Is Bryan Sanderson, the Northern Rock chairman, the only one who can see any humour in the situation around the bank?

The group already owes £26 billion to taxpayers, a figure that could rise closer to £50 billion if the bank is nationalised, while even Goldman Sachs, the Government’s own financial adviser, admits that Britain’s reputation has been “badly dented” by the debacle.

Yesterday, the start of an extraordinary general meeting sent Rock’s share price sliding a further 14 per cent while shareholders vented their anger at the handling of the crisis.

Sanderson, though, was in full humour, joking first that he had the “second-hardest job in Newcastle” (one for you football fans) and then that his speech had been legalled so heavily that it sounded “like a transcript from a German translation”. Strangely, nobody else there seemed to see the funny side of things.

Being head of Britain’s largest commercial radio group was always going to demand some personal sacrifices, but for Fru Hazlitt, a particularly galling one has come only weeks into her new job as head of GCap. The takeover approach from Global Radio — made three days before Ms Hazlitt’s promotion — has forced the first woman of media to abandon her planned two-week Maldives holiday with her fiancé Charlie Porter, co-founder of the Thames River Capital hedge fund. With — at most — five weeks to provide a robust defence against the offer, she has been forced to settle for a brief mini-break closer to home.

Is hands giving a peep into the future at EMI?

Industry wags have been quick to dub Guy Hands’s masterplan for EMI “Project Zeus” — the name of a disastrous business overhaul in the popular Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show. For those of you still in the dark, in the show, the main character, the hapless Mark Corrigan, instigates a shake-up of his loans company, which is centred around one big idea — merging sales into marketing. It is a spectacular failure, so much so that Corrigan runs out of the pitch meeting feigning illness.

Yesterday, Hands revealed that his restructuring plans for EMI — which his Terra Firm private equity firm acquired last year in a £3.2 billion deal — include the merging of its marketing and sales division into one, over the next six months.

Let’s hope that Hands has more success.

Jon Wood, who runs the hedge fund SRM Global, is not one for sentimentality — clearly not given his apparently conflicting stance towards Sir Richard Branson. SRM, the largest shareholder in Northern Rock, is fervently opposing Virgin Group’s bid for the crisis-hit bank. Yet the Virgin Media share register reveals that an 8.3 per cent shareholder in the broadband group is the same SRM.

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