MORE trouble for Elizabeth Weston, the former Merrill Lynch lawyer who sued the US bank last year and won £500,000 for sex discrimination. Last month Weston, who probably thinks she has seen enough of the English legal system, dropped a separate claim of victimisation at a tribunal and paid her former employer £150,000 in legal fees.

She is now being sued herself by her former lawyer, Gillian Howard, who represented her in the first claim. Howard is claiming for unpaid legal fees. Weston, who was advised by the City employment specialist Fox Williams in the second action, has had to hire a third solicitor, Bankside Commercial, to defend her in the latest case.

I WELL remember Theo Paphitis when he first emerged as an entrepreneur 15 years ago, and he always had an eye for a sale. The Millwall chairman is one of the rescuers of Red Letter Days, the experience gift company. I hear that, on arrival at the firm, one of his first actions was to assure employees that they now qualified for staff discounts at his La Senza underwear retailer.

Treasury vampire

SPOT the link between Nick Macpherson, new Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Macpherson has been a Treasury man for two decades and already has an office there. When the makers of the programme were in London filming an episode about an evil sect, they chanced upon the new Treasury building for filming, and were, for some reason, given permission. So Macpherson’s office becomes the sect’s headquarters in the episode and is demolished by means of some impressive computer- generated imagery.

I AM taken to task for my suggestion yesterday that swimmers at the Hampstead Heath ponds are meekly paying into the “honesty machines” installed there by the Corporation of London. “On those rare occasions when a donation is being made, swimmers are prone to gather around the meter and watch the proceedings with fascination,” scoffs a self-styled “libertarian” from the United Swimmers Association of Hampstead Heath.

A song for Gordon

MY REQUEST for suggestions on what Gordon Brown might store on his new iPod has met with the usual excellent response from readers. We’ll set aside Brown Sugar and Golden Brown. I was looking for the politically apposite — Dear Prudence, by the Beatles. One reader sums up the Chancellor’s political future with Road to Nowhere, by Talking Heads. Another suggests a rousing chorus over the garden wall to Number 10 of Move Over, by Janis Joplin, Adam Ant’s Stand and Deliver and Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.

The most erudite suggestion comes from Robert King, artistic director of The King’s Consort, who nominates the Renaissance composer Josquin des Pres for his Faulte d’Argent. “Faulte d’argent c’est douleur non pareille / Sy je le dis, las je scay bien pourquoy / Sans de quibus il se fault tenir quoy, / Le temps le doit, ce n’est pas de merveille.”

Work on the English translation among yourselves. The third line is hard, I admit. For “quibus”, think Latin, and “quoy” is archaic French for quiet. Most witty, not scholarly, response gets twin tickets to the Consort’s opening concert for its 25th anniversary season on October 28, all Mozart, and King has agreed to be judge.

city.diary@thetimes.co.uk

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