SKINFLINT'S CITY DIARY Dry rot
No 10 Downing Street has been struck With dry rot only a few years after over a million was spent on restoration. If woodworm and dry rot control was carried out by Rentokil (who certainly know how to Charge for their work) the taxpayer wouldn't have been troubled by further bills, as I see from some of their recent advertising that they give a ten year guarantee.
Lion of Judah
The Labour Conference was downstaged satisfactorily on Tuesday by Emperor Hirohito's trip down the Mall. The Emperor of Enlightened Peace is just as welcome here as his country's cameras and television sets, though there was a not unexpected murmuring from those whose memories of the war are ineradicable. He is only seventy-two but seems to have been on the Chrysanthemum Throne for an eternity. There is 'only one other national leader from the 'thirties and 'forties whom one is surprised to find still around and that's our good friend, Emperor Haile Selassie of Abysinnia, who is older.
The Japanese Emperor will no doubt have less trouble with English than the Lion of Judah when he came over to England in the 'thirties after his country had been overrun by Mussolini's troops. I remember hearing a story, undoubtedly false, that he thanked a City audience at the time for "helping me in my hard struggle with the douche my enema."
Feeling the competition
Tom King, the MP for Bridgwater, is Parliamentary Private Secretary to Christopher Chataway, the Minister for Posts and Telecommunications. But he still has Some important business interests, including the chairmanship of Sale Tilney, East India merchants, his father-in-law's firm. He also has 10 per cent of a profitable busines, Insulex Limited, a private comPanY making insulated plastic mugs and ice buckets, which is controlled by fortyYear-old bachelor Robert Waddington. Though Insulex is a small company, it iS giving competition to the publicly quoted Stewart Plastics Limited of Croydon, run by Mr Charles Dugan-Chapman, Who, incensed by Insulex's lead in its specialized field, has brought out his own range of ice buckets and tumblers with !nimble success. At the end of each working week Waddington and Dugan-Chapman compete at golf for side-stakes at Sunningdale. But there, too, Dugan-Chapman is feeling the competition : his opponent, and Tom King's co-director in Insulex, has been telling an accountant friend that he is up
£9,000 at Sunningdale this year, not a little of it, I suspect, coming from the private account of the head of Stewart Plastics.
Not out
The New Scientist is always worth picking up, even though they are tempted, too often, to deal with subjects like 'Advanced Computer Graphics,' whatever they are.
Tim Eiloart Of Cambridge Consultants Limited, which is a research group, recently wrote a piece called 'Raising cash to start a business.' Eiloart listed twentyone venture capitalists worth approaching for money, finishing with the Bank of America, which he describes as giving " big bank service, small bank friendliness, flexible, value for money."
His first choice, though, (I don't know when he wrote this article) is Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press : "Ten minutes chat and he is in or out. Sometimes keen, always straight."
Hmm. Not an easy decision but on balance I'd chance the Bank of America.
Right against the Market
It seems to me that entry to the EEC may be commercially beneficial though, I suggest, it will create industrial havoc. Once this perilous yeast is at work we shall be struck at the root both of our independent defence capability, and our power to withdraw from Europe, should we desire ever to do so.
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