Spam is one of the irritations of modern life, so I am surprised to receive an unwanted e-mail from ScottishPower offering me cheap power. It is against several codes of conduct to do this without establishing that the recipient is one of that odd breed who welcome junk e-mails, so I inquire further. What follows is disturbing.

The power company says that it complies with the code but uses “affiliates” to trawl for business by e-mails, and these have to be cleared by the company. “On this occason the affiliate has sent this out without (clearance) and broken our terms and conditions.” They will not work for the company again.

The odd thing is that the e-mail went to the address at the bottom of this column, which is not a person and doesn’t pay power bills. The address came from a website that gathers them by means of holding competitions in which entrants have to provide five addresses of “friends” willing to receive e-mails. I trace it to a Watford provider of cheap loans whose phone number doesn’t work. It all sounds amazingly dodgy. I am surprised a company like ScottishPower finds itself involved.

The bonus magic carpet looks a bit threadbare

My note yesterday on the employee who tried to justify a pay rise because she had to pay for a new car prompts a story from a big City employer. A female employee who had been on maternity leave for six months requested a bonus covering the time she wasn’t actually there, because the new carpets in her house had come in more expensive than she had expected. “We had to take it seriously,” he marvelled. I hazard a guess that the encounter may have dated from before recent events, in the halcyon era when “discretionary” bonuses were expected as of right by all and those who had actually performed expected even more.

— I learn from an e-mail doing the rounds of the City that Dick Fuld, chief executive of Lehman Brothers, is trying to raise emergency funds from an unusual source, BBC2’s Dragons’ Den . “Filming completed yesterday and will be aired early next week, by which time most Lehman staff will have been sold into slavery in Turkish brothels,” it claims.

— Duncan Bannatyne, the Scottish gym tycoon, suggested that rather than employing 20,000 people to lose $20 billion a year, Fuld should cut 19,999 staff and reduce losses to $1,000. The programme turned him down. I cannot vouch for any of the above but I can vouch for the fact that the bank’s website still states brightly: “Around the world, the Lehman Brothers team is growing.”

— An enticing offer arrives: “See real-time rain falling across the UK with the launch of the free weather website.” Yup, using a Google map you can see rain falling in all locations across the UK. It’s presumably designed for people who want to know whether to carry an umbrella. But isn’t it depressing enough looking out of the window at the stuff chucking it down without searching it out on the internet?

City champion set to move on

Sir James Sassoon, Alistair Darling’s vicar-on-earth in the City, is standing down. Sassoon moved across to the Treasury in 2002, part of a surge of hirings by Whitehall from the City.

He had been vice-chairman of investment banking at UBS Warburg and joined the Treasury to look at matters such as financial regulation.

At the time much was made of this influx of top City talent, evidence that Labour was working in tandem with the Square Mile.

Even more was made of the drop in salaries suffered by such people, Sassoon’s £150,000 a year being rather less than he would have been pulling in as a merchant banker.

He became the Chancellor’s special representative for promotion of the City in 2006. Sassoon, related to the war poet, did not return my calls. The Treasury said he was leaving “at his request”.

Asked why he was going, a Treasury man said breezily: “No idea at all, I’m afraid.”

— Spotted parked in Berkeley Square the other night: one large black Mercedes 4x4, with the registration LI FFE. How very 1990s.

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