Drumlanrig: A mighty fine batsman who simply lost his way THIS week's revelation, via newly released secret papers, that Margaret Thatcher, below, paid nearly £2,000 towards the search for her son Mark stirred a few ancient memories. One could hardly switch on the television in the 1980s without hearing jokes at the expense of Thatcher jnr's sense of direction after he got lost in the Sahara Desert in the Paris to Dakar car rally. Drumlanrig recalls a conversation with a retired Edinburgh headmaster, who once taught the young Thatcher when he was a boarder at Belmont, Mill Hill Preparatory School in London. "He was the finest prep school batsman I have ever had the privilege of coaching," said the school master. Where oh where, did it all go wrong? That's not way to talk about a "great scientist" A report in our sister paper The Scotsman revealing that Stewart Stevenson MSP described the great hero of British wartime intelligence R V Jones as "a great scientist but absolutely crap lecturer," has led to quite a stushie. Others, who like Stevenson were students of the great man, have been writing to the papers in defence of the lecturing skills of a physicist whose breakthroughs saved countless lives. Jones's son Robert was another to defend the academic lectures given by his old man. The ones delivered at home, however, were a different matter. "Mind you, I got lectured by him severely and that was pretty crap, too," admitted Jones jnr. Brown's break not caused by booze Spare a thought for the Tory MSP Gavin Brown, below, who went to hospital with a suspected broken ankle after a painful fall over the Christmas period. Before anyone leaps to conclusions, Drumlanrig can reassure his constituents that Brown is a clean living man and his accident had nothing to do with an overindulgence of Christmas spirit. Moore gets in on the Act at long last A surprising confession from Michael Moore, the Scottish Secretary, who has admitted to his "eternal shame" that he has "never managed to secure a private member's bill" during his time as an MP. Before he piloted the Scotland Act, the legislation handing more powers to Holyrood, through Westminster, he "had never been responsible for delivering a piece of legislation." With the creation of the Scotland Act and having played a key role in delivering a single question referendum now a matter of record, Moore has upped his game a bit.