* Stobart Group, famed for its Eddie Stobart green lorries with girls' names, is clearly delighted to have bought Southend Airport for
£21 million, but that is no excuse for this nonsense from chief executive Andrew Tinkler: “Acquisition of Southend Airport is a major opportunity for Stobart to advance the implementation of its multimodal strategy. At one stroke, we have found our southern base and greatly enhanced our position as a leading point-to-point service provider for customers in the UK and Europe who require fast and efficient services by air as part of their logistics solutions.” Come on Andrew, in English please...

* To the Management Today Most Admired Company Awards, where Vince Cable tells how he was campaigning in the last general election and knocked on a door. A woman answered. She looked very sad but said she would be voting for him. “And what about your husband?” inquired Vince. It turned out he'd died that morning. Then she added: “Don't worry, he did a postal vote. It's in the post.”

* Where does the Taj in Mumbai get its staff from? When hotel guests who managed to flee the terrorists returned to collect their belongings, they found porters insisting on carrying their bags — even though colleagues, friends and in some cases, relatives, had been killed.

* With America listening to bids for its embassy in Grosvenor Square — the deadline for first-round offers is tomorrow — it is worth remembering London is the only US embassy in the world the Yanks do not actually own. They have a long lease on the site but the freehold is owned by the Duke of Westminster through his Grosvenor Estate. The Americans once tried to buy the site outright but the old Duke would only agree if they would return something his family lost during the War of Independence...Florida.

Rating agencies turn tough

The market for mortgage-backed securities is almost lifeless. One source at a major UK retail bank says: “All we are doing is managing existing securities, assessing risk and revaluating what things are worth. We are originating nothing.” And it's no wonder. According to star analyst Meredith Whitney at Oppenheimer & Co, mortgage-backed securities formerly worth $744 billion were downgraded in October by the main credit-rating agencies — around 16 times the amount in August 2007 when the crisis first broke.
Proof that the credit-rating agencies, who were about the last people on Wall Street to realise we were in a credit crunch, have turned with a vengeance...

* Others struggle but the London Stock Exchange sails on. Total trades on the equity order book reached 29.6 million for October, up 55% on last year, when the FTSE 100 index hit 6730 just days before the first of the credit-crunch sell-offs.
So how has the LSE managed to make hay despite the stock-market slump? Cynics might suggest it is almost entirely due to the increase in multiple hits on the computerised order book and narrower bid-offer spreads

* The latest City casualty is hedge fund Tudor BVI Global Fund, which has suspended redemptions until 31 March. Tudor BVI Global Fund is part of Tudor Investment Corporation, which was founded in 1980 by commodities trader Paul Tudor Jones. He made his fortune shorting positions in the run-up to Black Monday, in October 1987.

He was so successful that he later became the subject of a film, Trader: The Documentary. The movie shows a youthful Jones predicting the
1987 crash. Hmmm. As they add up their losses, clients may wonder why he didn't spot the meltdown this time around.

The diamond king plays his share-price cards right

Hmmm...it seems the King of Diamonds may be attempting a one-man re-inflation of the
burst-gems bubble.

Laurence Graff, the billionaire founder of Graff Diamonds, has paid a stonking $38,400 (£25,800) a carat for the 478-carat Light of Letseng in Antwerp — or a total of $18.4 million for the third-largest rough diamond pulled from the earth in the 21st century.

Graff is breaking his own records. He paid $10.4 million, or $21,100 a carat, for the Letseng Legacy last year and $12.4 million, or $20,600 a carat, for the Lesotho Promise the previous year, the two biggest diamonds found since the turn of the millennium.

Both were also from the Letseng mine in Lesotho run by London-based Gem Diamonds. Funnily enough, a profit warning from Gem recently saw its share price dive after it indicated per carat diamond prices had halved this year.

Graff had just recently become a 4.5% shareholder in Gem. News of his acquisition of the Light of Letseng saw Gem Diamonds' deflated average sales price climb back up to a healthy $2123 per carat, and helped send Gem shares rebounding skywards.

Critic of Labour roosters' dies

Alas, Peter Buckley, whose death has been announced. There was no more outspoken City critic of Labour than the custodian of the Cayzer family's wealth. This year, the Caledonia Investments chairman went for “Rooster Brown” and “Rooster Blair” in an extended diatribe about how Labour's chickens had come home to roost. In 2007, he railed against overnment “incompetence”, saying it was “lacking integrity”, while the previous year he again slammed Labour's “incompetence” and decried how it had “wantonly wrecked” the country's pension system. But perhaps his passing will be mourned most by the Conservative party. Under his chairmanship, Caledonia has donated £75,000 to the party in 2008, following the £60,000 last time. Typically, not all the shareholders were keen, but he did it nevertheless.

* How bad is it out there? Moss Bros housebroker Altium Securities reckons the suit seller and hirer's sales are down 10% in the last month. It then goes on to add: “Trade talk leads us to believe that Moss Bros is outperforming its rivals.

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