After the usual “we’ll have to get back to you” nonsense, the regulator rushed out a quick statement to all, confirming the fact, which had been due to be announced yesterday. This was apparently to ensure that their friends elsewhere in the media were not embarrassed by our exclusive and, ethically, is about as low as you can get in this business.

Ofcom is less than a month into its span, but the omens are not good.

NEPOTISM or sheer coincidence? Baroness Blackstone, the former Education Minister, was the other day appointed to the board of VT Group, which used to be the shipbuilder Vosper Thornycroft but is now more into educational services. Blackstone’s mother’s maiden name is Vosper, and the family is very distant relative of the Vosper family who founded the company in the 1860s. Just one of those strange coincidences — even some of those involved at VT were unaware of the link.

Brought to book

THE rise and collapse of Redland, the building materials group that was a stock market darling in the early 1990s, is the unlikely genesis of Having Their Cake . . ., a book that looks at how the City is failing business. Redland was built up using some ambitious accounting and treasury measures as well as acquisitions before the share price deflated and it was sold to Lafarge of France in 1997.

Both the authors, Don Young and Pat Scott, worked there. “There was a symbiotic relationship over 10 to 15 years between the top managers and the City,” Young tells me. “Each side knows what the other wants and has learnt how to benefit from it.”

Redland was, of course, the proving ground for Gerald Corbett, who then moved to Grand Metropolitan and ended up running Railtrack before quitting over the Hatfield disaster. “He had the best sense of humour I ever came across,” says Young.

MIKE ROWE, the young Vancouver entrepreneur who allowed himself to be bought off by Microsoft with a mere game console in return for giving up his mikerowesoft domain name, isn’t as daft as he seems. Rowe is selling most of the correspondence with Microsoft’s lawyers on eBay as “a piece of internet history”. Three bids so far, the latest $540, and rising.

Heads up

THERE is an e-mail doing the rounds of the foreign exchange markets purporting to be from an anonymous headhunter looking to fill the gaps at the National Australia Bank after those losses from rogue trading. “Between you and me, this is a write your own salary job. The bank (unnamed throughout but clearly the NAB) is in a bit of a mess and desperate for high-calibre individuals,” the headhunter said.

The message has reached me addressed to a high-flyer in the forex market, whom I think I had had better not name. “Sounds like a sarcastic wheeze from one of my friends — I have an idea who it is,” he says ominously.

city.diary@thetimes.co.uk

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