SOLVED: MYSTERY OF VANISHING FORMER PM
IT WAS a rip-roaring ride for those who turned up at the swanky Renaissance Chancery Court Hotel in Holborn yesterday to hear Mayor Boris Johnson exercise his notoriously sharp tongue. Boris, the guest of honour at the Cities of London and Westminster Conservative Association’s annual lunch, certainly knows how to play to an audience including such blue-blooded City folk as Jupiter fund manager Philip Gibbs, Numis chief Oliver Hemsley, BlackRock’s Richard Plackett, Schroders’ Andy Brough and Howard Leigh of Cavendish Corporate Finance.
“I’m going to solve one of the greatest mysteries of modern politics,” Boris began, in typical blustering fashion.
“That is, our elusive ex-Prime Minister. Hardly anyone has found so much as a fingernail clipping of Gordon Brown since the general election, but I have a theory – that he was one of the original members of the suburban Soviet spy ring and has gone back to Moscow to receive the Order of Lenin and an award from the Kremlin for sabotaging the British economy…”
Cue raucous laughter from the party faithful – especially when the Mayor turned his mischievous wit onto the Conservatives’ own new bedfellows.
“This coalition government is a bit like a Toyota hybrid,” he quipped. “It runs on good old-fashioned Tory petrol, and when circumstances demand, it switches to a purring Lib Dem electric motor…”
SMASHING TIME
A cracking performance by one and all at the annual charity “Hacks versus Flaks” cricket and rounders tournaments on Sunday, with the spinners taking both of this year’s trophies off the defeated journalists. Mind you, the PR cricketers did have the magic hands of Hudson Sandler’s Charlie Jack, who managed to steer a cricket ball well over the boundary and straight through the window of a neighbouring Chelsea mansion.
GHOST TOWN
After months of hoop-jumping with the authorities, Ajit Chambers – the former City banker who’s got big things planned for London’s disused Underground stations – is finally ready for investors.
Chambers hit the headlines last year with plans to transform 26 abandoned Tube sites into tourist destinations by opening them up to the public. The condition for City Hall granting permission is that no public money is used, meaning that Chambers is now looking for an investor to part-own either the first “ghost station” site or the entire group.
The asking price for investing in the first development alone ranges from £1m to £5m – for which said investor gets a final say in which of three potential sites is developed first, out of old Tube stations at Stockwell and Clapham North and an “entry area” dug out between Holborn and Chancery Lane, in order to construct the stations on either side.
WHITE ELEPHANT
Recent visitors to the Royal Exchange may have noticed four model elephants gracing the building as part of the London-wide Elephant Parade. It appears the City wasn’t too impressed by the colourful designs, though – when the charity elephant was emptied after a month of visitors dropping donations through the slot in its back, only £234.87 trickled out. In comparison, over £6,000 was donated to the other elephants dotted across the capital.