The Dastardly Mr Deedes

Struggling Deutsche Bank’s London staff have been given an extra week’s holiday, increasing their annual leave allowance from 25 days a year to 30. Workers remain glum. They suspect gloomy-looking boss John Cryan, 57, is merely softening them up before delivering another shafting, most likely around bonus season. Aberdeen Standard Life’s results announcement today might give us a glimpse as to who wears the tartan trews between joint chiefs Martin Gilbert, 62, and Keith Skeoch, 61, locked in a tenuous power-sharing agreement since last August’s £11bn merger. Who’ll announce the results, Gilbert or Skeoch? Says a company source: ‘They’ll announce them together, but they won’t be holding hands.’ Who said it wouldn’t last? Re Aberdeen: its biggest client Lloyds’ decision to pull a contract worth £109bn last Thursday remains much discussed in the City. In particular, Aberdeen’s share price which curiously dipped 2.5pc the day before the bombshell announcement, even though the FTSE rose. As Caledonian folk say: Crivens! JP Morgan will tear down its headquarters in midtown Manhattan and replace it with a 75-storey tower, making it one of highest skyscrapers in New York. The imposing Park Avenue property is expected to be completed in five years’ time, which, aptly, is when JP’s long-serving boss Jamie Dimon, 61, is due to quit or, as is more likely, be dragged out by his fingernails. Not that the security goons will have very far to carry him. Dimon’s spacious apartment is just down the street. Announcing insurer RSA’s results yesterday, chief executive Stephen Hester modestly told journalists he would have to try to ‘walk and chew gum at the same time’, after his chief financial officer Scott Egan got delayed at TV studios. The phrase ‘he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time’ was first levelled at Gerald Ford, after the uS president shanked a golf ball into a spectator’s head. Tetchy Hester, 57, doesn’t play golf, but did once ride out with his local hunt in a fetching starched silk cravat.