An e-mail flyer arrives for The Vast and Gruesome Clutch of Our Law, a science fiction novel by B.C. Bamber, in which a sinister organisation has taken power. Compares well with the post-apocalyptic settings of Brian Aldiss or John Wyndham, claim some suspiciously unnamed reviews. After our hero’s father is killed by the organisation’s secret police, he is imprisoned without trial but “escapes and sets out to halt the vile purges of Intrum and Justica . . . ”

Hang on, there’s a debt collection agency called Intrum Justitia, which used to be listed in London and operates extensively in the UK. Inquiries to B.C. Bamber, whose publisher appears to limit itself to his own work, fail to establish what, if anything, he has against the firm, but you can understand how someone might have fallen out with it.

Intrum itself sounds startled by news of its apparent immortalisation in the annals of dystopian fiction. “We need to find out what the beliefs are that this guy holds against us,” says a spokesman. A quick glance at the records suggest no obvious past history with any B.C. Bamber. “If people go to these lengths to express their dismay or whatever, it may be we have to take it seriously.” The firm is consulting its legal advisers.

• Back in June, there was much made, as part of Gordon Brown’s government relaunch, of Building Britain’s Future, a website that was designed to allow the public to make suggestions on what should be included in the legislative session.

The site is full of Stalinist nonsense about “a nation of citizens supported by world-class healthcare” and “we’re giving parents greater involvement in their children’s learning and development”, and appears to have closed for further comment from the public. Alas, reports Computing magazine, it has attracted only 233 comments, according to the Cabinet Office, many of them irrelevant, nutty or plain abusive.

Such as this, the second in the top five featured on the site: “Am I naive ... but I am wondering why on earth a blatantly party political pseudo-manifesto is being publicised on an HMG website and therefore presumably funded by the taxpayer?”

• In writing about the two failed restaurants in Creechurch Lane the other day, I joked that the site was, perhaps, once a native Indian burial ground. Very Stephen King. But I am told by a reader that the local church there — now St Katharine Cree, with the “Cree” being a corruption of Christ — has a tangled and ancient history going back to 1108. The church, a priory, was then in Aldgate, and the present building was originally its churchyard . . .

• Sainsbury’s was in trouble with customers yesterday after some grossly insensitive peddling of Call of Duty, the new and very violent computer game, over the intercom at its stores on Remembrance Day. “The manager of the Lee Green store [in South East London] refused to engage with an angry crowd,” says my source.

There were also scenes in Chiswick. Sainsbury’s backs down at once. “Some stores made tannoy announcements today to publicise our offer price for the new Call of Duty game,” a spokesman admits.

“It was not meant to cause offence and we have now asked stores to stop making these announcements.”

Purist at heart

In the blue corner: Lord Eatwell

Lord Eatwell is the former financial adviser to Lord Kinnock, in the dark days when he ran the Labour Party, and has also worked for the Financial Services Authority. These days his main job is as President of Queen’s College, Cambridge — was there ever a better name for an Oxbridge don than Lord Eatwell? — and he is not happy about how economics is being taught in this country.

“Economics has become very vocational,” he tells the Securities & Investment Review, the journal of the newly renamed Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment, formerly the SII. “If you want a job in a firm, go to a business school.”

He is especially put out by the latest theory dominating the subject, which claims that business cycles are caused by technological shocks, such as if half the world’s oil runs out. “The idea that what happened over the past two years has anything to do with a negative technological shock is nuts. There is no possible link,” he says. “It’s like astronomers saying, actually Ptolemy was right; the Earth is the centre of the Universe. It is ludicrous.”

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