The dastardly Mr Deedes
The Grey Old Man of Threadneedle Street – I refer to deputy Bank of England governor Sir Jon Cunliffe, 65 – has claimed £328.33 for ‘personalised gifts’ on his expenses. The sum, I’m told, was for eight mugs donated to foreign banking officials. At £40 a pop, those are expensive coffee cups, not least as dignitaries throw such pointless knick-knacks swiftly in the bin. Surely a signed selfie of Cunliffe’s pin-up boss Mark Carney would have sufficed.
Riverford Organics’s craggy founder Guy Watson informs Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs that before setting up his £50m vegetable box delivery business he endured an unhappy spell as a management consultant. Dispatched to set up an outpost in New York, he found the work to be ‘morally bankrupt’ (surely
not!) and resigned before hurling the office keys into the river. Reflecting on this petulant episode, Watson, 58, remarks sheepishly: ‘I was probably doing rather too many drugs at that point.’
Twinkle - eyed Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Al-Fayed’s former yacht Sokar, on which his late son Dodi used to woo Princess Diana, is up for sale for £17.5m.
Brokers Edmiston say the interiors have been ‘significantly upgraded’ since Fayed, 89, sold the 208-footer to an unknown buyer in 2014 for £11m. So presumably the plaque he placed in a bedroom commemorating Dodi’s and Diana’s courtship is unlikely to have survived.
Goldman Sachs has hoisted an EU flag over its grandiose offices on Fleet
Street, previously home to the Daily Telegraph. The newspaper’s proprietor at the time, Lord Hartwell, will be turning in his grave. No fan of the European project, he presciently remarked of Britain’s inevitable involvement: ‘Our confidence in our neighbours has somewhat to develop before we could surrender our destinies to an assembly in which we shall be only a small minority.’
Re flags, the Lord Mayor of London, Charles Bowman, 57, an ex-PwC partner, yesterday excitedly announced the rainbow LGBT flag was now flying over The Old Bailey for the first time. How the lags languishing in the holding cells must have cheered!