The dastardly Mr Deedes

Former Jaeger owner and rag trade grandee Harold Tillman is to be appointed chairman of The Ethical Fashion Forum, an industry body aimed at making fashion more sustainable. A gentlemanly, dapper figure with a fondness for natty threepiece suits, tailor’s son Harold, 71, has spent 50 years in retail and is often credited with putting British fashion on the map. He collected a CBE from the Queen in 2010, but friends say a knighthood wouldn’t go amiss.

Have Whitehall’s paper shufflers done any due diligence on the London Stock Exchange merger with German counterpart Deutsche Boerse? A call to the Department of Business’s press office yesterday to discuss the proposed deal was met with the worrying response: ‘What’s that? Hmmm, well it’s the first I’ve heard about it…’

Disgraced Fred Goodwin could face his first public outing in seven years if called as a witness next March in a £4bn class action brought by angry Royal Bank of Scotland investors. What’s the charmless reptile, 58, up to these days? ‘ Not much. A bit of shooting, a bit of golf and generally keeping his head down,’ says an acquaintance. In other words, enjoying the £16m pension pot he somehow wangled and without a care in the world. Sickening, isn’t it?

Hedge funds have suffered a nightmare year, with nearly every established ‘name’ in the predatory, £2.5trillion industry underperforming. Experts predict new launches to be few and far between next year. Some cheering news amid our daily deluge of horror.

The decision by British Airways’s Iberian boss Alex Cruz to scrap free meals on short haul flights is an obvious, if unimaginative, cost- cutting measure. In the 1980s, American Airlines’ penny-pinching former president Robert Crandall, 80, boasted he saved the company £80,000 a year just by removing a cocktail olive from every passenger’s salad, though I accept this may sound fanciful.