Are they losing their grip at Sports Direct? Admittedly, the past few months would have put anyone under strain, what with almost £1 billion of investors’ cash demolished. But the ever-shy founder, Mike Ashley, asked whether he regretted going public, suddenly claimed another – urgent – phone call and dashed off. Some hours later Ashley came back, but only after it had been pointed out to his advisers how daft he looked.

It was left to Simon Bentley, the acting chairman, to field calls. Asked by a colleague how much progress was being made in finding a new chairman and how many candidates had been interviewed, he snapped that this was a “pathetic question”. The last chairman quit seven weeks ago in apparent despair. I would have thought his replacement, in a company that so obviously desperately needs leadership, was about the most pertinent point for discussion just now, Mr Bentley. So what prompted the outburst?

— The emergency phone line in the press office at Severn Trent, 350,000 of whose flood-hit customers face up to a fortnight without water, is being manned by Andrew Marsh. In an earlier incarnation, at the Consumer Council for Water, he regularly chastised his new employer’s level of service. Marsh insisted yesterday that his old employer is supportive, despite the woes of Severn’s customers. “These are pretty unprecedented circumstances,” he said. Still, the company pushed ahead with its trading statement yesterday – to reveal it had missed leakage targets for a second successive year.

E-mails kill Old Lady

A visitor to the Bank of England notes a sad fact. The Old Lady, the quarterly publication for staff and pensioners, is to be wound up by the end of the year.

The mag has been running since 1921, but today most internal communication is by e-mail and on the intranet, and so fewer staff are reading it. Plus, contributors are dwindling and/or retiring. The cost of publication, after subscriptions, requires a subsidy of £12 a copy sold.

Although the mag didn’t quite clock up a century, the nickname “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” is rather older. It dates from the caption “Political Ravishment or The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in danger” to a cartoon published in 1797 by Gillray. This had William Pitt the Younger pretending to woo the Bank, an elderly lady in a dress of £1 notes seated on a chest of gold.

— Visit London, the old London Tourist Board, has produced a brochure about hotels for London visitors. “Since 1989, Visit London has been at the forefront of collecting and monitoring information about hotel developments in the capital,” it says. Indeed; which is why the back cover features the Radisson Edwardian in Manchester. I ring up to . . . well, to gloat, really. “Yes. Well spotted.”

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