Last week I said that the headline 'Foot heads arms body' was probably apocryphal. Not at all

• Years ago I heard a radio DJ tell a story of how motorists had learned about a filling station that had left the pumps unlocked overnight. When they nipped in to steal the petrol they discovered, too late, that the tanks had been full of cleaning fluid.

"You won't have read about that in the papers," the DJ said in a knowing sort of voice, "some stories are so good, the reporters keep them to themselves."

What? Was he mad? Can they imagine a journalist going to his news editor and saying: "This is a brilliant tale, boss. Shall we keep it under wraps so we can tell our mates in the pub?"

It's a myth widely believed – maybe it reflects badly on our credibility – that journalists always know more than we let on. So nowadays people often say to me: "You work in parliament. You must know when the election is going to be. Who's going to win?" Every time I answer: "I have no idea. I see the opinion polls, like everyone else," and they give me a little smile that says, "yeah, we'd expect you to say that."

Of course sometimes there are stories that have to be hidden, for legal reasons, and sometimes we know who's got that injunction, or is reputed to be the gay judge caught in orgy shock. But our main failing is that we usually know much less than we let on. In our world, possibilities become probabilities, likelihoods are presented as certainties.

Facts are like sugar puffs, pumped full of air, coated with honey, and served up for breakfast.

And, as it happens, I assume the election will be held on 6 May, but only because everybody else does too.

• My friend Kathy used to work for the late Labour MP Joan Lestor, who was a close friend of Michael Foot. On one occasion Kathy joined Lestor, Foot and Foot's devoted, much-loved secretary Sheila Noble, for lunch at one of his favourite Italian restaurants. Though he was well into his eighties, he arrived in a fashionable leather jacket and seemed perfectly content to be with three women, who did not let their male guest cramp their conversational style. After a particularly graphic exchange, she asked whether he was at all uncomfortable sitting with them. "No, no, not at all," he said. "I'm going through my lesbian phase."

• By a sad coincidence, last week I said that the headline "Foot heads arms body" was probably apocryphal. Not at all. I have since heard from Martyn Cornell, who was a subeditor on the Times around 1986.

He had to handle a story about Michael Foot being put in charge of a committee to look at nuclear disarmament in Europe, or something similar. The headline was to be in largish type, but across a single column – always a problem for subs.

"I certainly wasn't going to get 'nuclear' or 'disarmament' or 'committee' to fit, so after a struggle I decided on 'Foot chairs arms body', then thought 'Foot heads arms body' would at least give a laugh to the revise sub. To my astonishment, the headline was printed, and a legend was born …"

Andrew Kyle remembers a vogue for making longer and longer headlines from the same base. "Assuming Foot had become PM, and had discovered that his defence secretary had approved the bullying tactics of the National Front, the headline could have been 'Foot knows arms body head backs front muscle'."

• Another friend, the writer and polymath Karl Sabbagh, recently attended a meeting in the BBC's council chamber in Broadcasting House. Under the corporation's giant crest, he noticed the motto "Quaecumque". "I checked," he said, "and this is Latin for 'whatever'. If you spelled it 'wa'effer' you'd have final proof that the BBC is dumbing down."

• It's been a good week for us climate change agnostics, the people who hold the only respectable position. Dr Phil Jones, of the Climate Research Unit at the UEA, was nervous and unconvincing when he spoke to the parliamentary committee; his message seemed to be that he selected the data, he decided how to massage ("adjust") the data, and he determined what he did with the data afterwards. In effect, he said, that was nobody's business but his own.

I don't think for one moment that Dr Jones is a cheat. But I do suspect that some scientists are now so convinced that they are right that they can ignore anything that suggests the opposite, and ignore anyone who disagrees with them. Why, they think, should they release their work to the sceptics, who would only misuse it to suggest that the believers are wrong? Which they aren't. Or so they believe.

Meanwhile, on the other side, Nigel Lawson was slightly less than convincing. He got stroppy when MPs wanted to know where his funding came from and accused them of playing the man not the ball. But believers (or "alarmists" as Lawson calls them) have always insisted that sceptics are funded by the big energy companies, and the only way to answer that is to reveal all your contributors, or refuse to take any money from anyone who won't go public.

• If you're in London and have the time, you must go to the Kingdom of Ife exhibition at the British Museum. It is quite incredible: 100 sculptures created between the 12th and 15th centuries, depicting the great, the good and the bad, from Ife, Nigeria – once a great trading city and still the spiritual centre of the Yoruba people.

They had developed a highly naturalistic style rendered in a copper alloy as well as stone and terracotta, and the sculptures have the same astonishing power as the great works from Greece and Rome.

Though the fact that they were highly talented did not make them particularly nice – some staffs of office show miniature heads of men gagged with rope, waiting to be executed.