The dastardly Mr Deedes

As vultures circle WPP boss sir Martin sorrell, who could succeed the embattled advertising mogul as the firm’s head honcho? One name in the mix is Johnny Hornby, 50, boyish-looking brother of Fever Pitch author Nick and founding partner of WPP-owned agency The & Partnership. His elevation would delight his good friend, and former Labour minister, Lord Mandelson, who banked £1m from the 2007 sale of Hornby’s previous agency Clemmow Hornby Inge, of which he was a director. WPP currently invests in his Lordship’s secretive consultancy group global Counsel. Hardly rolling in cash, spreadbetting firm London Capital Group is sponsoring Swiss tennis ace Stan Wawrinka thanks to the indulgence of its buffoonish chief, Charles-Henri Sabet. He and Wawrinka, 33, a three-times Grand Slam champion, both hail from the Alpine city of Lausanne. Mono-browed Monsieur Sabet, 56, likes to boast he was a teenage tennis champion, though colleagues report his engorged avoirdupois has diminished his fleetness of foot around the court since then. Does sacked Deutsche Bank chief John Cryan regret referring to the lender’s accountants indelicately as ‘basically an abacus’ whose tasks could easily be carried out by robots? His £3m-a-year job’s gone to po-faced Christian sewing, 48, a former head of audit and one of Cryan’s all-tooreplaceable abacuses. Bullet-headed Goldman Sachs’s president David Solomon, who moonlights as a dance music DJ called D-Sol, performed at a charity event in New York on Saturday aimed at helping drug addicts. Sporting an ill-judged baseball cap and T-shirt, he opened his set with a remixed version of the theme from The Pink Panther. Kool Kat Solomon, 56, plans to pounce into his £16m-a-year boss Lloyd Blankfein’s corner office by the end of the year. A group of investment managers, led by former Touche Remnant fund managers John garbutt and Mark Henderson, are close to forming the industry’s own City livery company. What coat of arms could they chose? A drift of hungry pigs, their greedy snouts immersed in a heaving trough, would be a wry touch.