BEAR TURNS REGENT FOR PERIOD BALL
WHEN YOU live in London’s last remaining Georgian palace, you may as well throw a Georgian Ball, thought Lord Mayor Michael Bear as he threw open his grace-and-favour home last Thursday for a night of minuet dancing.
Spotted among the wigs, fans and ruffles were Jimmy Choo, the founder of the shoe empire that was bought by Labelux for £500m in May; BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce; and Stylo International CEO Nancy Yeoh; who all processed to Mansion House by candlelight before sitting down to an eighteenth-century banquet followed by drinks in the “gin and gaming room”.
Throw in a performance from Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis – well, the actors playing them in the musical Million Dollar Quartet – and you have “one of the absolute highlights of the Lord Mayor’s Appeal calendar”. “It was entertainment on a grand scale,” said Martina King, chair of the ball’s organising committee and a governor at Coram, the beneficiary charity for the evening alongside disaster relief organisation Redr.
PARTY’S ON TRACK
MEANWHILE, hedge fund godfather Lord Stanley Fink celebrated turning 57 on a champagne-fuelled cocktail party aboard The Orient Express, one of the 80 events last Thursday and Friday that made up the first-ever international Global Party.
“I don’t know where we went; no-one was really paying much attention,” said one partygoer, as the train set off from Victoria and returned three hours later via “somewhere in the countryside”.
On board to help the former Man Group CEO celebrate were Fink’s business partner and Global Party co-organiser David Johnstone; Lady Helen Taylor; and Matt Hermer, the founder of Boujis owner Ignite Group. No special performance of Happy Birthday from singer Katie Mehlua though – that honour went to motor racing tycoon Eddie Jordan, who performed with his band Eddie & The Robbers.
TURNING TURTLE
THEY HAVE already traded their former lives to attempt to become a successful trader under the eye of Mike Baghdady, and at 1pm today the novice “turtle traders” take their positions for their first live deals.
The programme is the biggest-ever trading experiment the City has ever seen: a 2011 tribute to Chicago trader Richard Dennis, who visited a turtle farm in Singapore 30 years ago and announced he would breed an elite set of traders the same way. But the turtles won’t make a loss if the markets move against them, says Baghdady, as long as they follow his “rules” – analysing the psychology of how people perceive price and value in the market. Note absolutely no mention of a double-or-quits “Texan hedge”…