The dastardly Mr Deedes

Invitations to City spinner Roland Rudd’s winter party have arrived. The well-attended soiree, a heady mix of cabinet ministers and City heavyweights, will be held at Tate Britain in a fortnight, just hours after Philip Hammond delivers his budget. Has crafty Roland, 56, arranged this deliberately? It’ll be fertile ground for talking up sister Amber’s prospects should Hammond’s budget bomb. Baby-faced hedge funder Ian Wace, who’s worth £505m, says firms need homely office spaces if they’re to lure data eggheads from the likes of Apple and Google. So he’s moved his fund Marshall Wace from the Strand to a comfier premises on Sloane Street, and decorated it with his own art collection. Wace, 55, is particularly proud of a pair of 200-year- old, life- sized wooden elephants parked in the lobby, which hail from a Hindu temple in Rajasthan. They were bought and freightered to London for a trifling £15,000. Geezerish Marks and Spencer chief Steve Rowe says he and his chairman, ex-Asda boss Archie Norman, are ‘different sides of the same coin’. Different sides alright. Rowe, 50, spends weekends on the terraces of Millwall FC, while Norman, 63, is more likely found at the opera. Schooling- wise, Croydon-born Rowe was educated at Kate Moss’s gritty alma mater, Riddlesdown Collegiate. Privileged Archie went to Charterhouse, the Surrey public school whose pupils are known to rival colleges – for reasons opaque – as ‘the sheepsh*ggers’. Sinister-looking Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein has developed a fondness for Twitter, which he uses to needle President Trump as well as the British Government about Brexit. Strangely, he remains button-lipped on political events in Saudi Arabia where flashy investor, Prince Alwaleed, has been arrested as part of an anti-corruption drive. The prince, 62, is a Goldman client. He and Lloyd, 63, dined in Riyadh only weeks ago. This week’s Web Summit in Lisbon featured talks from big-name speakers such as former vice-president Al Gore and UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres. However, a source reports the auditorium was full only once. That was yesterday morning, during a frenetic discussion about sex robots.