Rumours, whispers and City gossip, City A.M. has brought back its weekly diary column The Capitalist. Are you in it?
VAT TW*T SPAT
City A.M. may have coined the term TW*T for midweek workers, but The Capitalist was confronted with one of the City’s finest this month.
Celebrating the opening of Engel and Jang at the Royal Exchange, the free flowing cocktails (courtesy of the restaurant’s free negroni fountain) saw one property bigwig get into a heated debate with a City A.M. reporter. Arguing against Labour’s policy to increase VAT on independent schools, the privately-educated property developer lost his cool – calling the reporter “a f**cking tw*t”, when asked which establishment his own children attended.
Didn’t stop him from giving out his business card to the journalist in question.
M-M-M-Mike Ashley and the Jets
If Mike Ashley thought the Daily Mail’s scoop around his incessant private jet use during coronavirus lockdowns had scarred his reputation, City A.M. has more bad news: almost 500 trips have been taken on Frasers’ corporate jet since – all while Ashley’s retail empire continues to assert its commitment to tackling climate change.
According to data given to The Capitalist by Flightradar24, covering three-and-a half-years of flights in and out of London, tropical destinations like Antigua, the Bahamas and Barbados were all favoured by the Sports Direct tycoon, though none so much as Mallorca which the Frasers company jet made 64 flights to and from between January 2021 and April 2024 (and where Ashley himself recently owned a €35m mansion complete with its own private cave). Just a Brit abroad at heart then.
Racking up £2.6m in the last year alone, the former Newcastle owner seems unlikely to cool his jets anytime soon. A self-described “PR nightmare”, Ashley justified his jet use as a much-cherished work perk in 2016: “I don’t get paid a salary but what I do like to do is go by private plane.”
Taking the Merc at Aston Martin
Speaking of workplace benefits, The Capitalist had the pleasure this month of attending a glitzy evening hosted by Aston Martin at the Burlington Arcade. “Someone in this room knows who the next Bond is!” teased former GQ editor Dylan Jones, metres from the Aston Martin DB5. The motoring company were cheersing free-flowing Bollinger to the 60th anniversary of Goldfinger; rumours hummed that a head EON producer was sipping amongst us who even Jones, after multiple glasses of late-night champagne, couldn’t elicit the goss from. MI6 chief Sir Richard Moore, also in attendance, may have had a better chance.
It might have been the first Aston to feature in Bond but the DB5 wouldn’t be much use to whoever the new chap is; Bond enthusiasts were running the time-worn anecdote about how the car isn’t actually roadworthy despite its £2.75m price tag. But do you know what are? Mercedes vehicles, which – it turns out – are the Aston Martin company cars of choice.
PR is not Brat
If that didn’t get you revved up, this email that regretfully fell into The Capitalist’s inbox yesterday morning might: “Ever thought about cumming to ‘360’ by Charli XCX? Well now you can,” luxury sex toy brand Lelo informed your diarist. Flaunting its new “rhythm-keeping, climax-making, brat-giving” vibrator – which does come in green – the brand added itself to the list of desperate PRs doing all they can to put the final nails into Charli XCX’s Brat Girl Summer.
Making a splash
First Dates maître d’ Fred Sirieix was teary-eyed yesterday as he watched his 19-year-old daughter Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix claim the Olympic diving bronze for Team GB. But the young athlete will be making a different type of splash from the autumn, with the Olympian having set her sights on the equally slippery world of journalism. The diver will join the 2024 cohort of budding hacks at City University from the autumn. A warm welcome to the gutter!