The dastardly Mr Deedes

Unilever chief Paul Polman’s £10.3m pay package now makes him, by my reckoning, the sixth-highest earning boss in the FTSE 100. Not that the moneybags Dutchman’s three children see much of their old man’s loot, I fancy. Speaking in New York this week, Polman revealed one of his sons worked as a driver for online food delivery firm Deliveroo.

Dear me, car insurer Hastings has certainly got some brass. The firm recently defied UK corporate governance codes by appointing its journeyman chief executive Gary Hoffman, 57, as chairman. Then, when announcing its results yesterday, it bypassed the usual protocol of hosting a conference call, preferring to email journalists with answers to some questions that Hastings put to itself. Sample Paxmanesque question: ‘Tell us more about how you will achieve your new targets?’

Prince Andrew’s game daughter Princess Beatrice appeared on a panel at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday, where she discussed innovation in technology. I trust she had more to say on the matter than her father, whose most useful innovation in the past 20 years, he says, has been upgrading the wifi in Buckingham Palace.

Manqué Bank of England governor Mark Carney won’t travel to Edinburgh today to speak to the Scottish Economics Conference due to the snow. He’ll deliver the speech instead via videolink from Bloomberg’s offices. Full marks for effort, I suppose. Yesterday, the powers that be at Ireland’s stock exchange thought it best to shut down for the rest of the week.

Cheeky, chirpy Jamie Oliver announces his next cookbook, Jamie Cooks Italy, will ‘acknowledge what the Italian matriarchs of the kitchen can teach us’. Like business acumen, perhaps? The aspiring cockney’s just had to close a dozen of his twee Italian restaurants.