Obituaries

‘Everyone remembers the names of Applegarth of Northern Rock and Goodwin of RBS, but history may judge the HBOS men to have been the worst of the lot,’ I wrote four years ago. Judgment has arrived at last in a Bank of England report on the 2008 HBOS collapse — plus a second report, by Andrew Green QC, on the adequacy of investigations by the now-defunct Financial Services Authority. The Bank does not go as far as I did with ‘worst of the lot’.

Rather more attention was paid last week to the strange position of George Osborne’s feet than to the dark shape lurking behind him. My own theory about his stance on the conference platform is that he was imagining himself as a operatic tenor, belting out an aria in praise the magic elixir he has administered to the formerly consumptive heroine, the UK economy, and pitching to be her next prince. But operas, like political careers, tend to end badly: so why the rumbling bass notes from the orchestra pit, and what is that sinister thing in the shadows? I’m not talking about Corbyn and McDonnell fighting in a sack with their own colleagues: they’re a comic subplot.

Sir Adrian Cadbury, who has died aged 86, is remembered as the author in 1992 of a first stab at a corporate governance code for public companies — which thereafter were expected to show ‘Cadbuarial correctness’ in the separation of chief executive and chairman and the powers of non-executive directors. Cadbury’s work was taken forward by the 1995 Greenbury report, the 1998 Hampel report, the Higgs review in 2003 and a subsequent drawing-together into a ‘Combined Code’. Finally Vince Cable, as business secretary, left his own mark by setting a target of 25 per cent women on FTSE100 boards by this year.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thehighpriestsofhealth/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss Charles Kennedy's career" startat=1211] Listen [/audioplayer]Charles Kennedy’s eloquence, intelligence and humour were famous in the Highlands long before his election to the Commons at the age of 23. When I started at Lochaber High School, the prizes he had won as a school debater adorned the walls; as pupils knew, at university he had gone on to win the national championship for Glasgow. It was clear that he was a phenomenon. Charles knew, perhaps better than anyone in British politics today, that how you say something is critical to being understood. Politics is the art of making and winning arguments.

I first heard of Raymond Carr, who wrote for this magazine for more than 40 years, when I was in Italy in the army at the end of the second world war, and I had a letter from my sister in London saying that she had met the most marvellous man who was not only very funny but immensely clever, and I must meet him when I got back. By the time I did, Raymond had moved from being a wartime schoolmaster at Wellington College to a being a resident fellow of All Souls, Oxford. He was, yes, both immensely funny and rather grand. Raymond Carr had been educated at Brockenhurst school, and then in 1941 won a history scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, having continued his education (as he used to put it) by teaching himself the clarinet and supporting himself by performing in a jazz band.

He’s a tall man, Kevin Pietersen, and he casts a long shadow. It loomed large over the Long Room at Lord’s last week where the great, the good, and the not very good at all of the cricket world had gathered for the annual Wisden dinner, one of the most enjoyable events in the life of man. For starters, indeed only a few minutes before we did get stuck into our starters, the hapless Paul Downton had been suddenly sacked as managing director of English cricket. It seems nonsense to blame Downton for all the failures of the England team, but he was the main man in the room for the botched firing of Pietersen last year.

The FTSE100 index has at last breached 7,000, surpassing its peak of 30 December 1999 and provoking moderate celebration among investors who have enjoyed such poor returns all these years. A thousand pounds invested in FTSE100 stocks on Millennium Eve, with dividends reinvested, was worth £1,670 by last month, an annual return of 3.4 per cent compared to inflation over the period of around 2.9 per cent. The same sum invested in a London house would have been worth £3,200, nearly twice the return on shares if we ignore running costs and the leverage effect of mortgage borrowing; invested on the rollercoaster of gold bullion, it would have been worth £4,500.

With Candida, you learned to expect the unexpected. She said she might make the charity sale at my house on Thursday, but not to rely on her. I didn’t. But on Friday, a bright red pick-up truck turned into the yard and out got Candida with a bagful of contributions. But she also brought a birthday present of a beautiful Alice Temperley skirt for my younger daughter. The red pick-up was a present for Candida’s own birthday, thrilling her as much as any red bike for a six-year-old. ‘I’m an old hippy,’ she once said. Perhaps. She was certainly a child of the Sixties, when half the aristocracy’s offspring were hippies.

Mr S was saddened to hear of the untimely death of Mark Shand, the Duchess of Cornwall's brother. He was a kind and witty man: a natural bon viveur. Parties for his charity, Elephant Family, which campaigned to protect the habitats of the endangered Asian elephant, were always splendid affairs. Shand’s vivacity and generosity came to the fore and partygoers gave generously. Mr S remembers one bash at Lakshmi Mittal’s gaffe. Lalit Modi, Vijay Mallya, Michiel Mol, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, Joanna Lumley, Sarah Ferguson and countless faceless financiers were dolling out cash like nobody’s business. London society has lost one of its most dashing players. And the Indian elephant has lost its most determined protector. RIP.

I could start by remarking that we should not speak ill of the dead, quoting the pertinent Latin phrase: de mortuis nil nisi bonum (‘of the dead, only good’). But this would be to miss a key qualification because the whole quote (from Diogenes Laertius, circa ad 300) adds ‘dicendum est’: ‘is to be said’. And that puts a different complexion on things. Commentators have preferred to describe the advice as an established social convention rather than necessarily their own opinion. Indeed it is often used as a sly way of indicating (without stating) the speaker’s disapproval of the deceased. But if the phrase has been thrown once at my head by my newspaper readers this week, it has been thrown a score of times.