Any Other Business – 31/01
Yvette Cooper has dished some dirt on her husband Ed Balls to the rather aptly chosen Red magazine, out today. The fellow Labour MP spoke candidly about domestic bliss with the shadow chancellor. “The most stressful time in any parent’s day is… between 8.20am and 8.40am. It’s just… shouting. And Ed has taken to piano practising during that period. It’s infuriating. So the shouting now includes shouting at the kids, shouting at myself and shouting at Ed because he is playing the piano and why is he not helping to find the swimming kit?” Usually it’s Ed getting red-faced from shouting in parliament.
Wednesday night’s Quoted Company Awards look to have been an exercise in honest, un-cynical gong-giving. Unlike many awards, for which winners are pre-briefed in a bid to sell them tables, attendees were unaware of their champion status until the envelopes were unsealed on stage. But it meant many winners weren’t there at all. “One of our clients won IPO of the Year,” Liberum chief exec Simon Stilwell told The Capitalist. “We happened to have one person there, a junior corporate financier, there as someone else’s guest, completely by chance. He had to go up and accept it for them.” Thank goodness for that.