SO YOU want to play like a hedge-fund manager for a weekend? Here’s your chance – as long as you don’t mind sharing your experience with an Australian egomaniac.

Richard Hains, who runs the London office of the Melbourne-based hedge fund Portland House, has opened a competition, to run all summer, for someone to win a weekend with him “in the fast lane”. It will be an all-expenses-paid weekend with him in London, taking in the best clubs, bars and restaurants with a driver at your disposal – basically to live like a hedgie does.

The son of Aussie billionaire David Hains, Richard, 44, describes himself as a “highflying bachelor” who parties with European models and has wallabies in the garden of his Gloucestershire pile.

He is clearly not doing this for nothing. It’s an effort to promote his first novel, Chameleon, described as a financial thriller laced with sex and drugs.

He insists it’s fiction, despite the main character being a whiz-kid Australian financier, who at one stage explains to his secretary: “Let’s face it. We’re all a bunch of overpaid thieves. The only thing missing from our costume is the little black Zorro mask.” It all sounds good, but unfortunately the book, which was finished six months ago, isn’t really selling. Hains said that was because of the large number of books on offer, particularly in America, his target market.

Last week Hains told Prufrock: “The competition is just a bit of old-fashioned fun and frivolity and I would not want it overshadowing the overall integrity of the novel.” Glasses man makes a spectacle of himself

OH dear, is Britain’s favourite mini-millionaire losing his popularity?

James Murray Wells has been the toast of the town as one of the country’s most promising entrepreneurs after setting up Glasses Direct at the tender age of just 21 and slashing the cost of specs sold on the high street.

But last week the whippersnapper, now 24 and worth £4m, decided to rub salt into the wounds – and didn’t make many friends in the process.

Speaking at a conference, he said high-street opticians’ “days are numbered” and they should “throw in the towel” because the online model was the only one for the future.

Ignoring the heckles from the crowd, Murray Wells described dealing with the General Optical Council, the industry’s governing body, as like being in a cemetery – “lots of people around but nobody listening”.

Now his website is packed with threats warning him to tone down his rhetoric.

One charming American trader advised other retailers: “If you can catch the guy in a parking lot, make him really nervous.”

- NOT a good week for Peter Jones, the star of ITV’s new business reality TV show Tycoon, whose large ego has finally taken a big battering.

Jones, who once said all girls fancy him because he looks like Brad Pitt (per-lease), planned to cash in on Britain’s new appetite for business reality TV, but sadly his efforts on Tycoon have been universally rubbished as a boring version of The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den.

Last week it seemed ITV decided it had had enough of the criticism. Just moments before the programme’s usual 9pm slot on Tuesday, an announcement was made that there had been a change of schedule and a Caroline Quentin drama was aired instead.

Tycoon has been moved to 10pm on Monday night and, if ratings are still poor, it will be axed altogether.

What will be his strategy now?

Spa for busy girls hits the nails on the head

HERE’s one for the ladies. It’s amazing the business ideas that are generated from the demands of spoilt women. A few weeks ago Linzi Stoppard, the electric violinist, arranged a breakfast meeting with women’s couturier Kate Starkey to discuss an outfit for an upcoming concert.

The problem was that time was pressing and the pair needed to squeeze in a manicure, too.

The team at the Spa at Chancery Court raced around and whipped up a watermelon and goat’s cheese salad, accompanied by little shots of smoothie drinks. The inventive staff made sure all the food was served in bite-size portions.

It seemed a good business idea and now “Breks-A-Manger” for two – served with chopsticks to avoid smudging nail paint – costing £120 are being served from 8am til 11am every day of the week.

- BAA is having a tough time, what with flaming Jeeps crashing into its Glasgow airport and commentators lambasting standards at Heathrow. But sometimes BAA does not make life easy for itself. I was inundated with calls on Friday from business travel-lers trying to catch British Airways flights from Gatwick. The monorail that carries them to BA’s check-in desks in the North terminal broke down, stranding hundreds. “What I’d like to ask Stephen Nelson [BAA chief executive] is why is there not a contingency plan? The transit system does break down, it’s hardly unexpected, yet nobody seems to know what to do,” fumed one caught in the scrum.

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