The dastardly Mr Deedes

Questions are asked about quite how high-flying Andrea Leadsom’s City career was. A senior Tory, who enjoyed a high-profile City career, remarks: ‘I had never heard of her before she became an MP.’ Hoity toity Andrea, 53, most recently spent a decade as ‘Senior Investment Officer and Head of Corporate Governance’ at fund manager Invesco Perpetual. Former colleague Robert Stephens says that while advising on corporate governance issues and working (sometimes part-time) on ‘special projects’ – one of which included negotiating pay terms for senior fund managers – she had no one reporting to her in either role. So the words Senior and Head were a tad superfluous.

Sir Philip Green’s garish new 300ft yacht Lionheart remains stubbornly moored in the Italian port of Livorno. Friends report that Sir Philip, 64, is reluctant to set sail on the £100m floating gin palace until the fallout from the BHS debacle has subsided. He’ll likely have to wait another fortnight before the MPs’ report into the affair is published, which is expected to be highly critical. How the beleaguered sea dog must long for the salty tang of Mediterranean air in his flaring nostrils.

JP Morgan has been extracting its money’s worth – £2.5m a year, so they say – from its most famous employee, Tony Blair, since the referendum. The former PM spent all last week in New York soothing the bank’s grizzled general, £20m-a-year Jamie Dimon, 60, and hosting bracing conference calls with nervy clients. Blair is toxic goods over here, but to JP the old phony’s a treasured asset.

Ample hedge fund baron Crispin Odey had a good referendum, raking in £220m after betting on Brexit. But experts estimate his fund is still down 26.5pc this year. Work to do if Odey, 57, wants to regain his erstwhile billionaire status. Such trifling epithets are said to matter terribly to the status-conscious old Harrovian.

Courtly oilman Algy Cluff is delighted that his enjoyable, self-published memoirs have now sold 1,000 copies online, where it retails for £15. Ex-Grenadier Guardsman Cluff, 76, paid just £6,500 for its initial print run. Who needs publishers?