Trade associations don't often generate much excitement, and the Association of British Insurers has always struck me as worthy, but dull. But one of its biggest members has walked out claiming that customers are in danger of being misled.

Skandia UK, owned by Old Mutual, has quit. “There's no row,” says the ABI. Has anyone left you before? “Companies come and go,” the association says breezily before admitting that, no, it can't actually remember anyone walking out before.

The ABI is rejigging its rules on how insurance is sold, encouraged by the Financial Services Authority, and proposing something called “assisted purchase”, which is somewhere between getting proper independent advice and being sold a product. “There's a blurring of what is sales and what is advice,” says Skandia.

I can see its point. The insurer claims that the ABI's own research suggests most people are confused. In trials, two thirds of customers who were offered “assisted purchase” thought they were getting independent advice. The last thing the insurance industry wants is another scandal over mis-selling.

A new branch of banking

A curious ad for HSBC has been posted on YouTube. In the 90-second drama, a young woman protesting against the felling of huge trees is arrested, then bailed out by one of the loggers after which they ride off into the sunset on his motorbike. The soundtrack is from alt-folkie Joanna Newsom. “What does an environmental protest have to do with banking?” asks one commentator.

Food for thought

Tonight is the second annual awards dinner at Guildhall hosted by the Variety Club, the charity for disabled children. There is a Lifetime Achievement Award heading in the direction of Brian Winterflood. I hear that the dinner, which could raise something in the region of £50,000, nearly didn't take place. Some were concerned that times were too hard in the City. Fortunately, the optimists prevailed. Life must go on.

Amanda Staveley turns tables on Barclays

There has been much comment, started, I fear, by me on Saturday, about the role of Amanda Staveley in the refinancing of Barclays. She is the financier who is reported to have banked £40 million for introducing Barclays to its proposed new Gulf investors. Four years ago, things were different. Staveley, who had just won an award for businesswomen, so perhaps she should have seen it coming, was behind with the rent, threatened with bankruptcy and pursued by a bank over a £1 million personal loan to a conference centre she owned in Cambridge. The bank involved? Barclays, which is refusing to comment.

Good luck or judgment?
In the blue corner: Gordon Ramsay

There has been plenty written of late about Gordon Ramsay's finances. First there was the 16-month delay by his company, Gordon Ramsay Holdings, in filing its accounts. Then there was the claim that the group had cleverly avoided being caught up in the Icelandic banking crisis by switching its banking facilities from Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander to Royal Bank of Scotland a few weeks earlier.

Then we learnt from Chris Hutcheson, the volatile chef's father-in-law and business partner, that Ramsay had become the world's highest paid cook, with earnings of £15million, and that the company's turnover would hit £100million by 2010.

As Tom Aikens can testify, making money out of posh restaurants is not easy as the world slips into recession. I hear a suggestion that Ramsay fortuitously switched banks because Kaupthing was concerned about the current trading climate. A spokesman for Ramsay seemed rather keen not to discuss the subject: “I don't want to com- ment, so do whatever you want to do.” I only asked.

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