AS PART of its largely unnoticed £400 million renegotiation of the contract to run the Docklands Light Railway for the next seven years, the operator Serco Group has had to agree to provide an extra 16 night-time security guards — sorry, “Travel Safe officers”. The company insists to me: “There is a uniformed staff member on every train.” Plus, “CCTV cameras at the stations are constantly monitored.”

Serco concludes that the DLR is safe. We agree to differ. The trains themselves are, I am sure, but experience suggests that the streets around several of the stations resemble slow-motion riot zones. And if you can’t get to the trains, what’s the point of extra security guards?

THREE e-mails scatter-gunned to corporate bodies arrive from the so-called “Race Equality Inspectorate”. They say: “Please report any incidences of Institutional Racism to us.” An ambulance-chasing lawyer, perhaps? No, a self-appointed, selfimportant pressure group.

Space cadet

I PHONE Will Whitehorn, Sir Richard Branson’s vicar here on Earth. He sounds like he’s on another planet. “I’m in Lapland, at Kiruna airport in the Arctic Circle,” he says.

Kiruna is being considered as a possible European base for Virgin Galactic, Branson’s space tourism venture that has already earmarked New Mexico as its first spaceport. “From Kiruna you can fly straight up into the Aurora Borealis,” Whitehorn says. “No human being has ever flown up into the Northern Lights.”

No, that’s because there’s nothing there, Will. Just a few electrically charged particles. Still, nice view.

THE power of subliminal advertising: National Savings & Investments is precluded from using its adverts featuring Sir Alan Sugar on any channel whenever BBC2 is screening The Apprentice. Yet I am told in all seriousness that the arrival on our screens of the curmudgeonly one prompts a string of calls to the National Savings call centre from viewers wanting to buy Premium Bonds.

Money talks, aloud

HOW disagreeable for Derek Tullett, a man who prefers to enjoy his wealth in private, to be dragged into the limelight in this silly row over people lending the Government money.

And how lucky that the commentators seem to have missed an earlier unfortunate outbreak of bad publicity for his Tullett & Tokyo Liberty, now part of Terry Smith’s Collins Stewart Tullett.

This concerned a Jewish broker, whose grandmother died at Auschwitz, forced to wear a Nazi uniform and subjected to racial abuse. There emerged further stories of a culture at Tullett that required a Welsh colleague to be humiliated by wearing a Bo Peep costume, a reference to an over-fondness for sheep, and a Northern Ireland Protestant made to dress as the Pope.

Not terribly new Labour, is it?

HAS the entire country gone gambling mad? Not only is one bookie offering bets on the colour of Gordon Brown’s tie today — the longest odds are on orange, disregarding utter tielessness — another is making a market on the number of copies sold of today’s debut issue of The Sportsman. This is a paper itself dedicated to people who will gamble on anything. A touch self-referential, surely?

city.diary@thetimes.co.uk

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