It is a rule that, as an American president nears the end of his term of office, he is allowed to grant various pardons to miscreants. There is always a big rush of applicants and the crop this time includes the disgraced junk bond king Michael Milken, who has successfully reinvented himself as a philanthropist promoting cancer charities and rebuilt his fortune. He was convicted of securities fraud in 1990 for crimes committed at Drexel Burnham Lambert and did less than two years of a ten-year sentence in a minimum security jail.

Why he should wish to clear his name, which will forever be associated with junk bonds whatever the outcome, I cannot say. But I recall that President Clinton controversially cleared another dodgy financier, Marc Rich, who had fled the United States for Switzerland to avoid 51 counts of tax evasion, fraud and violation of a trade embargo on Iran. Also pardoned, Richard Nixon and Casper Weinberger, two weeks before he was due to go on trial for alleged involvement in the sale of weapons to, again, Iran. Would Milken really want to be counted among that number?

Confusion over ‘Plumber’ puts spanner in the works

A piece appears in a rival paper about Paul “The Plumber” Davidson buying a Majorca football club. Blimey, he’s changed a bit, I think, looking at the accompanying photograph. In fact, he appears to have somehow morphed into Robert Atwater, former chief executive of Cyprotex. This was the biotech company whose flotation led to allegations of market abuse by Davidson and a case against him by the Financial Services Authority, which was overturned on appeal. I wonder what Atwater makes of being confused with the man who has ensured that his company will always be associated with financial scandal? “I’ve never met him,” he tells me. “I’m not worried at all.”

At the planning and transportation committee yesterday, the City of London slapped tree preservation orders on three plane trees in the gardens of the Bishop of London, who lives at The Old Deanery near St Paul’s. He wanted to cut down one in his rear courtyard, an act described by Peter Rees, the City planning officer, as “episcopal arboricide”. A tree preservation order seems a bit drastic, though. What is he going to do, creep out in the dead of night in his vestments with a chainsaw? That wouldn’t be terribly Christian.

Much debate at the Treasury Select Committee over who leaked the bad news at Northern Rock to Robert Peston at the BBC last autumn. Mervyn King said he had no idea, but added darkly: “I think it’s pretty clear where leaks come from. I suggest you ask the other authorities involved what they have done about it.” I have no idea where Peston got his scoop. He certainly isn’t saying. But those idiots who love such conspiracy theories might also be interested to note that his father is a Labour peer and he worked for many years at the Financial Times with Roland Rudd, who now runs the Rock’s PR company. Not that either were involved, of course. It’s a small world.

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