Dave will tear up his bus pass for election battle

David Cameron is under pressure to return to old-fashioned Tory values this week, but there's one long-established party tradition he's determined to consign to the scrapheap.

He told colleagues at party conference that in the event of an Autumn general election, he won't be spending any of the party's funds on an election "battle bus".

Instead, he is planning to hold regular morning press conferences in London and then travel to organised events around the country by helicopter.

"David feels the battle bus has had its day," says a party insider. "The idea of fighting a general election campaign while stuck in a traffic jam on the M1 hardly strikes him as the most efficient way of doing things."

Cameron is also known to be less than keen on another trademark feature of election time – the traditionally hazardous walkabout. While assuring friends he'd "love nothing more than to get the John Major soap box out", it's understood he feels such events are self-defeating, due to increasingly well-organised stunts orchestrated by rival political parties on the campaign trail.

The battle bus's demise will be particularly lamented by members of the lobby, as they have been the source of constant amusement for political hacks.

In 2005, Michael Howard was forced to take his temporarily off the road when it emerged its tax disc was out of date. During that same campaign, John Prescott toured the land in a similar vehicle, in which he bafflingly managed to rack up a cost of nearly £140,000.

Katherine gives her Welsh rugby flops a miss

Angry Welsh rugby fans have already seen off the national side's coach, Gareth Jenkins, so I do hope his namesake, the singer Katherine Jenkins isn't next on their hit-list. The toothsome soprano is supposed to be the team's official mascot and regularly performs before home matches at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. However, during Wales's humiliating World Cup exit in Nantes at the hands of Fiji on Saturday, Jenkins was strangely absent.

"No, I couldn't be at the game because I was travelling from Cyprus," she told me at Montblanc's Power To Write campaign in aid of Unicef. "It was such a shame we didn't win, though. I thought they all did really well and I have every confidence that things will get better in the future."

It's an admirable sentiment from the 27 year-old, although I fear it is not one that will be shared in the pubs of the Welsh capital this week.

Liam finally declares peace

One of the great musical feuds of our time, between the Oasis singer Liam Gallagher and Damon Albarn of Blur, has finally come to an end.

The pair, whose respective bands were chart rivals throughout the late 1990s, have been locked in a bitter personal dispute for nearly 12 years. But Gallagher has offered a surprise olive branch to his long-term bête noire.

"I don't mind Blur," he tells this month's Mojo magazine. "I'm over it. It was a laugh, man. That's what you do when you're young. When I see Damon Albarn, I get a buzz off him."

I wonder whether Albarn will be quite so forgiving. It was Gallagher's brother Noel who once charmingly commented that he wished Albarn would "catch Aids and die".

Pressganged

So far, the Tory party conference is treating Boris Johnson pretty well. Less so, his sister Rachel.

Yesterday, Johnson, a journalist for The Times, fell victim to the conference organisers' notorious "clipboard Nazis" who refused to grant her accreditation to the main conference hall in Blackpool.

Although she apparently produced all the necessary paperwork, she was informed it was supposed to have been handed in weeks ago.

Johnson has reason to be particularly miffed. Not only will she miss her brother's Q&A session today, in which he will set out his stall for the London mayoral race, but she told passers-by she was also refused entry to Labour's shindig last week in Bournemouth.

Alien menace unchecked

The widespread deployment of British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq not only leaves us vulnerable to attacks from abroad, it also makes us sitting ducks from outer space. Following a freedom of information request by this newspaper, an MoD spokesman has confirmed there are no plans in place to deter an attack by alien invaders.

"The MoD does not have any expertise or role in respect of 'flying saucer' matters or to the question of the existence of otherwise extra-terrestrial life," he says. In a move which will enrage pus-faced conspiracy theorists even further, he adds: "To date, the MoD knows of no evidence which substantiates the existence of these alleged phenomena.

"We therefore have no plans relating to first contact and have not drawn up any plans in concert with other nations."