The dastardly Mr Deedes

Down but definitely not out ad tycoon Sir Martin Sorrell, 73, informs an audience in Cannes that he always planned for WPP’s current joint chiefs Mark Read, 51, and Andrew Scott, 49, to replace him, as one person ‘would not be sufficient’. He adds jokily: ‘I’m not saying two individuals because nobody could replace me individually.’ Perish the thought! Andy Haldane’s vote for an interest rate rise yesterday is the first time a Bank of England chief economist has dissented from the Monetary Policy Committee’s consensus since 2011. With the governor’s job in play, spindly built Haldane’s continuing renegade tendency is to be admired. It makes him the most interesting character around Threadneedle Street, though not always the most popular. Don’t be surprised if he’s abruptly dispatched to spread the goodwill in blameless Rochdale next week. Aston Martin chief Andy Palmer foiled a pickpocketer on the Paris Metro last weekend while returning from the Le Mans 24 Hours race. Says Andy: ‘Had he been successful he would have been very disap- pointed, but as it was he just had a fat guy sitting on him swearing a lot.’ Fat guy? Wellpadded Palmer, 55, is, in rugby parlance, what you call a ‘unit’. Brawny ex-Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn has jumped aboard the £200,000-a-pop speaking circuit while he weighs up his next career move, according to Vanity Fair. Apparently Cohn, 57, who resigned as President Trump’s chief economic adviser in March, is considering penning an account of his time in the White House. As if we haven’t had enough of those already. Surely a tell-all book about his 11 years playing Prince Charles to Goldman’s enigmatic boss Lloyd Blankfein would be a more illuminating read. Accountancy giant PwC, the geniuses that audited BHS before its disastrous sale to porcine chancer Dominic Chappell, 51, has done away with landlines. Calls to the London office are informed the firm has gone ‘mobile first’, a ghastly, jargon-esque way of saying their beancounters can only be reached via their mobiles phones. Let us hope they still have access to calculators.