Christopher Fildes

To be watching the last days of poor old Rover is to intrude on canine grief. A wise vet would have put this dog down long ago. I was asking only last week when Rover would go under: after the election? Some means could surely be found, after all those years on and off life support, to make the patient hold on until Friday 6 May. The Prime Minister must have thought so too. Had he not sent John Prescott and then Gordon Brown all the way to China, to coax Shanghai Automotive into giving the dog a good home? Had he not himself picked up the telephone to exercise his powers of persuasion on China’s President? Could anything have gone wrong in translation? He was on his way to Rome for the Pope’s funeral when, with four Fridays still to go, Rover keeled over.

Charles Thomson has achieved what I thought was impossible. He has provoked me to sympathise with the directors of Equitable Life: the gold braid, that is, on the bridge when the ship hit the iceberg. Our oldest life assurance office — set up in 1762, which made it Barings’ twin — had been holed below the waterline. I have not, until now, had a kind word to say for them. I accused them of trying to save the society’s skin at the expense of its reputation, and failing. After that failure, they were pushed overboard, and now their successors are trying to sink them. Next week, in the High Court, the Equitable will open its case against its former directors and auditors. Already the lawyers are ticking like gas-meters.

The trouble with a referendum, as Kenneth Clarke noted, is that people do not always answer the question you ask them. You want to know if they favour a bimetallistic approach to the currency, and they say ‘Throw the rascals out.’ Something of the sort may be happening to Jacques Chirac. He had the French all geared up to vote for Europe’s new constitution, the polls are now running against him, but it may be that the voters have tired of a President who keeps flying off to Japan to watch the sumo wrestling. Even so, a Non vote next month would halt the constitution in its tracks, and would not say much for Europe’s confidence in its structures, current and proposed. Last month another structure came apart.

Paul Wolfowitz may have to choose between Shaha Ali Riza’s affections and his sense of duty. She is a gender specialist employed by the World Bank as an acting manager for external relations and outreach, he has been nominated as the Bank’s new President, the world’s biggest boondoggle is full of quasi-jobs like hers, and he must nerve himself to take an axe to them, whatever this may mean for relationships on his domestic hearth. He is the Pentagon’s scholarly super-hawk, who put his shirt on Ahmed Chalabi (now scratched) for the Iraq Stakes and, when ambassador in Indonesia, urged his hosts to stand no nonsense from East Timor.

This is where I came in. Another Gordon Brown budget: how well we know them by now — the thumping delivery, the gabbled numbers, the loopholes closed and opened, so many initiatives, so much complexity, so many popular causes. British films, British science, children’s centres, cars propelled by fuel made from processed hen-droppings — are they all there this year? (Yes.) Are these the same schemes as last year’s? (Quite likely.) By now some of his audience must think that this is what budgets are like. They can never have seen or heard anyone else’s. Old hands have learnt to listen for the gaps between the sentences. What has he somehow forgotten to mention? What low ball has he saved up for the small print of an Inland Revenue notice?

It may not be too late for me to bid for the Stock Exchange. Open season has now been declared, Deutsche Borse (Frankfurt) and Euronext (Paris and Amsterdam) are manoeuvring for position, and there must be room for one more contender. I could even offer to save the Exchange for the nation, though not exactly in its present form. When it was a club it belonged to its members, who used its services for exchanging stock. In those days it had a monopoly, but competition has broken in and the Exchange has lost ground. I would offer to sell its stock-exchanging business to a consortium of its customers. No one, so far, has asked them what they want, but they might know at least as well as the Exchange’s highly paid management, large board and fly-by-night shareholders.

Bill McDonough once preached to Wall Street from the pulpit of Trinity Church, taking his text from St Matthew and reminding his astonished hearers of their duty to their neighbours. Lord George (Eddie, still, in the City) prefers to take his text from J. Fred Coots and Henry Gillespie, authors of the 1930s classic ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’. To an astonished banquet of bankers in Guildhall on Monday, he warbled his message: ‘You better be good, for goodness sake.’ A warning came with it: ‘He knows if you’ve been bad or good.’ This was Santa, an example to central bankers everywhere.

Last exit from Lombard Street. This week Barclays begins to pack up and move out. The bank’s founder set up shop there as a goldsmith 315 years ago, and Barclays has been established on its corner site under the sign of the black eagle since 1728, periodically building and rebuilding. The post-war head office, a massive stone money box, was knocked down to make way for a lumpy effort in the Moorish taste, known to its City neighbours as the Islamic Cultural Centre. The directors never liked it — they had to go downstairs to tomb-like lunch-rooms in the basement — and four years ago put down an order for a tower in Canary Wharf. In May, when the move is complete, Barclays will have 5,000 of its staff all toiling away under the same lofty roof. Such is banking fashion.

Oh, look. In response to widespread lack of public request, the people at North Colonnade have found something new to regulate. A sequence of count-down advertisements — only so many days to go — have been preparing us for the joys of general insurance regulation, which comes into force on Friday. If you are in the business and your application form has not gone in by then, you are (as the ads remind you) committing a criminal offence, so there. What business? Well, insuring things: selling insurance, advising on it, arranging it, being an agent for it or helping with the paperwork. Even if it is only a marginal part of your business, or something you do in your spare time, you’re caught.

How convenient it would be if we could find something out of a package — a computer programme, presumably — to do our conscience’s work for us. Then we could switch off and stop worrying. Happily, in the world of investment, this need has been met, with the invention of ethical funds, armed with ethical codebooks. These are the investors’ equivalent of buying bubble baths from the Body Shop — a tepid glow of self-satisfaction comes with them. The Financial Times even has an ethical investment index, smugly entitled FTSE4Good. Along the way, ethics have been codified and redefined to fit the package. Now investors in Framlington’s Health Fund find themselves called to a meeting and asked to approve a change in their fund’s objective and purpose.

In the narrow courts between Cornhill and Lombard Street, where the old City lives on, I find the senior partner in his seasonal bad temper. He likes to get on with his work but, he says, nobody else does — and, what is worse, nobody thinks that they should. ‘Take that clerk of mine, Cratchit,’ he grumbles. ‘I never see him at all. First of all it was stress and now it’s paternity leave. He’s taken the year off. Still expects to be paid. Claims he’s looking after Tiny Tim. When I told him that’s a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket, he threatened me with a tribunal.’ His mood does not improve when a sharp-suited figure bounces in: ‘Merry Christmas, uncle! Can I cut you in on my new hedge fund?

Just what we need: a well-meant effort to gum up the market in houses. This market now seems to be gumming itself up, but never mind. A new Housing Act has been passed into law, and with it the concept of sellers’ packs. Anyone who wants to sell a house will have to put one of these packs together or, more precisely, to order one. They are supposed to contain all the information that a buyer of the house might want to have, and members of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors will be happy to provide them for anything up to £1,000. Who are these surveyors? Well, if you wanted to annoy them, you could describe them as estate agents with their Sunday suits on.

The postman who calls at 30 Able Road may be a new urban myth but, as myths do, he tells a story. The people at number 30 found that they were getting post for 30 Baker Street, 30 Charlie Avenue, 30 Dog Mews, 30 Easy Street and so on. When they compared notes, they worked out that this postman could read Arabic numerals but was still at sea with English street-names. Disbanding the old guard and taking on helpers like this under contract must have given a boost, however temporary, to the Post Office’s finances. This week its omnipresent chairman, Allan Leighton, will take some time off from stalking Sainsbury’s to announce a modest profit, and to claim that it is meeting its targets for the delivery of letters.