The dastardly Mr Deedes

HSBC’s appointment of company lifer John Flint as its next chief executive fulfilled my long-held prediction that the job would go internally. Not that there wasn’t plenty of outside interest. I hear Credit Suisse’s Cote d’Ivoire-born chief executive Tidjane Thiam, 55, put out feelers for the position, which received a swift ‘non merci’ from the bank’s board. The future of Deutsche Borse’s silver-maned boss Carsten Kengeter, 50, is much discussed in Germany, where he remains embroiled in a £4m insidertrading scandal. Some of his colleagues have taken to referring to their embattled chief executive as ‘Herr Wanngehter’, which is roughly translated as ‘Mr When Will He Go’. As nicknames go it’s hardly a thigh-slapper. But then ze German sense of humour is no laughing matter. Business tycoon and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, 75, who opens his firm’s European headquarters in the City today, describes Britain’s decision to leave the European Union as ‘the single stupidest thing any country’s ever done. Very, very stupid’. A tad ungracious? We gave the ungrateful wretch an honorary knighthood, as I recall. Who’ll succeed Xavier Rolet as head of the London Stock Exchange when the £6.3m-a-year Frenchman tootles back to his vineyard in Provence next year? One suggestion mooted, which is likely to raise eyebrows, is Blythe Masters, the uber-glamorous ex-JP Morgan executive currently boss of technology firm Digital Asset. The Oxford-born brunette, 48, is credited with inventing the notorious credit default swap, the instrument partly responsible for the 2008 meltdown. Rupert Murdoch’s wife Jerry Hall was spotted in the stalls on Friday night at Ink, the brilliant West End play dramatising the media mogul’s brazen acquistion of The Sun in 1969. No sign of ‘KRM’ himself, which is a pity. He would find Doctor Foster actor Bertie Carvel’s portrayal of him most sympathetic.