The dastardly Mr Deedes

Love-him-or-loathe-him ex-London Stock Exchange boss Xavier Rolet, who departed his £5.7m-a-year role abruptly following a spat with fusty chairman Donald Brydon, informs friends he currently has ‘several irons in the fire’. Doubtless this is true. Though a senior banking source informs me none will be a much-coveted FTSE 100 chairmanship. The unseemly manner of his departure from the LSE means the Frenchman, 58, will probably find lofty roostings tricky to come by. John Lewis’s annual report says that the Partnership embarked on a new strategy last year, which aimed to ‘unlock the benefits of working in a more co-ordinated way’. They called this touchy-feely-sounding approach ‘Stronger Together’. And how did they implement it? By making 1,440 employees redundant. Bearded takeover king Carl Icahn vehemently denies insider trading after dumping £25m worth shares in crane maker Manitowoc, days before his friend President Trump’s new steel tariffs sent stock plummeting. Aggressive, unsmiling, not to men- tion hideously rich (he has a £12bn fortune) Icahn, 82, is not a loveable creature. Nor is he one of life’s oil paintings. Ex-Vanity Fair editrix Tina Brown’s bitchy diaries describe him as ‘a giant of a man, with close-together eyes and a big humourless nose’. Estate agents Countrywide responds to its disastrous £208m losses by saying it’s going ‘back to basics’. A wise choice of expression? Former PM John Major regretted adopting ‘Back to Basics’ as a slogan when a succession of MPs were exposed in a string of frothy sex scandals. The British boss of McDonald’s, chief superintendent-lookalike Steve Easterbrook (salary: £11m), proudly flipped the burger chain’s famous golden arches logo upside down to form a ‘W’, in support of International Women’s Day. Shameless opportunism dressed up as virtue, one of the great scourges of our time.