she writes.

After two years of regular beatings, Kampusch "began a kind of passive resistance", punching herself in the face before Priklopil was able to. When she reached 15, the beatings became even more frequent: "… repeated punches to my head that made me nauseous, sometimes more than 200 blows to my body in a week", Kampusch writes.

The 22-year-old also documents her attempts to kill herself, saying the efforts provoked fear in her captor. Kampusch attempted to strangle herself with items of clothing, slit her wrists with a needle and later lit a fire in the cellar, but said "the will to survive kicked in".

The book also tells of how Priklopil manipulated her psychologically, potentially hinting at why she did not attempt to escape earlier.

"He told me my parents had refused to pay a ransom," she writes. "'Your parents don't love you at all … they don't want you back … they're happy to be rid of you.'"

"These statements were like acid. Systematically, he was undermining my belief in my family."

Paedophile Derek Slade ordered boarding school pupils to write about 'whackings I have had'

A former boarding school headteacher convicted of abusing male pupils, both sexually and physically, during the 1970s and 1980s was today imprisoned for 21 years.

Derek Slade, 61, of Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, had been convicted of more than 50 offences. A jury found him guilty of sexually assaulting and beating 12 boys aged between eight and 13 between 1978 and 1983, following a trial at Ipswich crown court.

Jurors heard that Slade ran St George's private school, which was initially based in Wicklewood, Norfolk, then moved to Great Finborough, Suffolk, in 1980.

Prosecutors said Slade hit boys with a slipper, a table tennis bat and his bare hand, then ordered youngsters to write about "whackings I have had".

Slade was arrested after former pupils complained two years ago. One victim said he had never told his parents what had happened. Another described Slade's assaults as "reigns of terror".

He had admitted assault, indecent assault and child pornography offences. He denied other allegations of assault and indecent assault, but was found guilty.

Slade admitted being a paedophile and told jurors that there was a sexual motive behind the corporal punishment he inflicted. But he denied more serious sexual assaults, including prosecution allegations that he hosted "midnight feasts" where boys would be abused.

Heavy rain forecast for south-west, Wales and Northern Ireland

Autumn gales and torrents of rain are washing out the memory of a dismal summer, with severe weather warnings today for the south-west, Wales and Northern Ireland, and forecasts that downpours will spread to most parts of the country.

The Met Office is predicting rainfall of up to 15mm in three hours in many places, and is warning travellers to check for traffic disruption caused by flooding on many roads.

August proved the coolest since 1993, and in many parts of England the fourth dullest on record, the Met Office reports. There were very few really warm days, average maximum temperatures were 1C below normal, and rainfall well above normal in south-east England and Wales. In East Anglia it was the third wettest August on record, with more than twice the normal August rainfall.

For those returning to school this week, there won't even be the consolation of savage grudge conker matches. According to the Campaign for Real Conkers, there is a shortage caused by the dismal August weather, when many fell early from the trees and rotted on the ground. Most of those still on the trees will not be ripe and robust enough for the sport when the gales topple them.

Keith Flett, the serial Guardian letter writer and a spokesman for the group, explained: "The conkers are nowhere near ripe enough yet and people won't be able to get their practice in. When you whack a conker before it is ripe it will crumble to bits."

Boris Johnson unveils plans for alternative travel as London Underground warns most journeys will be affected by walkout

Most journeys on London Underground will be disrupted in the next 48 hours, Transport for London warned today as a series of strikes over job losses were due to start.

Last night, around 200 maintenance staff on the Jubilee and Northern line walked out in a separate dispute about pay.

A more significant strike gets under way at 5pm today, when thousands of members of the Rail Maritime and Transport union (RMT) and the Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA) will walk out in protest at plans to axe 800 jobs at ticket offices.

Further action will begin at 9pm tonight, when drivers, signallers and station staff start another 24-hour walkout.

The unions say safety and security will be compromised by staff cuts and reductions in ticket office opening hours.

Transport for London warned that most journeys will be disrupted, with the biggest delays expected tomorrow.

But London Mayor Boris Johnson said he was "determined to keep London moving", and dismissed the strike as "pointless and politically motivated".

The mayor and TfL have laid on alternative modes of transport , in attempt to minimise the disruption. They include 100 extra buses, escorted bike rides, marshalled taxi ranks, and the capacity for 10,000 more journeys on the river Thames.

Volunteers will be also positioned at tube, bus and rail stations to help people with their journeys and provide maps and other information.

Johnson said: "Londoners are a hardy bunch and I am sure a tube strike will not deter us from getting around. I have asked TfL to pull out all the stops, but we must be clear that the RMT and TSSA plan to inconvenience Londoners for no good reason.

"The extra measures we have put in call for a team effort and people will need to consider buses, boats or bikes as an alternative to their usual journeys. This planned action will cause disruption for millions of Londoners and I call on the unions to get round the table and show common sense."

The RMT said the use of volunteers during the strike was a further example of TfL playing "fast and loose" with safety. RMT's general secretary, Bob Crow, said: "There do not appear to be any corners that London Underground are not prepared to cut in order to bulldoze through their lethal cocktail of job and safety cuts.

"Sending out a few volunteers without the necessary operational licences and training to try and run a few trains is a disaster waiting to happen."

Crow added: "Instead of meaningless PR gimmicks from the mayor, he should start telling his officials to take this dispute seriously and he should also start putting tube safety before the dash to slash budgets."

TfL denied the RMT's allegations and said it would never do anything to compromise safety on the underground.

More staff cuts are feared as TfL completes a cash-strapped revamp of the tube network. The unions plan further stoppages in October and November.

The transport commissioner, Peter Hendy, said: "We continue to make every effort to avoid a dispute. There is no need for any action as the changes we are introducing come with no compulsory redundancies, and mean that stations will remain staffed at all times and every station with a ticket office will continue to have one."

He added: "Due to the success of Oyster, just one journey in 20 now involves a ticket office, and some ticket offices sell fewer than 10 tickets an hour."

Gerry Doherty, general secretary of the TSSA, said the mayor was behind the proposed job cuts, adding: "His plans to slash ticket office opening hours go considerably further than those he opposed in 2008 when trying to get elected as mayor, and our members rightly see them as the forerunner for additional cuts in October when the government delivers its dreaded spending review."

The transport secretary, Philip Hammond, said: "A tube strike will be bad for passengers, bad for business and bad for London.

"At a time when public finances are under pressure, any strike by tube workers will be seriously damaging — undermining the case we are making within the spending review for continued investment in the tube."

David Miliband expected to win first round of ballot but brother's campaign team say they will take bulk of second preferences

Ed Miliband's campaign for the Labour leadership claimed that vital second preference votes were heading to their man by a proportion of three to one, greatly increasing his chances of victory.

On the basis of its telephone canvassing Ed Miliband's team expect his older brother David to win the first round of ballot, due at the end of the month, but then for Ed to scoop up the bulk of the second preference votes of supporters of Diane Abbott, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham as they drop out.

At the end of probably the most important weekend of the leadership contest, Ed Miliband's team claimed his brother's campaign was rattled. The votes of members in the constituencies represent a third of the electoral college.

This version is hotly contested by the other camps, and David Miliband, appearing on a 90-minute Sky News debate between the five leadership contestants repeatedly offered himself as the unity candidate, a clear appeal for the second preference votes.

David Miliband emerged as the man grassroots Tories most fear in a poll of Tory activists conducted by Conservative Home website and also won the endorsement of the Observer newspaper.

Summing up his appeal to voters at the end of the Sky News debate, David Miliband said he stood for "a moral economy, with responsibility from top to bottom; the redistribution of power in Britain; an assault on inequality of life chances; and a different kind of Labour party".

He was praised afterwards by Lord Prescott for being the man most willing to defend the government's record.

Ed Miliband by contrast repeatedly emphasised the need for change from New Labour, and said the most difficult decision of his political life had been to stand against his brother. "I am the candidate who can best turn the page for Labour. I am not the candidate of the New Labour establishment, I am the candidate who can change Labour, win back trust from people and win back power for our party," he said.

The two men clashed most openly over tuition fees in higher education with Ed Miliband, in common with Ed Balls, calling for a graduate tax, and David Miliband refusing to endorse one at this stage, arguing there was a danger that students on a two-year course would end up subsidising those on a four-year course. He pointed out upfront tuition fees had already been abolished, and a graduate tax might add 2p to income tax. But his brother suggested continuing with tuition fees would lead to more prestigious universities charging more than their less prestigious rivals.

Ed Balls, the former education secretary, said he had done most to challenge the Tory media orthodoxy that cutting the budget deficit is the only priority arguing he was "the candidate who has set out a credible, but also a radical, plan on jobs and housing".

In an apparent side swipe at David Miliband, Ed Balls said Labour would lose the next election if it chose a leader on the basis that he or she was attractive to the rightwing press. All five candidates said they were happy to describe themselves as socialists. Abbott failed to answer correctly any of the five questions put to test the candidates' knowledge of everyday life, including the price of a litre of petrol and a lottery ticket.

The four-part TV spinoff from the movie begins tomorrow on Channel 4. Watch a video of Shane Meadows and his cast sharing their experiences

London Blitz: 7 September 1940 was the first day of the German bombardment of London that lasted 76 consecutive nights
• Datablog: See how the first day's attacks looked. Full list
• The first day: hour by hour. An interactive map

It was late in the afternoon of an early September Saturday 70 years ago when the German bombers came, flying low, in formation, up the Thames, their engines roaring as they headed for London to start eight months of bombing the capital.

"It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight," wrote Colin Perry, a lad cycling that afternoon on Chipstead Hill, Surrey, in a memoir years later. "Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes … the sky was full of them. Bombers hemmed in with fighters, like bees around their queen, like destroyers round the battleship, so came Jerry."

Mavis Fabling, now 80, remembers that afternoon of 7 September 1940 just as clearly. She said: "I can still remember it very vividly. We lived in Abbey Wood, three miles from Woolwich Arsenal. My mother was baking in the kitchen, I was playing outside and my father was digging in the garden. Suddenly he rushed inside. He'd seen the planes overhead. 'Quick, quick, quick, get into the air raid shelter.' We ran down into the shelter in our garden.

"There were awfully frightening sounds, of bombs dropping and then there was one ghastly, thunderous sound. It was a direct hit on our neighbour's shelter. They were all killed, the whole family, except the father who was out. My mother had taken his wife shopping the day before to buy clothes at the Co-op. I can remember looking out of the window at the coffins being brought out and my mother very distressed.

"Then my father got the car from his work and took us down to my grandfather's house in Kent and I can remember looking back out of the window and seeing the sky glowing red behind us."

The records of the London fire brigade for that day, now kept in the metropolitan archives office in Clerkenwell, tell the story of the first major raid of the blitz in meticulous and sober detail. Neatly typed official green slips record each incident and a separate bound volume lists all the fires attended.

There had been scattered, small-scale raids for weeks, but this was the first concerted attack, ordered two days before by Hitler in retaliation for an RAF raid on Berlin a fortnight earlier.

The fire brigade's day started quietly enough but by late afternoon the records show, minute by minute, incidents coming thick and fast. First the East End, then the docks, both sides of the river, then the City and – more sporadically – the West End.

Trivial fires – 6ft by 4ft patch of grass burned in the garden of 207 Waller Road, SE14 at 6.40pm – are listed alongside the major: 24-48 Dee Street, Poplar E14, explosive bomb; Culloden Street School; 50-68 and 41 to 71 Aberfeldy Street; and 2-36 and 1-37 Ettrick Street – a whole neighbourhood flattened.

On Telegraph Hill, one of the highest points in south London, St Catherine's church was hit by an incendiary bomb: "Nave severely damaged and most part of roof off." It took 10 years before the church was rededicated. "We've just redone the rest of the roof," said the current vicar, Zambian-born Francis Makambwe. "So we're ready for another war."

The communities beside the docks got it worst: Silvertown on the north side was cut off for hours, its roads and terraces ablaze, Deptford too. At 6.07pm Childeric Road off New Cross Road was hit: 21 to 61 and 10-40 inclusive, 37 private houses severely damaged. At nearby Ruddigore Road, 13 private houses were damaged by explosion and fractured gas main. At Childeric Road today, the west side of the road still stands: a neat Victorian terrace of all the odd numbers. But the other side of the road is now a park.

Stacey Simkins, then 16 and an office boy enrolled as a fire brigade messenger – sometimes allowed to hold the hose when other firemen were busy – was off duty that night, at home with his family in East Ham. "When the bombers came over that night, most of us stood outside in the road, watching the fires down on the docks. It sounds ridiculous to say it now, doesn't it? We didn't think about the bombs, it was just that old cockney thing: 'Woss goin' on?' "

The fire brigade was nearly overwhelmed. At the start of the war, London had just 120 red fire engines and 2,000 motorised pumps. That night's records repeatedly say "Extinguished by handpump" or "Extinguished by strangers with sand."

Historian Francis Beckett, who has written a history of the fire brigade's union in the war, quotes one officer from the docks: "There were pepper fires loading the surrounding air heavily with stinging particles … so it felt like breathing fire itself; a paint fire, white-hot flame coating the pump with varnish. A rubber fire gave forth black clouds of smoke … sugar burns well in liquid form as it floats on the water.

"Tea makes a blaze that's sweet, sickly and intense. It struck one man as a quaint reversal of the fixed order of things to be pouring cold water on to hot tea leaves. A grain warehouse … brings forth banks of black flies, rats in hundreds and the residue of burnt wheat, a sticky mess that pulls your boots off."

By 6.30pm there were nine fires out of control in the docks. Timber stacks on Surrey docks were so fiercely alight that a fireboat had its paint scorched off in seconds. A rum warehouse went up, its contents spilling into the water and setting the Thames ablaze "like a Christmas pudding". There was a 1,000-metre wall of flame below Tower Bridge.

At 8.30pm, a second wave of bombers arrived, using the fires to guide them up the river. By 3am the next day, the exhausted firemen were gaining control. At 5am the all-clear was sounded.

The first night's raid left 430 killed, including seven firefighters, 60 boats sunk and the docks destroyed. Beckett quotes a fireman: "A man who returned from leave the following day found colleagues in shock, convinced they would not live for more than another week. Men who were old enough to have fought in the first world war said the western front offered nothing worse than they had seen."

The next night, the bombers came again, killing another 400. On 9 September 200 bombers came by day, 170 by night and their bombs killed 370. They came for 57 consecutive nights between mid-September and mid-November and then regularly for another six months until May 1941. Two years later, there would be doodlebugs and V2 rockets.

"Somehow, we just carried on," said Mavis Fabling. "I think it was worse for our parents than for us. I got used to doing my homework in the shelter. The teachers still expected you to learn your Shakespeare sonnet for the morning."

Kirstie Allsopp among those affected as spammer exploits weaknesses in passwords and in Facebook code to try to tempt people to 'free' gadgets

A spammer has exploited a serious vulnerability in Facebook's photo upload system to spam both Facebook and Twitter with photos promising "free" iPads and iPhones.

The photos, which were posted to peoples' walls by exploiting a flaw in which it was not checked whether a photo could be posted to someone's profile, pretended to be from the profile owner and promoted schemes promising cheap or free gadgets - particularly iPhones and iPads.

Among those affected were a friend of Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg - who responded, says the security company Sophos; Zuckerberg responded to the picture by asking his friend "Is this real or did your account get hacked?"

Robert McMillan for IDG was the first with the detail, which he says let the spammer post "thousands" of messages on peoples' Walls.

People who saw the fake postings appear on their Wall, and knew they hadn't put them there, would assume it was their own account which had been hacked and change their password - but this made no difference, because the flaw is in Facebook's basic photo authentication code.

As the company told McMillan, "Earlier this week, we discovered a bug in the code that processes photos as they're uploaded. This bug caused us not to make the correct checks when determining whether a photo should be posted to a person's profile... We quickly worked to resolve the issue and fixed it shortly after discovering it. For a short period of time before it was fixed, a single spammer was able to post photos to people's profiles that they hadn't approved."

It remains to be seen whether that's the last of the problem. Meanwhile, Twitter users have had their own problems: property doyenne Kirstie Allsopp was among a number of people whose accounts were hacked at the weekend to send out (yet more) "free iPad" and "OMG free iPhone" tweets.

Sophos notes that Allsopp has since removed the offending tweets, which would have led anyone who followed them to webpages where they were encouraged to apply for "free" iPads in exchange for personal information and sign up for scams that charged £4.50 per week.

"Interestingly, the spam messages were sent 'via web', suggesting that it wasn't a third party application or linked website that was used to send the messages," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos. "It seems likely that Kirstie Allsopp's Twitter password was stolen via a phishing or spyware infection on her computer, or that she was using the same password on multiple websites – which is never a good idea."

Allsopp isn't pleased: "Hacking is a pain in the bum" she observed pithily after changing her password, profile picture and deleting the offending tweets. Yup - which only makes the case for better passwords stronger.

Lindsay Lohan's success in Machete is great timing for the troubled actor. But if she wants her professional star to keep rising she must pick future roles carefully

If you look at the US box office this morning, you might think Machete's successes have been modest – it opened at No 3 behind George Clooney's The American and the week-old The Takers, grossing roughly a tenth of what Toy Story 3 took in its opening weekend – but for Lindsay Lohan, it is a massive victory.

Commercially, Machete is Lohan's biggest film since Herbie: Fully Loaded five years ago. Nothing she's done since – not Just My Luck or A Prairie Home Companion or Bobby or Georgia Rule or I Know Who Killed Me or Chapter 27 or the direct-to-cable comedy Labour Pains – has come close to matching Machete's $11,300,000 opening.

But, even better, people don't actually seem to hate her in it. Admittedly this might be because she's playing an exaggerated version of herself – a gun-licking, drug-obliterated party girl in a nun's outfit – but reviews have been favourable, none the less. What's more, Lindsay's co-star Jessica Alba has repeatedly found room in her promotional schedule to call her a "brilliant actress" and director Robert Rodriguez was so impressed by her performance he's hinted at an entire spin-off movie for her character.

This professional upswing couldn't have come at a better time for Lohan. Her recent stints in jail and rehab have hopefully acted as a full stop to years of troubled behaviour, both on and off set, which have blighted her career, and now she seems genuinely ready to put everything behind her. Just last week Lohan appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair telling everyone how determined she was to make a success of herself again. And now that Machete has reminded us she's an actor, Lohan has never had a better chance to seize upon this newfound momentum.

This, however, will require a lot of work on her part. To become the serious actor she's always wanted to be, Lohan should forget about everything – Machete and jail and the slow-motion car crash that is her family life – and just start from scratch. Starring in a play, with its rehearsals and routine and scheduled performances, might be the perfect way to help her regain some discipline. And then, following that, Lohan would be best advised to clock on as a supporting actress for a while. Machete has already proved what an effective scene stealer she is, so a few years of well-picked bit-parts should be enough to prove she's reliable and talented enough to handle her own vehicles again.

Of course, role selection needs to be at the heart of everything. Lohan will only ever be as good as the parts she plays, so she and her advisers need to seriously consider every professional decision she makes from now on.

Then again, the trailer for her next film, Underground Comedy – written, starring and directed by a man primarily known for advertising kitchen products – contains defecating supermodels, a character called The Naked Asian and two scenes of necrophilia. So, on reflection, maybe we shouldn't hold our breath for a complete revival just yet.

Cif wouldn't be Cif without readers' input, and today we're asking you to contribute your thoughts on the future direction of the site

Recently, a colleague emailed round a link to a blog in praise of newspaper website comments. Yes, you read that right. Martin Belam – who, among other things, works on the Guardian's web development team – was offline for four days while at a festival, and in that time realised how much he missed readers' comments. An article felt "flat" without them, he said. "It genuinely felt like the article had finished prematurely ... There is a lot of debate about whether comment threads on news sites, and the constant sniping, flaming and bickering that seems to go with them, add anything to the user experience. But ... I was astonished at how much I missed the 'below the line' banter."

Last week, off work and at home, I decided to try it out. I went readers' comments cold turkey. Each morning, I brewed some coffee, lay the newspaper on the kitchen table, and read the articles, in print – my laptop cast aside. Day one, and by the time I got to the comment pages, I was struggling. What did readers – from PeterGuillam to princesschipchops and Damntheral – think of Theo Hobson's article on liberal guilt? Had he been back to defend, or maybe change, his views? And might Jackie Ashley's column backing Ed Miliband for Labour leader finally have tempted Olching to share his views on the contest?

Today, back in the office, is my first day as the new editor of Comment is free, and I'm looking forward to finding out the answers to these and other questions provoked by articles and threads alike. After a hugely successful few years in charge, Matt Seaton is moving to New York to edit Cif America, and I wish him all the best there. I will be working under Katharine Viner, executive comment editor and deputy editor of the Guardian, and alongside Becky Gardiner, editor of the newspaper comment pages. We have lots of ideas and plans for Cif – including making our coverage more regional and more global; being more engaged with the rest of the web; and redesigning some of the site (you may have noticed a few small changes already).

I will share more details on all of this with you each week, and I hope you too will contribute your thoughts on the future direction of the site. But for now, I want to emphasise that Cif is, crucially, about the articles and the comments. Together they make up the complete picture of what we publish. So a lot of my efforts, and those of the rest of the Cif team, will go into creating an inviting and inspiring debating space – one that, albeit sometimes on the wrong side of robust, nevertheless feels essential to the Guardian's comment section. This means we will give considered attention to both the articles we commission, and to how we host debate in the threads – including moderation. Even if some people plan never to post (or read) a comment on an article, I want everyone to feel that the potential to do so is there, and is something that enhances rather than detracts from our shared interest in quality journalism.

This will, inevitably, be a work in progress, and sometimes a thorny one. I will aim to be as transparent as possible about what we are doing and why, and I hope you will engage with that – if you're new to the site, or a long-time reader who doesn't usually comment, I'd welcome your thoughts; if you're a regular, please remind me of your hopes for the site, and have patience while we work through everyone's ideas. John Naughton, the Observer's web guru, has some useful advice along the lines of Beckett's "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." In his recent article on the internet, Naughton wrote that, traditionally, organisations try to deal with complex situations by reducing complexity. But this won't work on the web, he argues, where "intelligence, agility, responsiveness and a willingness to experiment (and fail) provide better strategies for dealing with what the networked environment will throw at you".

Every day on Cif, there's the potential to inspire debate on a huge range of issues, across large parts of the world, on a scale unimaginable before the arrival of the web. There's also the possibility of engaging, challenging and even changing people's minds about things that matter. That's complex stuff, for sure. But I'm looking forward to the challenge. To that end, please let me know: what should we try out next on Cif? And which blogs or other sites out there do you like and think we could usefully learn from?

Against medical advice, Max Stafford-Clark, still recovering from a stroke, is getting stuck into a new play – about New York and the IRA. Stuart Jeffries meets a theatre giant

On the morning of this interview, it took Max Stafford-Clark 16 minutes and 21 seconds to walk to work. It's perhaps half a mile from his flat through north London to the office of his theatre company, Out of Joint. "Ever since the stroke, I've timed the walk. A year ago it would have taken 17 minutes. My best time is 14 minutes five seconds." And the worst? "Forty-four minutes. That was just after the stroke. The doctor advised me not to do that, but I did."

It wasn't the only medical advice he ignored. Doctors also advise that if you've had a stroke, you don't make your partner your principal carer. But today, as he hobbles on sticks into the rehearsal room, Stafford-Clark is helped by his wife, the Irish playwright and actor Stella Feehily, whom he married 10 days before we meet. "Any advice doctors give you," he says, "they temper by saying, 'Every stroke is different.' David Hare told me that 40% of people who have a stroke become depressed. I decided not to go down that route."

Later, we sit over lunch in his office. Stafford-Clark, 69, has just finished giving notes to the cast of The Big Fellah, a fine new play by Richard Bean. It's the seventh play he has directed since his stroke in December 2006, and he's already plotting the eighth, An Evening With Dr Johnson, adapted from Boswell's life of the critic and his A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. "My output is back to the level it was – so in that sense, I have recovered. I'm directing as well as I ever have. I'm working as hard as I did before the stroke."

But not everything can be conquered by force of will, not even if your determination is as enviably steely as Stafford-Clark's. "Journalists want that story of a miraculous recovery, but that's not what's happened. There is no miraculous recovery. My left hand is pretty much useless, and the peripheral vision in my left eye is no good." As a result, he can't drive. There have been some improvements, though: his speech isn't as slurred as it was in the stroke's immediate aftermath, and the tears that previous interviewers noted no longer course incessantly down the left side of his face.

I tell him that a few years ago, I interviewed Alan Ayckbourn in his garden in Scarborough. It was a couple of years after the playwright had suffered a stroke. Ayckbourn's wife, Heather Stoney, told me proudly that it was the first time her husband had managed to climb down the spiral staircase to his garden. It's a story of recovery, but not a miraculous one: that step forward for Ayckbourn showed painfully clearly how the boundaries of his progress were circumscribed. He would never bound up and down those steps as he once did.

On hearing this, Stafford-Clark tells me a story. "Ian Dury, who I used to know well, was a lovely man except when he'd a few drinks – which was every night. One night at the bar of the Royal Court, he slapped the caliper on his leg and said, 'You know how often I think about this? Every fucking day. Every fucking day.' That's true, in a way, for me. I have very vivid dreams – of driving, rugby playing, and one where I throw away my sticks – like the end of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It is, I'm afraid, not like that."

The last time I met Stafford-Clark was in April 2004. He had come into the Guardian to guest-edit the arts pages. He sent me to Shrewsbury to find out if there was any cultural life there, and made me sit through an evening of Kate Adie's war-reporting reminiscences at the town's boys' school. I've nearly forgiven him for that assignment. Today he is frailer, certainly, but more compellingly acute in his judgments. Maybe this is because in 2004 he was dabbling as a journalist, while now he's on home turf – at the helm of the theatre company he co-founded in 1993, knocking a piece of new writing into dramatic shape, just as he has done for the best part of 40 years.

Lest we forget, Maxwell Robert Guthrie Stewart Stafford-Clark is one of British theatre's greatest postwar directors. He launched the careers of, among others, the director Danny Boyle (who thanked him in his Bafta awards acceptance speech for Slumdog Millionaire). He has been the leading catalyst of British theatre's new writing and new talent since the mid-1970s. At Joint Stock, the company he co-founded in 1974 with David Hare and David Aukin, his workshop methods nourished work by Hare, Howard Brenton and Caryl Churchill. As artistic director of London's Royal Court theatre from 1979 to 1993, he commissioned and directed an extraordinary bunch of plays – Churchill's Top Girls, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Terry Johnson's Insignificance and the great Howard Barker's Victory. As artistic director of Out of Joint for the best part of two decades, he has commissioned and directed, among others, Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom, David Hare's The Permanent Way and Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking.

"It's been a great privilege to have lived and worked in a time when theatre has played a huge part in the debate about how society should conduct itself," he says. "In other countries, it's novels that do that. Here it's theatre that is the medium in which we explore the political and deal with parts of our society that wouldn't get addressed otherwise."

Many of these plays have dramatised conflicts across the Irish sea. Why? "Well, I am a Hibernophile. My wife is Irish." That's not his only Celtic credential. He studied at Trinity College Dublin in the 60s and went back to work at the Abbey Theatre. He'd like to take his latest production of Richard Bean's The Big Fellah to the Irish capital he loves, but that seems a remote possibility. "They think they've seen too much theatre to do with the IRA."

Bean's starting point for The Big Fellah came on a visit to New York after 9/11, when he saw firefighters with collection buckets trying to raise money for victims of the bombings of the Twin Towers. "He had this thought: four or five years before, they would have been collecting money to support the IRA." The play starts on St Patrick's Day, 1972. Twenty-six people have recently been killed by British soldiers in Derry, and, in New York, the eponymous Noraid bagman is filling buckets with cash from angry Irish-Americans to buy ArmaLite rifles for the struggle against British rule in Ulster. The next hour and a half take us over three decades in a drama filled with betrayal, with the realisation that a righteous struggle has become poisoned by the murder of innocents, and with difficult politics (an NYPD cop working for the Big Fellah refuses to see parallels between his struggle and that of the Muslim terrorists). It ends on the morning of 11 September 2001, with the Good Friday agreement in place and the bombs of another terror cell poised to change the world.

Let's change the killer's identity

"I thought it was a terrific play when I first read it," says Stafford-Clark, "much better than Richard's previous play." He's referring to the Brick Lane-set England People Very Nice, at the National Theatre, which caused something of a critical storm for what the Guardian's Michael Billington deemed its ethnic caricatures. "This is great because there's the steady release of information throughout the play, so you only gradually get the whole picture."

That steady release shows a dramatist working with great control – but The Big Fellah is also crammed with gags. "Well, that's because Richard was a standup comedian. I don't think he can write a play without jokes."

Even at this morning's run-through, a week before it starts its national tour, the play fizzes with humour and acute political observation. "I like being in the IRA," says one character near the end, "but if there's one thing I'd change it's all the killing." Stafford-Clark tells the actors he thought the performance was excellent, but he just wants to make a small change to the script – he wants to switch the identity of the killer in the play's penultimate scene. He calls Richard Bean to find out if that's OK. "He says he'll have a think about it," Stafford-Clark tells me. Is it usual to make such a radical change so late in rehearsal? "It's not that radical, at least not until the technical stuff bolts the script down."

Stafford-Clark is clearly in his element – working creatively hard to deadline, making a new play he admires work even better. He recalls that in January 2007, he returned to work too early after his stroke, directing Alistair Beaton's King of Hearts. "Again, it was against medical advice. And the play I was directing suffered because I wasn't able to concentrate as I needed to. But I so wanted to get back to this. What I really miss is the company of actors. They're the cobblers of truth who put it together for you. I don't want to be away from them for very long."

• The Big Fellah is at the Royal and Derngate, Northampton, from tomorrow until Saturday. Box office: 01604 624811. Then touring. Details: outofjoint.co.uk

There is no reception, no bar, no restaurant and no room service, but Berge, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, is the ultimate mountain retreat

It's been raining for days. The sky is a murky grey and the mountains, rising steeply just a few hundred metres away, are a blur. After a 90-minute train journey from Munich, I am standing outside the tiny station of Aschau, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, waiting for Nils Holger Moormann, the celebrated and somewhat eccentric furniture designer, to pick me up.

I'm here to visit Berge, his unique Alpine lodge. Despite the fact that Berge (which means mountains) offers nothing in the way of a reception area, service, internet, telephone, television, breakfast or restaurant, Elle Decoration named it "the most beautiful lodge in the mountains".

Finally, an ancient 4x4 pulls up and the passenger door swings open to reveal Moormann's smiling face. We head first to his huge design studio, located across the road from the lodge, literally beneath Hohenaschau Schloss, a medieval castle that dominates the landscape.

"It's not a luxury hotel. It's not a design or art hotel," he replies. "It's a kind of a well-organised shelter."

About four years ago, Moormann was on the verge of bankruptcy. Displaying a characteristic disdain for long-term planning, he had invested his future in the decrepit building across from his studio, with the aim of using it for storage and as a "logistics" centre. His idea, however, met with opposition from a small number of Aschau residents (even though 98% of his workforce are locals and he uses almost exclusively local materials for his designs). Planning permission was refused and he slithered towards financial meltdown.

The building dates from 1671, and over the centuries has been used as a court bakery, guesthouse and youth hostel, before being abandoned and left to rot. Considering the surfeit of Alpine lodges across the region, Moormann's new proposal to turn it into a mountain retreat was deemed by some to be an even bigger mistake than buying it in the first place. As it turns out, it was a stroke of genius.

In contrast to the legions of lodges promising "dream holidays", an utter lack of hyperbole is key to understanding not only Berge but Moormann's design ethos. There is no invigorating spa or wellness programme, detox regime or fitness trainer. There is no prescription for a better, healthier lifestyle. What you see really is what you get: innovative design, an invitation to be self-sufficient and a genuine opportunity for relaxation surrounded by nature. "You can have a five-course meal. If you cook it yourself!" says the website.

Moormann's design plays with typical Bavarian clichés, as with the lodge's Janus-faced exterior. The roadside facade with neat, square windows is not dissimilar from the ubiquitous mountain lodges that scatter the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, while its mountain-facing façade is a harsher, darker grey interrupted by a series of rectangular windows with single shutters. "It's a wonderful game," is how he describes it, "with the Alps and the Bavarian baroque set against the minimalist design."

The entrance corridor is reminiscent of a minor medieval church: plain, uneven white walls traversed by numerous vault-like arches. Exposed red brickwork adds to the rustic appearance.

"There was no real plan," says Moormann. "It's trial and error. People have asked me whether I can build something similar for them in South Tyrol, or wherever. It doesn't work like that. We play with Berge. We go three steps forward and two steps back. It's not good for the nerves; everything is 'under construction', but it means you are closer to the [creative] process."

At first, Berge seems to have an air of being "not quite finished". But don't be fooled: quality, attention to detail and skilled craftsmanship pervade throughout. Moormann has invested €2.7m in the project, made possible only by what he calls "a perfect run for the company over the past four years": the steady expansion in sales of his furniture, examples of which are scattered throughout the lodge, from his angular Bookinist chair to his array of lamps and pared-down tables.

After the tour, we head back outside to the entrance, and I open a metal box to get my room key. There are 16 individually designed apartments, all with names related to the mountains or the locality. Kampenblick, for instance, is named after the nearby 1,668m Kampenwand mountain, which is accessible via a cable car. Moormann leads me to Bergfried ("keep", as in the castle variety), and hands me a bottle of organic red wine.

With no clutter, my room, which is bigger than many in five-star hotels, is more than adequate for two adults. On the right is the kitchen area containing Moormann-designed cutlery and crockery. Ahead are two windows, one narrow and stretching obliquely from just above the floor to the ceiling, leading the eye to the keep of the castle outside, hence the room's name. There are no wardrobes, just coat hangers dangling from an old ladder, and a small wooden table with benches. The bedroom area is on a "second floor", above the small bathroom, accessed by a metal ladder. Before he leaves, I ask him about the most important thing guests should bring for a stay here.

"Themselves!" he shoots back. Then adds: "My personal tip is to bring a small notebook. Here you have time. You have the opportunity to calm down, to reflect a little and write a few pages… And when the weather's fine, nature pulls you outside."

After he leaves, I give some half-hearted thought to the possibility of finding an internet connection, but once I realise I am wasting my time, I start to relax. Reading becomes a joy.

"Berge is not a luxury hotel," Moormann had stressed earlier. "It's a modern translation of how to stay in the mountains." He is right, but Berge is also a luxury. Just of a different kind.

How to get there and what you need to know

Deutsche Bahn trains run from Munich to Aschau (bahn.com) and Berge is a 10-minute walk from the station. Rail Europe (0844 848 4070; raileurope.co.uk) has fares from London to Munich from £161 return. Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies to Munich from London Stansted and Gatwick from £29.99 each way.

Berge, Kampenwand strasse 85, D-83229 Aschau im (moormann-berge.de). Based on two sharing, prices range from €120-€260 a night (€30 surcharge for one-night stay). The Große Stube can be booked for group events (chef Hans Blösl, can also be booked).

Five other remote lodges in superb settings

1. The Roozen Residence, Margaret River, West Australia

Visitors to the Margaret River wine region, three hours south of Perth, can bed down in a stunning three-bedroom architect-designed beach house, which is the iconic holiday home of local artist and surfer, Ron Roozen. Sleek and minimalist, the open-plan, concrete, copper and glass building sits low on a secluded hillside, above the crashing surf of Prevelly Beach, offering 180-degree vistas of the coastline from all its rooms, as well as its huge balcony.
• From $550 (£317) per night (+61 407 479 004; ronroozen.com.au). Qantas (qantas.com.au) flies from London Heathrow to Perth from £794 return.

2. The Winged House, Tasmania

Rising from the hillside like a silver bird with wings spread wide, this award-winning house is located above Table Cape, on Tasmania's rugged northwest coast. Designed by an artist and architect, it has two bedrooms, a Japanese-style bathroom and an open-plan lounge with floor-to-ceiling windows offering views across the Bass Strait – all filled with the designer's artwork.
• From $350 (£201) per night (+61 9906 3224; thewingedhouse.com.au). Virgin Atlantic (virgin.com) flies from London Heathrow to Sydney from £848 return. Virgin Blue (virginblue.com.au) flies from Sydney to Hobart from $176 (£101) return. Hire a car to drive five hours north to Table Cape (europcar.com.au).

3. Hotel Furillen, Gotland, Sweden

Located on the tiny islet of Furillen, off Gotland Island – 90km east of the Swedish mainland – this limestone-factory-turned-hotel is one of Sweden's furthest-flung hotels. It has 15 double bedrooms in the main house, but it's the four timber cabins hidden among the woods you want to go for, with sheepskin rugs, handcrafted furniture and roaring fires. The hotel has its own restaurant, too.
• From 1,950 SEK (£169) per room per night, including breakfast (+46 498 22 30 40; furillen.nu). Get there SAS (flysas.com) flies from London Heathrow to Stockholm from £141 return. Take a high-speed ferry to Visby on Gotland from Nynashamn, 57km south of Stockholm, with Destination Gotland (destinationgotland.se) from 152 SEK (£13) one-way.

4. Anttolanhovi Art & Design, Design Villas, Finland

Individually designed by not one but nine Finnish artists, these 19 eco villas are located on the shores of Lake Saimaa in southeast Finland. Built from birch, stone and glass, some are right on the shore front, others tucked in the hills, all with lake views. The villas sleep between four and six. A beautician and masseuse are on call for pampering whims.
• From €690 per night (+358 207 57 5200; anttolanhovi.fi). Easyjet (easyJet.com) flies from London Gatwick and Manchester to Helsinki from £46 return. From Helsinki, take the train to Mikkeli (2 hours 30 minutes), near Anttola. Go to see vr.fi for times and fares.

5. 360° Leti, Himalayas

Surrounded by mountain wilderness at 8,000ft in Uttaranchal in the Himalayas, about an hour's walk from the nearest road, this retreat is as remote as they get. It has four ensuite cabins, built from stone and decked out in woollen rugs and wooden furniture, fronted on two sides by glass – perfect for lapping up those mountain vistas. Dinners are served in the restaurant.
• Three nights from £1,231 per person, including all meals, a guide and return road transfers (seven hours) from Kathgodam train station (+44 (0)20 3151 5177; shaktihimalaya.com). Get there British Airways (ba.com) flies from London Heathrow to Delhi from £512 return. Shakti Himalay a can organise the overnight sleeper from Delhi to Kathgodam, prices on inquiry.
Nicola Iseard

A person freefalling from 120,000 feet would theoretically reach a supersonic speed of over 700mph. Two daredevils of the skies are racing to break the sound barrier – and face unknown hazards in their attempt

We know this. At around 120,000 feet, on the fringes of space, the air is so thin that a falling human body would travel fast enough to exceed the speed of sound. A skydiver, properly equipped with pressurised suit and a supply of oxygen to protect against the hostile elements, could feasibly jump from that height and, about 30 seconds later, punch through the sound barrier – becoming the first person ever to go "supersonic" without the aid of an aircraft or space shuttle.

Here our knowledge ends. Experts admit cluelessness. Our skydiver could render a mighty "krakoom!" across the high skies or history could be made in utter silence. Immense forces could knock the intrepid skydiver out cold, could peel the skin back from his body or simply cause a little wobble in the midriff, like a playful hug. Nobody is quite sure – but one of two men will soon find out.

They are Felix Baumgartner and Michel Fournier, rival daredevils who have long been formulating plans to travel up to 120,000 feet, far higher than any skydiver has yet been, from there to plunge back to Earth. Their plans share similar elements – helium balloons attached to mansize cradles, space-faring equipment, lots of complicated parachutes – but this pair could not be more different.

Baumgartner is an extreme sportsman from Austria, steely, serious and a parachutist who has completed all kinds of dangerous and newsworthy stunts over his 41 years. His effort to skydive from the edge of space – to "space jump" as the feat has come to be known – is backed by energy drink manufacturer Red Bull, who under the project banner Red Bull Stratos have outfitted Baumgartner with expensive kit, a hi-tech Californian base, a team of aeronautic and medical experts and funds fully to publicise the endeavour.

Michel Fournier's mission has not quite the same pizzazz. The French former paratrooper is 66 and not backed by an energy drink. His equipment has been laboriously sourced from various abandoned military projects over two decades and his publicity machine consists of an ill-updated website plus a beleaguered press agent called Francine. Plotting his space jump since the late 1980s, he was long ago banned by his own government from conducting the project in France (too dangerous) and has for the last 10 years been operating from a tiny airstrip in North Battleford, Canada.

Here, Fournier has made several attempts at a space jump, but all have gone wrong in the early stages – the very early stages. He has set a few records – highest skydive by a Frenchman! – but if Fournier has done anything really newsworthy to date, it has been for the type of exploit heralded by a wry broadcaster saying: "And finally…"

Baumgartner has been plotting his space jump for four years, Fournier for 20, and this autumn both projects are coming to a head – 50 years exactly since anyone even came close to leaping from such heights or plummeting at such speeds. That was Colonel Joseph Kittinger, a test pilot, who completed a series of high-altitude jumps from a helium balloon in August 1960, part of an equipment-testing project for the agency that would become Nasa.

Jumping from 102,800 feet, Kittinger fell at 614mph, about nine-tenths the speed of sound; a torn glove meant one of his hands swelled to twice its normal size. On a previous test jump, from 76,000 feet, a parachute cord wrapped around his neck and Kittinger passed out mid-fall; he was saved from death only by the automatic deployment of an emergency chute.

Every year since, says the American, now 82, some privateer has contacted him with plans to beat the record, to jump from higher and travel faster. No one has managed it. The effort has defeated, humiliated, pauperised, even killed challengers since 1960, largely due to the sheer difficulty of getting up high enough to attempt a jump.

It can't be done from an aeroplane (even a spy plane can only ascend to about 80,000 feet), nor from a rocket (any hopeful parachutist opening the hatch to jump out would be torn to pieces). Ballooning directly up is the only realistic option, but an option still fraught with difficulties. A helium balloon launched into the stratosphere needs continually to enlarge because of the changes in atmospheric pressure, and so must be made of a special expandable material that is less than a 1,000th of an inch thin; clingfilm thin. It also needs to be huge, about the size of an office block.

Inflating a building-sized balloon out of something like sandwich wrapping is not easy, as Michel Fournier can well attest. Preparing to launch his first space-jump attempt from North Battleford in 2002, a filling tube on his balloon tore, ending the mission before he'd even got into his capsule. In 2003, he was back on the same strip of tarmac, but the material ripped again, the mission aborted for a second time.

Raised on a farm in the Auvergne, Fournier joined the French army in his teens and rose to become a parachute officer and later a reservist colonel. In 1988 he was chosen by the European Space Agency to be part of a space-jumping effort that was soon nixed by budget cuts; nonetheless a seed had been planted and Fournier – bouncy, rubbery-faced, with an oft-described physical resemblance to Robin Williams – has pursued the project independently ever since. "I haven't led a very conventional life," he says. "I have to live at 1,000mph!"

Or, at least, 700mph – the kind of speed he could expect to reach during a successful space-jump. And so in 2006 Fournier returned to his North Battleford airstrip, newly equipped and ready for a third go. This time he was foiled by unfavourable weather, jet winds that might have carried him anywhere in Canada. In 2008, he was back again, his balloon reinforced with extra layers, Fournier in the capsule below, poised and excited and 20-years ready – when without warning his balloon floated away, the capsule unattached and left behind. A release-switch had fired prematurely and the balloon, worth around £120,000, flew off, landing in ruins miles away.

Nonetheless, for Fournier, "doing crazy shit for as long as possible is the only way to be". He reveals that le grand saut (or "the big jump"), as he calls his endeavour, has just about bankrupted him, that he has sold his car, his furniture, his war medals, even his house. "The main difference between Felix and me is means," he says. "If he has a problem with his balloon or anything else, Red Bull will cover it."

Red Bull will cover it – the company has ploughed billions into the sponsorship of sports as varied as football and Formula One, surfing and sailing. The biggest part of their portfolio, however, has always been extreme sports, and Felix Baumgartner has risen to become one of the company's stars.

He grew up in Salzburg, Austria, idolising Neil Armstrong, Spider-Man and James Dean. Determined and competitive, he always wanted to be the best at things, he says, "even in the sack race at school", and joined the Austrian army, there becoming a tank-driving instructor, a close-combat specialist, and a member of the military's parachute display team.

By the late 90s, out of the army, Baumgartner was making a name for himself in the sport of base-jumping, which required parachuting from a standing start off things such as buildings and bridges. "It came very close to my idea of being able to fly." In 1999 he set a world record by jumping from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Four years later he became the first man to cross the English Channel in freefall, soaring for miles wearing a wing made of carbon fibre.

Luke Atkins is a close friend of Baumgartner, and an experienced parachutist himself. "There are three things everybody asks you as a skydiver," says Atkins. "What's the highest you've jumped from? What's the lowest you've opened your parachute? And have you ever worn one of those wing suits?" In an outrageous base-jumping stunt in Oman in 2007, Baumgartner had popped his chute less than 100 feet from the floor of a cave. "The only thing he hadn't done was jump from the highest."

Enter Red Bull. From 2006 to 2010, the pieces of the Stratos project were put together: a team of ex-Nasa scientists were assembled to do the hard planning; a documentary crew was invited to film preparations; and Luke Atkins was roped in as an extra to hurl his body around at the California HQ when Baumgartner was at home in Austria, riding around on his collection of vintage motorbikes.

Red Bull Stratos made one more intriguing signing: Joe Kittinger. He was persuaded to lend his name to this project after decades of saying no to wannabe space-jumpers because "they were doing it right, safe". Most of those who had contacted him in the past, says Kittinger, "had no idea of the hazards. I didn't want to be associated with people who died in the attempt."

Before hopping from his balloon-attached capsule, Kittinger had described to a ground-control team his surroundings at 102,800 feet. He saw "an absolute void" – "beautiful but hostile". It will be worse at 120,000 feet, where Baumgartner or Fournier will be exposed to the combination of a freezing cold atmosphere and the sun's unfiltered rays. Other risks include hypoxia (a lack of oxygen), decompression sickness, even hallucinations – all before leaving the capsule. Any breakage or failure of equipment at this point would be catastrophic; were the suit to lose its pressurisation, for example, it would trigger a process called vaporisation whereupon the blood, in the vacuum of near-space, boils inside the body. (It was this that made Kittinger's hand enlarge so grotesquely in 1960.)

The plunge itself, lasting around 10 minutes and including a five-minute float once the main parachute is deployed at 3,000 feet, should be relatively easy. All excepting that small matter of becoming the first humans to test-puncture the sound barrier. "That is the real unknown," says Red Bull Stratos's medical director, Jonathan Clarke. "And it's a real big unknown."

One Sunday in May, the same weekend that Baumgartner and Kittinger were due to conduct a round of interviews with the world's media to promote Red Bull Stratos, Michel Fournier was back on his airstrip in North Battleford. A fresh series of preparations had begun for the Frenchman back in January, around the time that Baumgartner had officially confirmed he was to attempt a space-jump in 2010. Fournier ordered a new balloon: his fifth. Probably wary of rousing the same pack of local journalists and science writers who had trooped out to the airfield so many times in the past, Fournier kept his plans quiet. A small crowd, nevertheless, made it to North Battleford to watch, mostly ballooning enthusiasts but also the mayors of two local towns, and Fournier's close friend Gil Bellavance. "I gave him a little salute," recalls Bellavance.

At the far end of the airstrip, Fournier's team were ready to start inflating the balloon, a process that once started cannot easily be stopped. They were told something had gone wrong: the fittings on Fournier's suit were giving him trouble. An hour later, the inflation team got word to start again; this time they got halfway through, the balloon starting to rise promisingly from the tarmac, before a second call to abort went around North Battleford. In his capsule, Fournier's parachute had popped open, three hours and 120,000 feet too early.

"I didn't hear Michel say anything," says Bellavance, "he had his helmet on. But I would imagine the word at that moment would not be printable." On the airstrip, the balloon was deflated and packed away. Fournier's capsule was craned back to its hanger. Around the edges of North Battleford, the enthusiasts dispersed.

"I will do everything in my power to reach the end of my dream," says Fournier, who has tentatively scheduled another attempt, his seventh, for the coming months. But if the end of that dream is Baumgartner getting there first? "I'll congratulate him. But you can bet that I'll do it second."

Should he fail, two decades of botched space-jumps have at least rewarded him with something. A bachelor for most of his life, Fournier met his wife, Kim, in 2003 while she was working as a receptionist at his North Battleford motel. Unable to woo her in English at the time, Fournier simply took her hand and kissed it over the desk. They were married that year.

Baumgartner, meanwhile, has been making final refinements. In one test jump over the California desert he realised that he couldn't twist his head in its helmet to see if his parachute had opened properly, and so mirrors were added to his gloves. His visor, meanwhile, has been fitted with a demister to stop any fogging from his breath. He seems to be on the cusp of history, and has even had time to contemplate a Hollywood film being made of his efforts; Steven Spielberg would be the preferred director.

The exact date of his jump has not been revealed, but it seems likely the attempt will take place very soon, as close as possible to the 50th anniversary of Kittinger's record leap (which passed last month). At 120,000 feet Baumgartner says he plans to take in the view for a moment before jumping. He doesn't yet know what he will say before he leaps, but it ought to be something quotable. ("Stop worrying about death," is one of his lines. "It's like worrying about the sunrise.")

Then he'll bunny-hop from the platform, feet first, in a position long practised because it will ready him best for the strangest skydive of his life. The atmosphere will be so thin and featureless that, at first, he'll feel the sensation of being completely still. In fact, he will plummet faster than anybody has yet travelled outside of a machine. Even if there is a "krakoom!" across the skies it will happen far, far behind the falling man. Baumgartner himself will simply hear a small beep in his ear, confirmation from his equipment that the mission has been a success, and that he has become the world's first supersonic man.