Any other business

My racing correspondent, Captain Threadneedle, thought that banking and racing went together. He wanted Barclays to buy the Tote: perfect synergy, he thought, with matching systems, merged accounts, an overlapping customer base and a marketing slogan that would write itself: ‘You can bet on your overdraft with Barclays.’ He was, as we now know, before his time — and then the banks (Barclays included) took to betting on their own account, splashing out on doubles, trebles and accumulators, collecting piles of toxic betting slips and deservedly losing their boots. It has been left to Weatherbys, a very old name in racing, a new name in banking, to vindicate the Captain’s insight and to solve the equation.

Minsky’s moment has arrived There is a big political prize dangling over the economic crisis. Whoever now devises a coherent economic programme will mould British society for a generation. Labour won the post-Great Depression prize in 1945 by creating the paternalistic welfare state and won again in 1966 — a short-lived victory — with Harold Wilson’s modernising ‘white heat of technology’. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher won the prize that arose from the failures of the preceding paternalism and technocratic modernism with her vision of free-market individualism. From then until Northern Rock was nationalised, all economic policy was recognisably some shade of Thatcherism.

Putting Lord Mandelson into an electric Mini may not seem to bear much comparison with putting a man on the moon, but there are interesting parallels. In 1961, the US government embarked on the Apollo space programme, with the ambition of landing astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade. By 1969, it had achieved exactly what it set out to do. But it was a risky project, with no guarantee of success. To land on the moon, scientists had to solve three problems: how to rendezvous and dock with another spacecraft, how to work outside a spacecraft, and how to survive prolonged periods of time in space.

Eddie was a model public servant: that’s why Gordon was so rude to him In Tokyo in the mid-Eighties, I bumped into a very senior Japanese investment banker who had just been to London to negotiate an operating licence. ‘We met...’ he paused for effect, bowing slightly at the neck and adopting what I can only describe as obsequious grimace, ‘...Eddie-George-san!’ All the other Japanese present nodded vigorously and sucked their teeth in accord. Lord George, who died last Saturday aged 70, was a big player on the world banking stage long before he became Governor of the Bank of England in 1993. He was also a model public servant: modest, calm, courteous, firm-principled, and a master of market technicalities.

Jim Cowling has chosen the right moment to launch his new business. An experienced security consultant, he has just set up a company called Shipguard, with a small office in Clerkenwell. The product: providing the men, the know-how, and if necessary the weapons, to defeat the pirates that are the scourge of Somali waters. ‘We’re one of the groups throwing our hats into the ring,’ says Cowling. ‘This is going to be the next Iraq in terms of where mercenaries are going. Iraq is being wound down, and guys are looking around and latching onto piracy.’ He is far from alone. In the past year, as pirates have menaced the Gulf and the Indian Ocean demanding bigger and bigger ransoms, so dozens of companies have sprung up to fight them.

I live in fear of that peculiar sharp intake of breath I seem to hear whenever I ask service men actually to service anything I own that doesn’t work. I live in fear of that peculiar sharp intake of breath I seem to hear whenever I ask service men actually to service anything I own that doesn’t work. It’s not a promising sound. Dishwashers that stop washing dishes, internet servers that fail to serve, waste disposals that spew sewage wrist-deep back up into the sink, cars that make curious grinding noises — all these are problems I want dealt with speedily and with total confidence. I also want the person in charge of mending them to have a far superior knowledge of the buggered piece of machinery than I do. That is their job; their specialist field. Not mine.

One of my favourite parts of London, in easy walking distance of my house in Newton Road, is what I call the Ardizzone country. This stretches from the edges of Little Venice into Maida Vale and is, or was until the crunch, in the process of rapid gentrification. I call it after the artist because, from 1920 until his death in 1979, he lived (on and off) at 130 Elgin Avenue, and made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little sketches of its people. He had not much artistic training, apart from a spell under Bernard Meninsky at the Westminster School of Art, but he had an extraordinary skill at doing rapid figure drawings, which he deepened by clever hatching and watercolour washes.