The dastardly Mr Deedes

Mercenary public relations outfit Freud Communications has been handed a nice little earner from publicity-prone London Mayor Sadiq Khan. It is being paid to promote his ‘London is Open’ campaign by getting high-profile figures to promote it on Twitter, a task the mayor’s expansive staff is surely quite capable of doing. Cost to the taxpayer for retaining Freud’s services? A trifling £30,000. Hasn’t wee Sadiq more pressing matters to be seeing to? Crossrail’s delay, not to mention rising knife crime, spring to mind. President Trump’s erstwhile economic adviser, ex-Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn, is rumoured to have accepted a teaching role at Harvard, his first job since leaving the White House last March. Not that he’s been cutting out discount coupons since. Upon joining the government in 2017, bull-necked Cohn had to dump his considerable stock of Goldman shares, then thought to be worth £200m. Their value has since tanked after the bank’s involvement in the 1MDB Malaysian corruption scandal. West Ham vice-chairman Lady Brady asks Twitter: ‘What are you planning on working towards in 2019?’ One user responds: ‘Getting you out of West Ham United so we can move on.’ Predictable, but intelligent Lady K should know better than to reach out to these morons. Former Sainsbury’s boss Justin King popped up on Radio 4 yesterday to offer his two ha’p’orth on the struggling retail sector. After a quiet few years as the vice-chairman of Terra Firma, this was King’s second appearance on the airwaves in a matter of weeks since he was appointed to the Marks & Spencer board last month. I’m sure the M&S boss Steve Rowe is totally relaxed about this. Increasingly frothy-mouthed ex-Transport Minister Lord Adonis tweets: ‘4G coverage is much better in the Austrian Alps than the Lake District. This useless Government can’t even organise a proper mobile phone signal.’ Tory councillor in Hampstead, North London, Oliver Cooper tweeted in response: ‘Wait until he finds out that he was the chair of the National Infrastructure Commission and responsible for advising the Government on the roll-out of 4G until a year ago.’