So the 750-strong team of PricewaterhouseCoopers and former bank staff handling the Lehman administration is thinking of leaving the bank's old headquarters at Canary Wharf for cheaper premises in the City?

Yes, that number is correct. Read it slowly: seven hundred and fifty. Knight Frank has been appointed to find up to 70,000 square feet in the Square Mile to accommodate the Lehman administrators. At present, they are paying the Canary Wharf Group, owner of the Lehman tower at 25 Bank Street, £50 a square foot, so it makes sense to find something cheaper.

And some City landlords, adds Estates Gazette, are now offering rental holidays of up to four years. City Spy needs to lie down. Four years and 750 people!

* Have Lord Mandelson and George Osborne managed to patch up their differences after that acrimonous row about their holiday chatter on board Oleg Deripaska's yacht last summer? City Spy asks because Mandelson and Osborne are still avoiding each other's paths. This time it was at the Google Zeitgeist, the annual pow-wow hosted by the internet search giant in Hertfordshire, which has been taking place for the last two days. Lord Mandelson spoke yesterday about how to revive economic fortunes; Osborne was due to talk today about the road ahead. Doubtless, the fact these two were kept apart was just the way the schedule was arranged by Google. Of course it was.

* How much does Lord Mandelson want to sell the Royal Mail? A lot, judging by the spin operation that was mounted as soon as the postal service disclosed a doubling of its profits to £321million. These are merely accounting profits; its cashflows are negative; take out the Post Office's £150 million Treasury subsidy and insert interest payments and other exceptionals and it made a loss of £229 million; letter volumes are down 5% and expected to fall 10% this year; and with a pension deficit of £6.8 billion Royal Mail is technically insolvent. Do you understand?

Bargain basement at M&S

Marks & Spencer may have seen its profits slump 40% last year, but it is proud to be putting two million items on sale for 1p each in celebration of its 125th birthday. They include jewellery, scarves, sweets, knickers and socks. Sir Stuart Rose says: “It's been a tough year but people are fed up with being fed up, and we wanted to give our customers a treat. We are sure that this is going to go down a storm.” Spy would like to point out that 125 years ago there were 240 pennies to the pound. It's a rip-off!

* It's official: Justin King is excited, so much so that he is definitely not going anywhere else, such as M&S. Here is the Sainsbury's boss: “I'm really proud of the part I've played here at Sainsbury's over the past five years, but the most exciting part lies ahead and I want to be playing my part. The next five years will be incredibly exciting and I can't see myself anywhere other than heading that growth story.” That's two exciting and one incredibly. A football manager would be proud.

* But what, exactly, do the next five years hold for Sainsbury's that is so, well, exciting?

* A thought from economist Howard Archer of IHS Global Insight: “At the rate that politicians are paying back their expenses claims, perhaps the public finance deficits this year will be markedly less than feared.”

* Hmmm ... Remember the fuss about the Palm Jumeirah, the vast palm-shaped structure jutting into the Gulf off Dubai that has seen many of our footballers racing to snap up properties? Well Nakheel, the Dubai developer behind the scheme, has received aid from the federal central bank to pay contractors and suppliers...

* Back safe and sound from the annual private-jets jamboree in Geneva at the Ebace convention, and reports come in of plenty of long faces around the NetJets stand. NetJets is the time-share private-jet hiring firm owned and regularly promoted by US investment guru Warren Buffett. News from the show said NetJets had won 270 new customers last year. But over the same year, it also lost 268. So that's, er, a net gain of precisely two. This for a firm which has just taken delivery of 30 new aircraft...

Blank drives off with a pile of cash

Just in case anyone felt there was no need to get rid of Sir Victor Blank sooner rather than later, let us remember that he is paid a basic salary of £640,000 a year. That's £53,333 a month for being a part-time chairman of Lloyds. Oh, and don't forget that he owns 433,000 shares currently worth about £400,000. That's enough to buy 50 of his favoured basic range G-Wiz electric cars.

* Senior executives at Lloyds Banking Group have recently received information on how to guard against kidnap. So there's Sir Victor Blank squeezed into his tiny electric car... but how will the kidnappers get him out?

The sad part is, if the departing Sir Victor and the chief executive, Eric Daniels, were to be nabbed, would anyone pay the ransom?

Lloyds, which is 43% owned by the taxpayer, has also taken to advising its staff on how to avoid swine flu. It includes a 10-point guide on how to wash your hands, tips on using a surface wipe and how to dispose of tissues after you've blown your nose... “Put them straight in the bin.”

* Nice touch of humour from Panmure Gordon banking analyst Sandy Chen. His thoughts on the departure of the Lloyds Banking Group chairman are headlined: “This space intentionally
left Blank.”