Any other business

Gordon Brown is a son of the manse, so he will have been brought up on the Parable of the Unjust Steward. As stewards have been known to do, this one, we are told, had been fiddling the figures, and realised that his accounts would soon be audited. When that day came, he knew, he would need friends — so now was the time to ingratiate himself with his customers. He hurried about to offer them rebates and discounts. Can it be that the Chancellor has borrowed this idea from holy scripture? First of all he sends me an entirely welcome tax rebate. Then he follows it up with a straightforward £400 bung. Half of it, he explains, is a winter fuel payment to help me pay my heating bill.

This is the season of Advent: the time of prayer. Of course we should all pray all the time and not just in this season. I am not a prayerful person but I do pray daily and cannot imagine not doing so. Even King Claudius, whom Charles Lamb said was the least likable character in all Shakespeare, prayed, and had sufficient self-knowledge to know that his prayers were ineffectual: My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go. All must pray to somebody or something. As Homer says (Odyssey 3: 48), ‘Everyone needs the gods.’ Darwinian fundamentalists pray to Holy Charles; Richard Dawkins, I suppose, to the primaeval polyp. The word comes from precari, to beg or entreat.

New York No helicopters are flying in the cold clear skies above Liberty Street, home of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, from which I assume that monetary policy is in neutral. If money were running short, Ben Bernanke, successor-designate to Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed, would be prepared to contemplate an air-supply of dollar bills, dropping as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. An air-drop of gold ingots would, by contrast, constitute a health hazard, which is one reason why Mr Bernanke has no plans for it. Another is that he cannot produce the ingots for the asking. For that purpose, nothing compares with the printing press which, as he has pointed out, can produce extra dollars to order.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch. The early crowd in the foyer of Claridge’s ballroom was largely made up of City guests invited by our excellent sponsor, Threadneedle Investments, while less well-mannered parliamentary and media guests arrived late or not at all. I recognised several senior figures from my own banking days, among them a former colleague. Since this column is, this once, about journalistic good manners rather than corporate name-dropping, I will not hint at his identity. We exchanged pleasantries until a third party in the conversation moved away; then he brought his face closer to mine, with a rather chilly smile, and said quietly: ‘I thought what you wrote about Jack was unforgivable.

Rivers of fudge are to be expected from corporate PR people, but the Cadbury factory at Bourneville has an unusually impressive one — an endless six-feet-wide flow of the soft, brown confection, about to be sliced into ribbons, then chopped into tiny rectangles, coated in chocolate and popped into Milk Tray boxes. Even more seductive is the assembly line for chocolate Creme Eggs — made in halves with the yolk in one half only, then neatly flipped together, sealed, wrapped and sent bobbing along the conveyors.

I have long thought that Alan Greenspan would have made a passable Dalai Lama. Those gnomic utterances, that air of inner calm, that instant access to a deep well of understanding.... The faithful have come to accept that the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board is the embodiment of power and wisdom, and they are now preparing themselves for his next incarnation. Ben Bernanke, sometime winner of the South Carolina state spelling-bee, then professor of economics at Princeton and authority on the Great Depression, is told that he will soon be the most powerful man in the world, and is so wise and clever that all will be well. To look the part, that little jutting beard may have to go; long, white and wispy would be better.... In what, though, does his power reside?

Boots, Boots, Boots, Boots, moving up and down again — no discharge in the war .... Just another change of strategy and an alliance with Alliance. Perhaps it will work better than in-store chiropody. Salients have come and gone, casualties mount, the line is rectified, and commanders succeed one another like British generals in the Western desert. The new plan is to merge with Alliance UniChem, thus giving Boots even more chemists’ shops. Until now, armchair strategists — the High Street is full of them — have assumed that Boots has quite enough shops. Its trouble has been to know what to do with them. What would people rather buy from Boots than from Tesco? Sandwiches? Something for the weekend?