The dastardly Mr Deedles

Housebuilder Persimmon’s York-born boss Jeff Fairburn’s daft £47m pay packet includes £42,800 worth of benefits to cover his car, health insurance and, staggeringly, ‘some telephone costs’. What cheek! eh-oop-chuck Fairburn, 51, should take a leaf out of Warren Buffett’s book. Filings show the modest billionaire recently reimbursed his firm Berkshire Hathaway £43,000 for postage and phone calls.

With the Information Commissioner investigating Cambridge Analytica over its Facebook links, perhaps Chancellor Philip Hammond’s smart-butclumsy parliamentary private secretary Kwasi Kwarteng can provide some intel on CA’s Gatsby-esque chief Alexander Nix, who was filmed proposing to send Ukrainian floozies to smear political

opponents. They were in the same year together at Eton. Creepy-looking ex-City lawyer Nix, 42, was known to fellow pupils there as ‘Bertie’.

Uber’s shrieky ex-public relations chief rachel Whetstone had a reputation at the taxi firm, according to Business Insider, ‘for riling other colleagues, being difficult to work with, becoming easily upset, or even

irrational’. But it also credits her for standing up to the firm’s founder travis Kalanick, 41, by all accounts a gruesome creature. But rachel, 49, has dealt with her fair share of those. she spent three years working for former tory leader Michael Howard.

My story yesterday about HSBC’s £1.5m-a-year chairman Mark Tucker, 60, arriving for an interview with PwC

sporting two black eyes and two missing teeth from a football match fracas wasn’t his finest hour. Stoutly-built Tucker’s proudest moment, I’m told, was turning out for Barnet alongside legendary England striker, Jimmy Greaves, 78, by then playing out his twilight years for the non-league side.

Air France has launched an advertising campaign under the reassuring slogan: ‘take a chance or Fly Air France’. Catchy. Pity the carrier’s troublesome pilots’ union plans to strike on Friday.