Any other business

More interesting than the Governor of the Bank of England’s letter to the Chancellor explaining why inflation has exceeded the official target will be Gordon Brown’s reply. Mervyn King has admitted there is an even chance he will have to write the letter, and a prudent Governor would already be drafting it. King might want to point out that although inflation is his responsibility — under the pact imposed on the Bank when Labour took office — it is nevertheless Brown who is responsible for some of the steepest price rises.

Dates are important to me. I have always been good at learning them, helped by mnemonics taught me by my mother. When I was seven, attending the convent school and in the class of Sister Angela whom I adored, I had a meretricious triumph, my first of a quasi-public nature. An official visit was paid to the school by the Rt. Hon. Oliver Stanley, president of the board of education. He was the first politician I had seen, let alone met. Big, tall, fat, red-faced, genial and courteous, he shook hands during his classroom tour. Sister Angela introduced me as ‘a bright young man’. ‘Bright, is he?’ said the minister. ‘Well, boy, date of the Battle of Hastings?’ ‘1066.’ ‘Right. Battle of Bannockburn?’ ‘1314.’ ‘Right.

It was a typical west London dinner party, of the kind where the guests agree not to talk about house prices but then do so anyway. One smug homeowner was in the middle of explaining why buying property makes sense when my usually placid Japanese friend Takashi suddenly jumped up in anger. ‘That’s nonsense,’ he shouted. ‘I know what it means to see house prices collapse. You British know nothing about that.’ Like many other young Japanese professionals, Takashi remains traumatised by his country’s experience. Property prices in the Land of the Rising Sun have so far fallen by 54 per cent since peaking in 1990. In some parts of Tokyo they have lost nine-tenths of their value.

The Valhalla which is Hong Kong’s low and simple taxation system is set to be demolished. The government of the Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic has come up with the bright idea of getting its people to share the festering sore which in Britain goes by the name of Value Added Tax and does so much to detract from the sum of human happiness. Hong Kong plans to introduce a Goods and Services Tax to be levied at a modest 5 per cent, compared with British VAT at 17.5 per cent. But these evil schemes always begin modestly and have a way of becoming less modest as time goes on. There are some other significant differences in the Hong Kong-style proposed VAT.

Twenty-seven years ago, a shy 29-year-old engineering graduate from Cambridge University left his job as a trainee fund manager at an obscure South African investment company in London. In a move that some of his colleagues regarded as foolhardy, he had accepted an offer to join a little-known private American firm that had never sold an investment fund over here before, but thought that Britain under Margaret Thatcher — who had been elected just a few months earlier — might be a good place to try to break into the European investment market.

As a former treble chorister — you should have heard my ‘Benedictus’ solo from Gounod’s Messe du Sacré Coeur! — I love singing, especially popular ditties. I sing to my latest granddaughter, Daisy, that clever song ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’. She cannot talk yet but is almost walking, and she wriggles to it rhythmically, so I call her the Cairo belly-dancer. The period 1880 to 1914 was the first golden age of popular songs, most of them British, the best of which my mother used to sing to me when I was tiny.

It’s not that the Saudis aren’t pleased to see foreign visitors, it’s just that they use the first possible opportunity to issue a death threat. ‘Traffickers will be killed’ promises the landing card distributed before we touch down in Jeddah. It’s a reminder of Saudi Arabia’s tough stance on crime and its direct approach to business, even drug-smuggling business. But for those blue-chips interested in rather more mainstream corporate endeavours, opportunities in Saudi Arabia are booming. The oil-rich kingdom is offering more than £624 billion worth of contracts in defence, transport and infrastructure to international firms.

I don’t much care for Napoleon, but I’ve always had a sneaking sympathy for Napoleon III. His boundless ambition combined with an ultimate lack of ruthlessness, his self-importance and vanity combined with flashes of insight into his own personal insignificance, make him a far nicer man than his odious uncle. I mean no self-praise when I say that men who are failures are in general much more attractive than men who are resounding successes. It was my sympathy for the Emperor of the French that impelled me to pick up a little volume entitled Napoleon III (My Recollections) by Sir William Fraser, Bart. Sir William was elected MP for Barnstaple in 1852, but was unseated because he was deemed to have won by bribery.