SKIN FLINT'S CITY e f t DIARY

If you like building pyramids (now called conglomerates) you will before long be asked to sell a large block of shares on behalf of a major shareholder who will probaby have got them from you in exchange for his business. Fortunately there is a Pension Fund Manager around—an important man (often extolling the cult of the equity in public) that you must get to know.

The procedure is fixed and invariable. You call in and say you have been asked to try and place say 100,000 of your shares. The market is buoyant and the price of the 2s shares is lOs (it is unnecessary to mention, but probably understood, that you have seen to it that the price in a narrow market has gone up over the past few days). You say that you are able to let his pension fund have the 100,000 shares as a block at 8s a share against the market price of 10s. At this point there is usually a pause, a study of Extel cards, some abstruse note-taking and perhaps a slide rule is used. 'Yes' is the answer as the silvery head and fine blue eyes look at you. 'I like it: put us down for 90,000 shares and will take 10,000 for my own account. We may even buy a few in the market as time goes by.'

A fair day's work well done, you return to your office and tell your broker that you have placed 90,000 shares with a pension fund at 8s and 10,000 shares to a private client at the same price. However will he make sure that the 10,000 shares are sold at not less than today's price of lOs and that if the market is a little slack would he put them down to your own account. To save time will he post to your private client a cheque for the profit amounting to, of course, /1,000.

Jones the Voice

My condolences to the shareholders in Laporte Industries who will now have the pleasure of the company of Mr Aubrey Jones (one time Chairman of troubled Staveley Industries) now that the Prices and Incomes Board has thankfully been broken up. He was never up to much, giving even the Private Secretarial Agencies a clean bill of health, though more of them another day. None of this was as bad as his mincing voice and the way he seemed to let us know that the ideal condition for an intellectual is a plutocratic society which appreciated him and continued to give him jobs. Like all good intellectuals he did not seem to want to be left alone or leave others alone.

... and Burgess the Leak

Mr Aubrey Jones led a delegation to• Moscow whilst he was still a member of the Conservative party and a Minister in the late 'fifties. During the visit a member of his party, a Conservative peer, was tele- phoned by the defector Guy Burgess who had not then, so far as we in England were concerned, made his reappearance. Burgess, it seemed, wanted his friend from the House of Lords to test Mr Macmillan's Cabinet's

reaction to his return. Mr Aubrey Jones, ever inquisitive, was anxious to meet Burgess but it was decided to seek the advice of the British Ambassador who was already find- ing Burgess's covert presence in Moscow an embarrassment. He strongly advised against the meeting but if they went ahead 'they must deny it afterwards'.

Of such is diplomacy and politics.

There can be no question that Mr Aubrey Jones is some sort of an idealist if Nietzsche's definition is correct: `The creature who has reasons for remain- ing in the dark about himself and is clever enough to remain in the dark about these reasons'.

Camp follower

My words a week or two ago about the British Steel Corporation have, I feel, upset poor Lord Melchett—whose Public Relations Officer Mr William Camp (he is the best in the business) has complained.

Mr Camp, a dedicated socialist it will be remembered, was released from the British Steel Corporation during the general elec- tion to follow Harold Wilson around the hustings master-minding the photographers and journalists and also carrying out obsequious duties such as wiping bad eggs from his master's clothes, helping as a valet in the evenings, and sloshing out the braridy. The nationalisation of iron and steel was a more socialist measure than other nationali- sations. It was not a public utility. It had no intractable problems and was an efficient industry. However years ago in 1932 after Britain departed from free trade, an Im- ports Duty Advisory Committee was set up recommending protection. The industry be- came a cartel following the encouragement of trade associations by the authorities. It was cartelised and protected in 1945 with a good deal of internal competition, when for doctrinaire reasons it was nationalised.

I say again that if Lord Melchett was a good Conservative he should not have taken this job.

When a socialist dream comes true it turns into a nightmare.

Honi soit qui mal y pense

It is no doubt better to owe your rank to your own exertions rather than be the accident of an accident. But nonetheless I hope the Prime Minister's first honours list (which must be in the process of being pre- pared) will restore the gift of hereditary peerages—baronetcies being less important.

The proliferation of life peerages is fast making an unfair elite of hereditary peers. Let us hope we are not going to enter the pathetic unrevitalised Altnanach de Gotha society of France and Germany with all sorts of people assuming virtues they don't possess. Princes, Marquises, Counts and Barons on one side and station masters with the Legion of Honour on the other. As a disinterested pleasure-loving lounger in middle life I hope you will allow me to quote some important thoughts: 'The order of nobility prevents the rule of wealth. It is important not for what it creates but for what it prevents. Money is kept down and cowed by the predominant authority of a different power. It is a great gain to society to have two idols—money and rank. In reverencing wealth we rever- ence an appendix to a man. In rever- encing inherited nobility we reverence the faculty of bringing out what is in us.