The Liberal Democrats' election miracle worker, Lord Razzall, I read this week, wants the party leader, Charles Kennedy, to adopt a new image. He needs, the sage says, to look prime ministerial. They need to be very careful here. As I read this report, I recalled the poignant case of the Guardian motoring editor who, invited to test-drive a very fast car, went to change up and hit reverse by mistake. The car was a write-off. Make the gear change in Kennedy's image too precipitate and his party may come to rue ever having thought of it. The whole point about Kennedy's popularity, in my view, is that in an age which distrusts and despises politicians he doesn't look like a politician. He looks like a fun person. He likes a drink (in moderation, nowadays); he is out for a bit of a laugh, which is regarded as one of the highest virtues in today's society; he chairs Have I Got New For You. Let him get all serious and statesmanlike and start using words like "paradigm" and the punters may think he is just like the rest of the breed. There are parallels here with Ken Clarke. People seem to like him because he is cheerfully insouciant, doesn't care about what he wears or what he eats, likes a cigar, goes to the jazz and the football and even this week, at a time when all his rivals were sweating away preparing speeches about their Visions, went to Trent Bridge for the cricket. Put a dishmop, dyed blond, on his head, and he might even pass in indifferent light for Boris Johnson. He hasn't chaired Have I Got News For You yet, but don't rule it out.

This must be the secret of why people like him - like him enough to forget the ciggy connection, which has brought him, it was suggested this week, a fag fortune of over a million. Enough to forget his bullying ways at Health and Education. Enough to forget, when we hear him now insouciantly declaring that the euro is a mess and we won't go into it during his lifetime, the casual contempt which he turned for years on all those sensible people (like me) who said all along that we ought to keep out. We're also asked to forget his age: close to 70 at the next election. He says he's fine and it doesn't matter and the world is full of successful politicians of 70 plus (unnamed). Maybe. But I dare say Lord Razzall has already gleefully noted that Ken would be older on entering Downing Street than Harold Macmillan was when he shuffled out.

· I have spent, for reasons irrelevant for the purposes of this column, some time this week investigating the origin of the word and the place name Loggerheads. As I'm sure I have mentioned before during my tenure here, there are two places called Loggerheads in Great Britain, one on the borders of Denbigh and Flint and one on the borders of Staffordshire and Shropshire. Is it merely coincidence that both are on the kind of territory which used to be called debatable lands? Did the armies of Flint and Denbigh, the armies of Shropshire and Staffordshire, once do battle at these delightful venues? The real problem is which came first: the term loggerheads, invoking some kind of dispute, or the place names. There's a rich array in good dictionaries of definitions of loggerheads. It can mean a thickhead or blockhead, as in "Ah, you whoreson loggerhead, you were borne to do me shame", which occurs in Love's Labour Lost. It can mean a local coin or token, as, I imagine, in "you don't happen to have a loggerhead on you, do you?". It can mean a type of turtle or a type of sponge. More relevantly, perhaps, since few in the course of history, even on the borders of Denbigh and Flint or Staffs and Salop, have ever tried to do battle with turtles or sponges, it was used to describe an iron implement with a long handle and a ball or bulb at one end: just the job for angry people in smithies eager to belabour each other. Over time, I deduce, the word began to apply to more civilised kinds of dispute. The Loggerheads in Wales (I have yet to complete my researches into the other one) appears to take its name from a well known pub called the We Three at Loggerheads, which allegedly refers to an occasion when two big cheeses from the locality met to resolve a dispute with the help of a mediator, and the action became so frenzied that the mediator joined in the jousting. All that, if true, means dumping the counter-proposal that the name of the village came first, and the reason we use the term "at Loggerheads" is because this famous dispute took place in the village. I look forward to discovering which positions the contenders for the Tory leadership intend to take on this crucial issue.

An etymologist writes: I doubt very much if people used to say to each other, "you don't happen to have a loggerhead on you, do you?". They would surely have feared that their interlocutors might respond by producing and waving about in a threatening manner an iron implement with a long handle and a ball or bulb at one end.

· My musings on Che Guevara's attachment to rugby league football, as attributed to him by the Leeds captain Kevin Sinfield, seem to have been misplaced. His rugby fanaticism is documented in a book called Che Guevara: a revolutionary life, by Jon Lee Anderson, but it seems his attachment was to 15-a-side, not the kind played by Leeds and Hull. I was right about Leeds losing, though, wasn't I? Which brings me, as chalk follows cheese, to the Che Guevara of Yorkshire and England cricket a century ago, Lord Hawke. At Leeds in 1903, Ben Mallalieu tells me, someone in the crowd shouted at him: "Lordy, take off FS" (FS Jackson) and bring on Scof" (Schofield Haigh). In the next over, Jackson took four wickets for five and Australia were all out for 23. The Lord - not customarily, it seems, addressed by groundlings as "Lordy" - knew what he was doing.

· "Nits are romping through young scalps as never before"- BBC news report. Who do you blame for this? 1. George Bush? 2. Al-Qaida? 3. The permissive society? 4. British membership of the European Union? 5. Prince Charles? 6. Peter Mandelson? Multiple answers accepted; indeed, expected.