THE Chelsea Flower Show is casting around for a sponsor for next year after having been ditched by this year’s firm, Saga Insurance. There is a load of rubbish about how successful the sponsorship was, etc, etc, but the fact is that Saga, part of the all-encompassing group for the over-50s, came to the end of a one-year sponsorship deal and declined the option to extend it, thank you.

This may have something to do with last year’s takeover by private equity, which tends not to err on the side of generosity. The show was sponsored for the previous five years by Merrill Lynch, which took it from an event for the keen gardener to an essential date on the City calendar. But I hear that, as the event became more successful, the Royal Horticultural Society raised its demands. “They got greedy,” says one insider.

“We’re talking to interested parties at the moment,” says the RHS gamely. The cost is somewhere short of £2 million, I hear, to be negotiated. But it is only nine months off, and any City firm keen to sponsor the show would want to make the best of all the publicity beforehand.



PING! An e-mail arrives from Reuters Affiliate Reports offering “the Hot Sex Lives of Stars in Fashion” and nude pix of various super-models and others. Blimey, Julius Reuter must be spinning in his grave, I tell the head office. “It hasn’t come from a domain of Reuters,” they say sniffily. “It’s likely to be a spoof e-mail by someone to promote their site using our name.” Will you try to stop them? “There’s not a huge amount you can do.”



First orders



YESTERDAY was the wedding of Jeremy Batstone, director of private client research at Charles Stanley and tireless media pundit. But both sides of the wedding nearly didn’t make it.

The event was in Fulham, and the bride’s party was 55 minutes late, which must be some sort of record. So late, says Michael Wilson, the Sky presenter, that some of the groom’s party went across the road to the pub, from which they had to be ordered out when the bride arrived. The first reading was from 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient.”



FROM New York, I hear of plans for a makeover for Waldorf salad. The chef at the eponymous hotel says that as no one eats mayonnaise any more, the original recipe needs updating, and he never liked it anyway. The new ingredients will be published in September and are confidental for now, but I understand they may include waldorfs for the first time.

All right, I admit I stole the last bit.



Odds on



NEWS of the dramatic jailblock sacking of BetOnSport’s David Carruthers went all around the globe. It was even picked up by the North Korean Times. Ironic, really, because the online bookmaker had recently made a book on the fate of bouffant-haired North Korean hardman Kim Jong Il, and how long he would last.

And did BetOnSport’s founder, the colourful Gary Kaplan, have a presentiment of Carruthers’ fate? After an earlier spate of arrests of Americans involved in gambling, Kaplan told a betting magazine: “We are at the size now that if there was going to be a second round of popping” — street slang for arresting; you get a measure of the man — “people, we’re probably in the next ring.”

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