THE DASTARDLY MR DEEDES
A partner at city law firm Winckworth Sherwood has resigned for inappropriate behaviour at the company’s Christmas party. Dimple-cheeked John Burnand, who specialises in lucrative corporate finance, had to be escorted from last week’s bash at Southbank’s Skylon restaurant due to his boozy antics. Apologising to staff on Monday, Burnand admitted he’d attended a prior event at which he’d ‘drunk more than I should’. An early tilt at New Year sobriety now seems likely. With Goldman Sachs deputy Gary Cohn off to work for the Trump administration, the bank has split his job and left it to dome-headed executives David Solomon and Harvey Schwartz to jostle for supremacy. Since Goldman boss Lloyd Blankfein is going nowhere, it may be a case of two bald men fighting over a comb. Even while £18m-a-year Blankfein, 62, was undergoing serious medical treatment earlier this year, I’m told the whiskered pit bull was hosting 8pm conference calls from his hospital bed. Is former Marks & Spencer boss Sir Stuart Rose to return as chairman? ‘Not a chance,’ scoffs a source. ‘It would be the end of M&S from a shareholder and governance point of view.’ Man-about-town Rose, 67, angered investors during his final years by combining the chairman and chief executive roles. His inept performance chairing the Remain campaign won’t help his chances either. Separate turkeys this Christmas for London-based hedge funder Arpad Busson and his on-off-again fiancee, stony Hollywood star Uma Thurman. The pair meet in Manhattan’s supreme court next month to thrash out custody of their four-year-old daughter, Luna. Tousle-haired ‘Arki’, 53, who previously squired Aussie model Elle Macpherson, is quite the swordsman. A girl acquaintance tells me he deploys a flirting technique which some might consider a little forthright. Listening to Greg Clark drone on in the Commons yesterday, how qualified is he to be Business Minister? Bar a stint in consultancy, the bulk of his pre-Parliamentary career was spent working as an apparatchik. ‘He has a PHD from that hothouse of uselessness London School of Economics, but otherwise he’s one of life’s fawners and schmoozers,’ is my snout’s verdict. Fawner and schmoozer? Perhaps he’s a little over-qualified...