Sir Nicholas Scott, the former Minister for the Disabled and MP for Chelsea, who has what the Americans call an ethics problem after a car accident involving a small child, is likely to face challenges in the new Kensington and Chelsea constituency from Norman Lamont and James Arbuthnot. Sir Paul Beresford, the junior Environment Minister, is said to be upset at losing the new Croydon Central seat to neighbouring Tory MP David Congdon (Croydon NE). "We just went for anything that would destabilise the Tory vote. What we tried to do was create as many marginals as we could.

And we enlisted the support of local people - playing on rural parish councils who didn't want to be lumped in with a new town But we were realistic about what the Commission would wear. The strategy was to maximise the number of winnable seats."Conservative Central Office realised too late what was happening Its officials are trying to be sanguine. "Which candidate represents which seat is a matter for the constituency associations," said one. But the resulting free market in Tory candidates is not what they would have wanted.Ordinarily constituencies chose from a mixture of young merchant bankers who have in a previous elections safely carried the Tory flag in a Labour seat and former MPs who have lost their seats in previous elections, with ex-ministers like John Maples, Francis Maude or Michael Fallon high on the lists. Now these traditional candidates are being augmented by carpetbaggers. The term carpetbagger was originally a scornful appellation applied, after the American Civil War, to Northerners who went South and sought election by appealing to the Negro vote. Currying favour with Negroes is not always a high priority in a Conservative adoption meeting: the maverick ex-MP Peter Bruinvels is more likely, according to rivals, to "get out a pair of handcuffs and rage about law and order".This time the carpetbaggers are sitting MPs like James Arbuthnot, whose existing seat of Wanstead and Woodford is being divided in three parts "like Gaul", as he puts it.

Or like the former roads minister and now free-thinking backbencher Peter Bottomley, who has told his Eltham constituency - majority 1,666 - to find a younger man and has cast himself upon the waters. It is, he acknowledges, "an exercise in ritual humiliation" but asks: "Why is politics the only profession where you have to lose before you can move? Does a consultant have to get sacked before he can move to another hospital? To exclude from the selection for a safe seat those who are currently doing a competent job in Parliament seems pretty perverse."It is an exercise that has been performed in the past by MPs as distinguished as Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Baker and Sir Leon Brittan. David at first followed in his path as a classical scholar, but transferred to medieval Hebrew and Arabic, and again Addi basked in the glory of his son's publications. His daughter Celia turned to the Law as a career, holding an appointment in the Hebrew University; but she too bolstered the family's classical studies by marrying a lecturer in ancient Semitic languages..

Later this month, providing Nasa can repair faults that forced a launch postponement last Saturday, two American astronauts will don their bulky pressure suits, enter the airlock and float out into the cargo bay of the space shuttle Endeavor But they will have little time to admire the view. One of their tasks will be to evaluate modifications to the life-protecting suits as part of the preparations for assembling the international Alpha space station later this decade. "But I only spilt a drop of coffee on it!" A terrible cry, and one that has heralded more angst for computer users - and profit for the repair industry - than almost any other. Orange juice is the stickiest assassin of all, but any liquid can find its way into the delicate electronic interstices of a computer and kill it dead. For desktop users this is irritating but rarely disastrous: the keyboard may short-circuit, but can be cleaned out of house for pounds 25 or so. For laptop users, the story is different - below the keypad sits the system board (the machine's heart) and the hard disk, and liquid can short-circuit all three.