Skinflint's
City Diary.
Skinflint is blushing — he hopes becomingly — this week because of his highly inaccurate story last week, about the efforts supposed to have been made by Luisa Abrahams, the charming wife of Sir Charles Abrahams of Aquascutum, on behalf of the Israelis during the Yom Kippur war. Lady Abrahams now informs me that she took no part whatever in the fund-raising effort I described; and I offer her my unreserved apologies.
Maxwell's bad luck
I was rather sad to see that Robert Maxwell has failed in his bid to buy Tinlings, the printing company on which he has had his eye, and in which he has invested a fair amount of cash in recent months. Maxwell, in the course of a great deal of wheeling and dealing, has been beaten to the punch, and neither the leader of his party, Harold Wilson, not his former parliamentary colleague, Harold Lever, both of whom were involved in the saving of the company, have been much help to him, favouring, as they did, other combinations. This is unfair, since Maxwell has been for some time meeting at least part of the Tinting wage bill, and keeping the place ticking over while its affairs were being beaten principally by the exertion of malign trade union influences: the trade unions, for some reason 1 simply do not understand, seem to dislike Maxwell almost as intensely as do those reactionary City forces who have done his so much damage in the past.
Institutions to heel
I really am fed up with the way in which the big institutions and the nationalised industries are being allowed to dirty the float of the pound, with a nod and a wink from the government, by borrowing money abroad. The floating pound has greatly sharpened our competitive edge in the export market, and its effect on import prices has been greatly exaggerated. What does, of course, alter the parity of the currency is the way in which the institutions behave in the money markets of the world. But then it is obviously the case that the institutions have greatly contributed — along with all the main pension funds and such like — to every sterling crisis that has occurred since the war; and they have done this without exciting any government riposte whatsoever. I have long argued that they should be brought to heel; and it would be a salutary task if a Tory government undertook to do the job.
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