Did you just put two and two together?

Don't fence with me Mr Fildes

Iwas saved from choking last week by a Lord Justice of Appeal, who hit me smartly on the back at a City dinner, so this may have used up my luck with the higher judiciary. Now I must keep out of sight of Lord Hutton, the Law Lord, as he inquires into leakages of information in Whitehall and out. His scope is wide, and I should make an unsatisfactory witness: 'You assert in your column that this crumb of knowledge was gathered for you by a friendly mouse under the boardroom table. Can you produce the creature? No? You claim that you were operating under a convention known as Moscow Rules. These, you tell me, are the same as Chatham House Rules — no fingerprints, no names, no pack-drill — but enforced at gunpoint. Do they apply in Moscow? I see. Well, it won't do here. Weren't you just putting two and two together? Don't fence with me. Mr Fildes.' A City firm I knew well was put through the wringer of an inquiry under the Banking Act, after we joined Europe's exchange rate mechanism. This firm had guessed what was coming, and made money, and those who were caught on the wrong foot cried foul and wondered where the tip had come from. It was there to be read. so I might have claimed, in my column, when I forecast that we would join in the first week of October — 'the week after the International Monetary Fund meeting, the week before the Conservative party conference, and the week of the Labour conference'. In today's City, raw information is a commodity, ready at its users' fingertips, stacked in electronic memories and pouring out of screens. Converting it into intelligence is harder. Even in the City, though, two and two have been known to add up.

The cat jumps

The mother of all these inquiries came half a century earlier, and remains instructive. Bank rate was hoisted from 5 to 7 per cent and the decision was said to have leaked. Many City firms took the blow on the chin, some ducked out of the way just in time, and some of these shared directors with the Bank of England. Lord Justice Parker's tribunal had to decide whether a brace of Keswicks had fired off privileged information on the grouse-moor and whether Lazards' Lord Kindersley had kept a straight face in all his meetings. The tri bunal cleared them, and found that there had been no general leakage of information, but stopped short of ruling out individual cases of well-informed dealing. An old Bank hand always said that there had indeed been a leak, but refused to say more, and his secret has died with him. At the time, a move towards dearer and tighter money had been looming for weeks, and was argued backwards and forwards between the Bank and the Treasury. Decisions like these tend to seep out through the windowless walls of stone and into the market's assumptions, just as they did before we joined the ERM, however inconvenient it may be to officials making up their minds at leisure. To the Bank rate tribunal's report, a poet of the money market added a footnote:

To civil servants in the know

It came as quite a hitter blow — Discussing it round the parish pump.

We guessed which way the cat would jump.

Don't be distracted

It is always a pleasure to watch ministers and companies trying to make two and two add up to what would suit them. This week we see Peter Hain urging the Prime Minister not to let Lord Hutton's inquiry distract him from the euro. The pattern is familiar: 'Cawdor Castle reacted angrily to reports that the Macbeths had been influenced by their three holistic advisers. "Our hearts are with Malcolm and Donalbain at this sad time," a spokesman said, "but we must move forward. Next week our Delivery Unit will report on the fight against crime."' 'The White Star Line stressed that it had other liners as well as the Titanic, all of which were still afloat.' Friends of President Francois Faure urged him not to let Captain

Dreyfus's allegations distract him from the goal of Latin monetary union.'

Paper aeroplanes

Wet fish, daily newspapers and airline tickets none of them improve with keeping. This was what gave the print unions their bargaining power in the had old days of Fleet Street, when any threat, real or perceived, to established custom would be met with a cry of `Everybody out!' Echoing through the halls of Heathrow, this cry, left British Airways' customers clutching useless tickets when they had already let go of their luggage. 'My members have been intolerably provoked, hut if anybody else has, we regret it.' Have we heard this line yet? The rest of the script is in place, including multiple meetings with rival unions, insisting on their differentials. This is Fleet Street with wings. The print unions had, in effect, pre-empted the industry's profits, and were content to push the owners to the edge, and over, secure in the belief that a new mug would be coming along.

No mug's game

What changed the game in Fleet Street was a post-Caxton technology which, briefly, rewarded the owners instead of the printers. Then the owners fell out, and began to cut prices, and the benefits went to the readers. Something like that seems to have happened to airlines. If BA is now to fly its way out of its troubles, it will somehow have to explain that no new mug will be coming along. Customers caught in the strike have complained that as soon as BA's rank and file walked out of Heathrow, its managers vanished. My aviation correspondent, Jumbo Speedbird, suggests that they may have taken refuge in BA's 4.000-seater head office, booking one or more of the 174 meeting rooms, and sending for refreshments from one of the three coffee shops while they worked out what to do next. What a terrible thing it would be, my correspondent says, if BA's economy campaign began at home.

G'day, Uday

The abrupt end of Uday and Qusay Hussein — Saddam's sons drew the 101st I..JS Airborne Division, and lost — has set off qualms here and there in the City. 'It's a bit like bumping off Kevin and Ian Maxwell', says a sympathiser, 'because you had a bone to pick with Captain Bob.'