The dastardly Mr Deedes

Investors are keen for Standard Life Aberdeen to ditch the firm’s peculiar power-sharing arrangement between Martin Gilbert and Keith Skeoch. According to a poll of 21 large investors, more than twothirds said they’d prefer an outside candidate to replace the joint chief executives within the next year. Perhaps incoming chairman Sir Douglas Flint might care to take a look at this, or do we suspect he’s not one to rock the boat?

Hedge funder Crispin Odey’s main fund was up again in October, boosting returns for this year to 48.4pc. He hasn’t lost money in any month this year. Quite a turnaround for portly Crispin, 59, after three years of losses. It’s also reckoned he banked £100m from the Sky takeover.

Jeremy Corbyn is due to speak at the CBI’s annual conference later this month alongside some of our most prominent chief executives, many of whose companies the Labour Party leader would prefer to see nationalised. Hoity-toity CBI chief Carolyn Fairbairn recently declared there was ‘much common ground between business and Labour’. There isn’t these days, of course, but the ever-looming spectre of a Corbyn government requires the CBI to pay him and his goons lip service once in a while.

January’s self-important World Economic Conference in Davos is themed ‘Globalisation 4.0, shaping a global architecture in the age of the fourth industrial revolution.’ The same old ‘we’re saving the world’ claptrap, in other words. Not that the 2,500-odd Davos attendees will be paying much attention. Most go to do deals. It’s a ghastly business. Of course, I shall be there with bells on, as ever.

A verified Twitter account purporting to belong to Elon Musk yesterday announced it was giving away 10,000 bitcoin to his followers. It turned to be an elaborate scam using a fake account. The idea that the Tesla boss would dole out just short of £50m did appear a little fanciful. Though let’s face it, you wouldn’t put much past mad-as-a-snake Musk these days.