Put your money on Mark for the marathon
BANK of England Governor Mark Carney is running the London Marathon on Sunday. It won’t just be Londoner cheering him on. He’s so far raised more than £61,000 for Cancer Research UK for funding the new Francis Crick Institute — and his sponsor list reads like a Who’s Who of City bigwigs. Former governor Sir Mervyn King has pledged his support, as has US ambassador Mathew Barzun and his wife Brooke.
But besides the goodwill The Londoner detected some sponsors on Carney’s fundraising page who might well be trying to charm him. Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, coughed up £100 for the cause; Sir Simon Robertson, deputy chairman of HSBC, threw in £250, and Rob Perrins, MD of the B e r ke l e y G r o u p, s p l a s h e d £ 5 0 0. Generous indeed, but perhaps the sponsor whose name stands out the most is Dirk Diggler, the fictional porn star from Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie Boogie Nights. Support sometimes comes from the strangest places, it seems.
It has also been an opportunity for some City men to show their humorous
PG WODEHOUSE’s step-grandson, former High Court Judge Sir Edward Cazalet, toasted the new Everyman Wodehouse collection at the Goring Hotel. “He used to say that the joy of landing in America was like arriving in side. “Glad to know that central bank governors take the long view in running too!” wrote economist Charlie Bean, who pledged £200. Also at £200 was ex-Barclays CEO Martin Taylor, who advised Carney that he might want to “consider running counter-cyclically”.
We called the Bank of England for some forward guidance on Carney’s target time. One in the know confidently projects that it will be 0.75 per cent below Carney’s Montreal marathon time of 3 hours 48 minutes. Heaven without all the bother and expense of getting there,” Cazalet recalled. “It changed, though: he later said it was like meeting a friend you hadn’t seen in a long, long time, who’d put on an awful lot of weight.”