MORGAN STANLEY and BP have been dragged into a row in the US over alleged censorship. The bank has been accused of threatening to pull advertisements without warning if papers also contain “objectionable editorial coverage”.

This is defined, by the bank’s own media buyer, as applying to ads placed by clients “in environments that do not support their marketing objectives”. Inevitably, it is being interpreted as an attempt to prevent coverage of the vicious civil war still raging at Morgan Stanley.

The bank says there is “nothing sinister in this” and it is not an attempt at censorship. The clause is an increasingly common one aimed at removing, for example, ads for airlines that might by accident run next to news of an air disaster.

BP has just been drawn into the story after claims that it, too, uses the clause in contracts. Again, standard practice, says the oil group — several corporate ads were pulled after the Texas City refinery fire in March that killed 15 people.

Icy reception

THE Chelsea Flower Show is seeking a new sponsor. Merrill Lynch is standing aside after five years, and the Royal Horticultural Society says it is in discussions with various parties.

I note that the most prominent supporters this year are Accenture, KPMG, Caledonia Investments, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse First Boston. Barclays denies rumours that it is in the running.

The opening night was sparsely attended, most agree, although it did feature a tantalising near-encounter between Jonathan Bloomer, formerly of the Prudential, and the man who sacked him, Sir David Clementi. The freezing weather will not have helped.

ERIC NICOLI, chairman of EMI, on the antipathy towards his shareholders expressed by Chris Martin, singer with Coldplay: “I am sure Chris had a smile on his face when he said that.” (Somehow I doubt it.) “I suspect that he was expressing justifiable irritation at the suggestion that he might compromise the quality of his album to meet the corporate schedule, and we would absolutely support Chris in that.” An appropriately bland response.

Achtung foreigner

AN ENGLISH PR man is the latest scapegoat for the turmoil engulfing German business. Josef Ackermann, the Deutsche Bank chief executive, has already been pilloried as one of the “locust” shareholders devouring German industry, and now his head of communications, Simon Pincombe, is the subject of a vicious attack in the Welt am Sontag newspaper and elsewhere.

Pincombe even woke up in a Frankfurt hotel room the other day to see himself on TV. He is accused of spending too little time in Frankfurt, of not speaking German and of being behind the “PR disaster” at the bank, all of which he denies.

He is, as I say, English. Ackerman is Swiss. As, too, is Werner Seifert, former head of the Deutsche Börse and the most high-profile victim so far of the witch-hunt, which is blaming UK and US investors. I think we may detect a pattern here.

MICHAEL WINNER, the film director whose films no one can remember, has been replaced by a mouse in those irritating but effective esure insurance ads. The well-upholstered Winner is philosophical about the substitution. “It could be worse. It could be a hippopotamus.”

city.diary@thetimes.co.uk

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