The dastardly Mr Deedes

Barclays’s £8.35m a-year boss Jes Staley recently hosted a party at New York’s fashionable Cipriani for some of the world’s biggest hedge funds, in a bid to tempt custom away from Goldman Sachs’s prime brokerage business. The evening was strictly high rollers only – the 55 hedge funds invited (including Man Group and Och-Ziff Capital Management) have a combined $669bn under management. No details on what guests were served. But the soiree is estimated to have cost $1m. So safe to say we’re not talking vinegary chardonnay and a few cocktail sausages. Showman-like John Lewis boss Andy Street, 53, packs in his £1.5m-a-year role on Friday to run as Conservative candidate for Mayor of West Midlands. He’s up against Labour’s Sion Simon, 47, a rotund ex-minister who once scarfed down 52 oysters during a lunch at nobby St James’s feeding trough Wiltons. A proper man o‘ the people! Re John Lewis, the new chief is rumoured to be expected to be announced this week. Street has always been a great champion of dainty commercial director Paula Nickolds, 43, a company ‘lifer’ who joined the store’s graduate scheme in 1994. She’s to blame for those drippy adverts it puts out every Christmas. Worth a fiver with the turf accountant, I’m advised Wells Fargo banker Angie Payden informs the New York Times the atmosphere inside the disgraced US lender was so toxic she resorted to swigging the office hand sanitiser to relieve the stress of selling customers unneeded services. At one point she was consuming a bottle a day of the horrid gunk, said to be the equivalent of five large vodkas. Let’s hope our own thirsty bankers don’t get any ideas. Monetary think tank OMFIF’s bespectacled chief David Marsh was all downat-the-mouth about Brexit during a recent panel discussion at Chartered Accountants Hall. Like most so-called fiscal ‘experts’ the former Flemings banker was virulently against us leaving the EU. But the referendum result did offer one silver-lined cloud. ‘I placed a £200 bet on the Leave campaign winning at 3-1,’ he chirped.