The dastardly Mr Deedes

While the fate of Sir Philip Green’s knighthood was debated in the Commons yesterday, almost as much anger was directed at Shifty’s former BHS chairman Lord Grabiner. Labour MP Iain Wright branded the haughty QC ‘shocking’ and ‘truly hopeless’. MP Richard Fuller accused Grabiner of showing ‘no curiosity in the deal’. His Lordship, 71, remains a director of Goldman Sachs, a master of Clare College, Cambridge, and is much admired in legal circles.

Addressing an audience at London’s Cass Business School, the Bank of England’s £182,000-a-year chief economist Andy Haldane joked: ‘The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to do three things – stable prices, stable financial system and financing wars against France. We dropped the third objective – at least up until the referendum’.

Whippet thin Haldane, 49, is an entertaining cove, prone to maverick remarks. There are some inside Threadneedle street who’d prefer him as governor to Mark Carney.

Gruff, know-it-all former business minister Sir Vince Cable’s debut novel Open Arms is to be published by Atlantic next June. Will critics greet the Cable opus with open arms? The publisher’s description of the tome – ‘a fast paced political thriller set in a post-Brexit future’ – is hardly the stuff of pageturners, but perhaps I’m being unduly hasty.

Without a hint of shame, Selfridges yesterday announced itself the first department store in the world to have already unveiled its Christmas window displays. It says ‘it’s an invitation open to everyone to celebrate the season and to party’. To think we now have another two months of this drivel.

PS: I hear of a desperately sad story concerning an under-fire banking bigwig, who was recently forced to fire an assistant. The poor woman unwittingly breached her contract after she appeared on a daytime TV chat show and revealed her place of work.