I would entertain proposals from the following: Hello! magazine, Which Wig? What South Sea Island Resort? Any decent cookery column that isn’t full of French stuff and The Tatler, but only if it goes back to its pre-War format.I suggest they contact me directly. We will avoid paying merchant bankers, accountants, lawyers, public relations people etc, and will spend the pounds 50m or so we have saved in fees on a pleasant meal.ON THE same subject, I have been pondering whether Rentokil will succeed in buying BET, as I believe it is trying to. Against BET must stand its appalling record at building aircraft. Until quite recently it had a subsidiary, Boulton & Paul, that made the Defiant, a Second World War fighter which had no guns pointing forward. Once the Germans discovered this, they were ingenious enough to work out that all they had to do was attack from the front .. One black mark to BET.But Rentokil has a problem too.

I recently noticed one of its vans decorated with this slogan: “Voted Britain’s most admired company.” Oh dear, there is no surer augury of disaster than to win one of these accolades. The Guardian Young Businessman of the Year is the most notorious, having thrown up John Ashcroft of Coloroll, John Gunn of British and Commonwealth and other since-splattered tycoons. Then there is the Industrialist of the Year award, which has repeatedly gone to Lord Hanson … This award is bad news for Rentokil – and it is really testing fate by telling everyone about it.Ominous signLLOYD’S of London is trying to set up a new company which, I am told, could be crucial to the market’s survival. It is called Equitas, and the chief executive is Michael Crall. It is uncertain, however, how much faith he has in Equitas’s prospects. A sign on his door says, “Will the last person to leave the office please turn off the coffee machine?”.I WAS delighted to find an American body appearing to resist the march of political correctness: the Association for the Health Enrichment of Large People.

Then I read on and discovered that AHELP is “a Non-profit Organization which represents [those who] serve people who are labelled fat or obese by themselves, society, or the medical community”. It also promotes “Professional alternatives to exploitive [sic] treatment”. From which I deduce that AHELP is as PC as the next Yank, and that “large” is the Correct adjective for .. large I suppose that’s progress of a sort.. COMPANIES that cut their dividend do so at their peril. When Redland, at 418p, one of Britain’s biggest building materials groups, slashed its payout by a third last year, reaction among investors was swift. “Redland has destroyed shareholder wealth in the last five years by issuing too much paper, overdistributing its earnings and focusing overly on Treasury matters,” was the verdict at the time from brokers NatWest. “Effectively, the group has consumed rather than created shareholder wealth.”
Others blamed Redland for doing too little too late, and only after a new top management had been brought in to carry out a strategic review.The effect of all this in stock market terms was predictable enough, with the shares losing almost a third of their value in a little over seven months.But recently Redland, under chief executive Robert Napier, has been somewhat rehabilitated.

It has been helped in part by a reassurance from its new chairman, Rudolph Agnew, that the dividend was sacrosanct, and by falling interest rates in Germany, where the bulk of group profits are struck. The shares even emerged relatively unscathed from a profits warning last month.What has encouraged investors most are signs that deep-rooted structural problems are being addressed.Foremost among these is the need to correct a historic cash-flow imbalance. In an unusual arrangement that has existed for more than 40 years, Redland receives an annual cash dividend from Braas – its successful German roof tiles subsidiary in which it has a 50.8 per cent equity stake. The rest of Braas is held by two family trusts.While the British housing and construction markets have been stuck in deep recession for a long time, Germany – and Braas – have gone from strength to strength on the back of a post-unification building boom in its private and public sectors.Last year, profits from Germany leapt from pounds 150m to pounds 195m to account for just over half of Redland’s total operating income. But the sudden downturn in the German housing market has left Redland looking horribly exposed, and last week Braas revealed its turnover had fallen by 4.7 per cent to DM2.2bn (pounds 950,000) in 1995.To overcome this heavy dependence on Germany, Redland is looking at ways to free capital and concentrate on roofing markets outside Europe, which have greater growth potential. Talks are under way to inject all or part of Redland’s European tiles business into Braas, already the market leader in Europe, in return for cash or shares.