I was yesterday discussing current affairs with a client of Daniel Stewart (DAN). The client might consider raising fresh capital but is concerned at the very thin market that they would inevitably encounter. Matters are made worse in that they expect DAN to deliver. But there is no point in asking DAN since the investment clients of DAN have been rubbed out by events at DAN. This must mean a change of corporate financial adviser. Exhausting and expensive.
It takes decades to establish a placing power such as that enjoyed at Cazenove. Deliberately espousing flaky and shaky China plays irritates the punters such that they withdraw. This is not difficult to understand.
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Forty years ago, I first encountered a chum who has subsequently proved to be a particularly competent property agent in Hampstead and environs. We have been friends ever since. He says things are very quiet. For instance, The Bishops Avenue is comprised of enormous properties that nobody would want to live in save, possibly, property salesmen retiring from Foxtons. There are boarded up properties and, at one of them, the receivers are in. This is not a good climate for Foxtons (FOXT) whose price this morning is an astonishing 246p.
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I listened to a Mr Keys and a Mr Bacon on yesterday’s Channel 4 News emphasising their disappointment at the failure of the Chilcot report to emerge – they each lost a son in the Iraq war. Those criticised in the report are very slow in clearing these criticisms as a result of the Maxwellisation that is going on. Hence, Mr Keys and Mr Bacon believe, the unwarranted delay. But I suspect matters are much simpler than that. For it seems to me that at some point Bush would have warned Blair that unless Britain came in on the Iraq caper Britain could forget future US support when it matters principally to Britain. That is quite an ultimatum and I suspect it swung the day. The point is that no such discussion will ever be publicly reported in the UK. Thus Blair skips free.
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In yesterday’s DTel, a former Coal Board geologist writes that he inspected coal mines in the early Seventies. They had virtually or actually run out of economic possibility and, because of flooding, collapsed roofs and pockets of highly flammable methane gas, are completely beyond resuscitation. Jeremy Corbyn wants to do exactly that. And it proves that he is barmy.
Corbyn has come up with this wheeze since he knows there is a rich vein of silliness on the left that is umbilically linked to the idea of hard work to no effect. Honesty in politics? I think not.
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Finally, yesterday’s Daily Mail reported a woman who had elected to skip a magistrates Court in favour of a Crown Court hearing – since, as is well known, a jury trial tends to be more favourable to a defendant. She was accused of a breach of public decency through having engaged in a sex act recorded by adjacent mobile phones. I looked closely at her mouth: it was too small to have been capable of offending anybody. Nonetheless the judge fined her £1,000 and stressed that so severe a fine was to compensate for the fact that society had spent – wait for it – £100,000 on the trial. Talk about a practical revenge.