Live-tweeting a very public break-up

by Janey Godley in The Independent

On a train ride from Glasgow to London I was privy to a not-so-private conversation between a couple, let’s call them Jack & Francesca. This entire story happened and was tweeted live by me.

• Couple on train before it’s even moved and they have fallen out over “her inability to accept the truth”. This will be fun.

• She just told him “I can accept the truth, you are incapable of speaking it. Now who is Tamera and why did she email you?

The train still hasn’t even moved yet.

• He said “Tamera isn’t working with us anymore she lives in Rome now” she said “lucky her is she a nun then?” and slammed her bag down.

• He hissed “Shut up Francesca, we never had anything going on it was when we were staying in Bognor remember?” she says “yes Bognor”.

• Francesca says “you were impotent in Bognor or were you just exhausted fucking Tamera?”.

He (Jack) is staring at floor. Francesca is eating a sandwich in a furious chompy manner.

• Francesca is on her text and Jack is pretending to ignore her. Jack: “who are you sending that piece of shit to?” “your mum” she said.

• Jack just rubbed his eye “Stop grooming me Francesca” he said. She stared and said “did Tamera ‘groom’ you? (She did rabbit fingers).

• Jack has gone to loo. Francesca just called Kate on mobile “I hate him Kate he never explains his emails or texts that I find”.

Jack is back.

• “Now tell me everything about Tamera” she hisses and Jack is staring at her I think he is scared.

She just plucked out one of his eyebrows out in the middle of a conversation with her fingers.

Jack tried to hold her hand but Francesca just grabbed his face and snogged him.

• “I love you Jack” says Francesca.

• Jack says “I was close to Tamera back in 99 before we met” no JACK don’t tell her! Francesca is smiling, encouraging him to tell.

• “Tamera and I flat shared in Manchester in late 90s – was wild times” Jack smiled wistfully.

Francesca is actually gnashing her jaw, how can Jack not see this?

• “Wild how?” she asks.

• “I told you I was in a band at uni back in late 90s” Jack pleads. Francesca snorts “was it Oasis?” and laughs really loudly at Jack.

• Jack stupidly explains “We did a few festivals together when I was in the band” Francesca laughs “what BAND? You were in a band?”

Jack has got up and walked off.

• Francesca is on phone to her pal Kate “did you know he was in a band? Me neither”.

• “Kate, I’m getting the morning after pill I have six hours left to make sure am not pregnant to this loser” said Francesca.

Jack is back. He is looking at me suspiciously. Hope he can’t see me tweeting.

• Jack: “Francesca I never loved Tamera – it was 98 last time I saw her, she emailed to say she is in Rome living please stop fighting”.

• “Am pregnant” Francesca just said to Jack.

Oh My God she isn’t she is going to take morning after pill. Do I step in?

Tunnel.

• “Are you sure?” he is asking. She is glaring at him “Of course I’m sure I’m a woman, are you calling me a liar?”

Meanwhile I am shaking my head at him mouthing the word LIAR.

• Francesca just said “well I might not be pregnant but am thinking of not taking the morning after pill which is same thing”.

There is another watcher to this story – just spotted a man watching me watching them. He has raised an eyebrow at me.

• Jack: “that’s not the same as being pregnant Francesca take the pill I don’t want this anymore” people are staring.

• Francesca just said: “I love you, don’t leave me, what about Janet?”

Who is Janet?

• “Janet will be fine, don’t pretend you loved her as well?”  I want to ask who Janet is.

• Francesca: “Janet needs grooming” please please let Janet be a horse and not a child.

• “I’m not paying to keep her anymore Jack if you leave me” Francesca says.

Am guessing Janet is a horse.

• He says “I’m riding Janet this week”.

Phew Janet is a horse/pony/thing.

• “Look can we stop talking about your horse and explain why you are leaving me?” says Francesca.

• Jack: “you pretended to be pregnant Francesca”.

• “I didn’t pretend I said I might be. You always make me the liar Jack” says Francesca “I wish I recorded what you said” says Jack.

I wish Janet was another woman he is riding and I wish I could tell Jack I have recorded what Francesca said.

• Jack stormed off Francesca is crying into phone “Kate he is being horrible and I think am pregnant if I don’t take morning after”.

• Jack is back with four cans of beer and has sat at another table.

• Jack is ignoring Francesca’s attempts to reconcile. Half way down the train a toddler falls.

• The baby screams – very well timed – Jack is talking to ‘Ruppy’ his pal… wait. Jack just got up and ran off train at Carlisle.

• Train is moving off now and Francesca is just banging on window.

Even I didn’t expect that! Jack is OFF.

• Francesca to Kate on phone “He just got off train at Carlisle… Yes he took his bag and ran off. Am taking the pill now he is such a wimp”.

• “We didn’t really make a go of it he prefers horses and was in Iraq for most of the year” she is saying on the phone.

Am guessing Jack was in army? Why else would you go to Iraq?

• Jack has called her people, Jack is on the phone.

• Francesca is shouting at him. “I’m getting off at the next stop. Nick s is coming to get me”.

Who is Nick?

• Jack hung up by the sounds of it and now Francesca is sitting staring out of the window.

• Francesca calls Jack. “Go back to Iraq with your mates or whatever they are called …well ..That then …regiment …whatever, I don’t care”.

• Francesca to Jack on phone: “Am meeting Nick at Oxenhome if you must know”.

• She is back on the phone to Jack now: “I’m sorry Jack, sorry, please meet me at Oxenholme? I love you”.

• She got off at Oxenholme and is on phone to Jack – I think they are meeting up. THE END.

Three Days Later…

• I got an email to my website from Jack or someone claiming to be him. Have asked for a photo as I know what he looks like.

• Jack is confirmed. Emailed me a photo of him and it’s him! I asked him what happened at Carlisle.

• Told me briefly in email he is glad he read the thread as he didn’t know Francesca said those things – he didn’t go to Oxenholme.

• He’s going to Cornwall where he lives & has a horse. He hopes Francesca finds Nick and leaves him alone – he is a bit embarrassed.

Regulatory Capture - The Bank of England knew of LIBOR rigging but did nothing

Ben Chu in The Independent

Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic failed to act on clear warnings that the Libor interest rate was being falsely reported by banks during the financial crisis, it emerged last night. 

A cache of documents released yesterday by the New York Federal Reserve showed that US officials had evidence from April 2008 that Barclays was knowingly posting false reports about the rate at which it could borrow in order to assuage market concerns about its solvency.

An unnamed Barclays employee told a New York Fed analyst, Fabiola Ravazzolo, on 11 April 2008: "So we know that we're not posting, um, an honest Libor." He said Barclays started under-reporting Libor because graphs showing the relatively high rates at which the bank had to borrow attracted "unwanted attention" and the "share price went down".

The verbatim note of the call released by the Fed represents the starkest evidence yet that Libor-fiddling was discussed in high regulatory circles years before Barclays' recent £290m fine.

The New York Fed said that, immediately after the call, Ms Ravazzolo informed her superiors of the information, who then passed on her concerns to Tim Geithner, who was head of the New York Fed at the time. Mr Geithner investigated and drew up a six-point proposal for ensuring the integrity of Libor which he presented to the British Bankers Association, which is responsible for producing the Libor rate daily.

Mr Geithner, who is now US Treasury Secretary, also forwarded the six-point plan to the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King. The Bank pointed out last night that there was no evidence in the Geithner letter of banks actually making false submissions – although then note did allude to "incentives to misreport".

It was unclear last night whether Mr Geithner informed Sir Mervyn about the testimony of the Barclays employee who said that the bank was being dishonest in its submissions.

If it turned out that he did, that would be highly damaging for the Bank since it has always claimed that it never saw or heard any evidence that private banks were deliberately making false reports about their borrowing costs. Sir Mervyn is due to be questioned by the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee next Tuesday, where MPs are likely to put this question to the Governor.

The Bank's Deputy Governor, Paul Tucker, went before the Treasury committee last week to answer allegations that he had put pressure on Barclays to misreport its borrowing rates in 2008 while attempting to promote financial stability. Mr Tucker denied that he had done so and said he only found out that Barclays had been deliberately submitting dishonest Libor submissions recently.

The New York Fed released its cache of documents in response to a request from the chairman of Congress's Committee on Financial Services on Oversight and Investigation, Randy Neugebauer, who has been investigating how much US regulators knew about the rate-fixing scandal, in which 11 other banks around the world have been implicated.

A separate email released by the Bank of England yesterday shows that Mr Tucker forwarded the Geithner email to Angela Knight, the former chief executive of the British Bankers Association. She responded saying that "changes had been made to incorporate the views of the Fed".

While the BBA is understood to have acted on two of Mr Geithner's proposals, the other four were not adopted.

Before hearing from Sir Mervyn on Tuesday, the Treasury Select Committee is set to take evidence on Monday afternoon from Jerry del Missier, the former chief operating officer at Barclays, who gave the green light for traders to submit false Libor submissions during the crisis. He will be asked about whether he thought the order to do so had come down from the Bank of England.

Last month Barclays was fined £290m for rigging Libor between 2005 and 2008. The regulators found that Barclays traders had initially submitted false reports to make profits for its traders, but subsequently to allay concerns about the bank's health. Barclays' chief executive Bob Diamond resigned on 3 July. The Libor rate is used to fix the cost of borrowing on mortgages, loans and derivatives worth more than $450 trillion (£288 trillion) globally.

The missed warnings: ‘So we know that we’re not posting, um an honest Libor

One document released yesterday by the Fed detailed a conversation between staffer Fabiola Ravazzolo and an unnamed Barclays employee in April 2008, including the following edited extract:

Fabiola Ravazzolo: And, and why do you think that there is this, this discrepancy? Is it because banks maybe they are not reporting what they should or is it um…

Barclays employee: Well, let's, let's put it like this and I'm gonna be really frank and honest with you.

FR: No that's why I am asking you [laughter] you know, yeah [inaudible] [laughter]

BE: You know, you know we, we went through a period where we were putting in where we really thought we would be able to borrow cash in the interbank market and it was above where everyone else was publishing rates.

FR: Mm hmm.

BE: And the next thing we knew, there was um, an article in the Financial Times, charting our LIBOR contributions... and inferring that this meant that we had a problem... and um, our share price went down... So it's never supposed to be the prerogative of a, a money market dealer to affect their company share value.

FR: Okay.

BE: And so we just fit in with the rest of the crowd, if you like... So, we know that we're not posting um, an honest LIBOR. And yet and yet we are doing it, because, um, if we didn't do it it draws, um, unwanted attention on ourselves.

FR: Okay, I got you then.

BE: And at a time when the market is so um, gossipy... it was not a useful thing for us as an organization.

Doctors' basic errors are killing 1,000 patients a month

The Independent 13 July 2012

Almost 12,000 patients are dying needlessly in NHS hospitals every year because of basic errors by medical staff, according to the largest and most detailed study into hospital deaths ever performed in the UK.

The researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and colleagues found something went wrong with the care of 13 per cent of the patients who died in hospitals. An error only caused death in 5.2 per cent of these – equivalent to 11,859 preventable deaths in hospitals in England.

Helen Hogan, who led the study, said: "We found medical staff were not doing the basics well enough – monitoring blood pressure and kidney function, for example. They were also not assessing patients holistically early enough in their admission so they didn't miss any underlying condition. And they were not checking side-effects... before prescribing drugs."

In one case a middle-aged man who had a cyst on his neck removed developed an infection. He was treated with antibiotics but medical staff did not realise he was not responding until it was too late and he died.

In another case, a 40-year-old obese woman was in hospital for three weeks while doctors investigated symptoms including vomiting and weight loss before discovering she had ovarian cancer. She was never given preventive treatment for blood clots – a risk of prolonged bed rest – and died of a clot on the lung.

The study was based on analysis of 1,000 deaths at 10 NHS trusts during 2009. Previous estimates have suggested up to 40,000 deaths a year are caused by errors in care but these have been based on international studies and have not directly linked the errors with the cause of death.

Dr Hogan added: "Hospitals must learn from careful analysis of preventable deaths and make every effort to avoid [them]."

Most of the patients who died were elderly and frail and suffering from multiple conditions. But some were in their 40s and 30s. More supervision by senior consultants was required to ensure junior doctors carried out proper assessment on admission and liaised with GPs and social services.

International evidence suggests one in 10 hospital patients suffers harm as a result of errors in their care, ranging from short-term effects from a wrong prescription to severe harm resulting from an operation on the wrong limb.

But the new study, published online in BMJ Quality and Safety, found errors of omission were more frequent than active mistakes.

Dr Hogan said: "The NHS in the future is going to have to look after very frail elderly patients as their numbers increase. Our systems are not robust enough to ensure we avoid harming them."

The authors say the quality of hospital care should be assessed on the basis of harm caused by errors, rather than on deaths. "If 95 per cent of deaths in hospital are not due to preventable poor care, the scope for hospitals to demonstrate reduction in their mortality rate is limited," they say.

A Department of Health spokesperson said it was an important study which revealed a picture of preventable deaths.

"Patients have a right to expect the very best care from the NHS. Any preventable death in hospital is unacceptable and we expect the NHS to ensure patients receive high-quality, safe and effective care. We know that data like this can help hospitals to improve services," said the spokesperson.

Man who died of dehydration was killed by hospital neglect

Neglect by medical staff led to a man dying of dehydration in a hospital bed, a coroner has ruled. Medical staff at St George's Hospital in Tooting, south London, did not give Kane Gorny vital medication to help him retain fluids. The 22-year-old, who was a keen sportsman, even phoned police from his hospital bed as he was so desperate for a glass of water, the inquest heard. Deputy Coroner Dr Shirley Radcliffe told the hearing: "A cascade of individual failures has led to an incredibly tragic outcome."

She recorded a narrative verdict at Westminster Coroner's Court and said Mr Gorny had died from dehydration contributed to by neglect. Dr Radcliffe said: "Kane was undoubtedly let down by incompetence of staff, poor communication [and] lack of leadership, both medical and nursing."

James Stevenson, the solicitor for Mr Gorny's family, said they were "devastated by the number of missed opportunities" to prevent his death.

What is Quantitative Easing and does it work?

Mervyn King has turned our leaders into zombie puppets

Demand has not risen. Neither has production. Yet we have been duped into thinking that QE will kickstart the economy

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 July 2012 20.30 BST

‘This enormous sum does not exist and never has. It is not "printed" money or funny money. It is no money.' Photograph: Chris Radcliffe/AP

It must be the biggest confidence trick of all time. It is a cheat, a scam, a fiddle, a bankers' ramp, a revenge of big money against an ungrateful world. It is called quantitative easing, and nobody has a clue what it means. According to the Bank of England, the past four years have seen £325bn pumped into the British economy to kickstart growth, with another £50bn now on the way. This enormous sum does not exist and never has. It is not "printed" money or funny money. It is no money. The one silver bullet on which the coalition relies to pull Britain out of recession is a fiction.

I have spent the last year trying to find this money, if only because it seemed rather a lot – more than an entire annual take from income tax, VAT and corporation tax together. I have asked bankers, regulators, commentators, economists, and even trotted round to the Bank of England. Ask any of them after the £325bn and they stare at the ceiling or look at their shoes. Nobody knows. The money appears in no statistic of cash in circulation or on deposit. Bank balances have not altered. Demand has not risen. Production has not expanded.

Such professional and intellectual gullibility on a matter of national salvation is staggering. When Alistair Darling, as Labour chancellor, "pumped in" £75bn, he said it would stave off recession. George Osborne, then shadow chancellor, derided it as "the last resort of desperate governments", and Vince Cable said Britain was going down the road to Harare and hyperinflation. Yet when these two men came to power, they were overnight converts. They became zombie puppets of the Bank of England and its boss, Sir Mervyn King.

We know what QE is supposed to do. The Bank "buys back" the government bonds (or gilts) that were previously sold to banks. Since gilts are as good as cash, this merely replaces an interest-bearing bond with actual cash on the asset side of a bank's balance sheet. It is a paper transaction, moving sums from the bonds column to the cash column.

In theory, the banks have an interest in lending that cash at a profit to the public, or to companies. But that depends on buoyant demand and on finding businesses and individuals whose credit is secure. This is not the case when demand is stagnating. In addition, the banks are sitting on bad debts that need covering, and regulators are telling them to keep higher cash reserves. The banks duly sit on the cash or use it to buy more gilts. The money goes round in circles, collecting fees. It is like Irish truckers moving goods back and forth over the Northern Ireland border, picking up European Union bungs each time they pass customs.

The Bank of England quarterly bulletin is full of QE theology. Its report on a recent conference on the subject is pure angels on pinheads. There is talk of QE leaking from banks into equities and thus "growth", hence the brief surge in equity and commodity prices in the early days of the policy. But bank lending to businesses fell steadily throughout, and consumer demand stalled. As for the Bank of England's theory that "things would have been worse" without QE, where is the proof? The only thing worse would have been bankers' fees.

Osborne and Cable still utter strangled cries for banks to do "more lending to small and medium-sized businesses". They formulate endless schemes to "kickstart the economy". They know that none of these works, but we still have such flops as Project Merlin, theregional growth fund and the business growth fund. The British economy is in a classicKeynesian liquidity trap. It is starved of demand, but nothing is done to boost it.

Some unease over QE is detectable. Darling admitted in an interview as long ago as 2009 that "nobody really knows" whether QE made any difference. The Bank of England monetary policy committee, the Vatican of QE, saw one departing member, Kate Barker, admit in 2010 that QE "might not have a significant impact on the economy". Faisal Islam of Channel 4 published a survey of sceptics in Prospect magazine last winter, quoting the Southampton pundit, Richard Werner, as regarding British QE as "a sham".

The Bank of England loves QE because it is a policy under its control. It opposes genuine reflation as possibly leading to runaway inflation – hardly Britain's top economic problem just now. But the governor himself is in denial. He appears genuinely to believe that QE is "putting money directly into the wider economy" and that "the one word we need to hang on to … is patience". He has brainwashed the Commons Treasury select committee to this effect. It is like watching a patient haemorrhaging blood on the operating table and telling him to wait for a new hospital.

If the government really wanted to inject cash into the economy, it would address the liquidity trap head-on. It would order the Bank of England to add, say, £1,000 to the current account of every adult citizen as a "people's bonus". Such an injection would not depend on Bank discretion. It would not await a government infrastructure project or a business wanting to invest. It would instantly transfuse between £30bn and £40bn of cash into the demand side of the economy.

This need have no impact on Osborne's borrowing targets or deficit, since it would be new money. The chancellor would declare the bonus "off-limits", an emergency stimulus to growth. It might push up some prices and suck in some imports. It might seem to reward the feckless as well as the thrifty. But it would do what the government claims it wants to do – that is, "inject money into the economy".

Opposition to doing this seems to be not practical but moral. It is basically about class. To bankers and politicians, giving cash to ordinary people is vulgar and indulgent. So they pretend. They pretend to pump money into the economy through lending, but do not even do that. They pretend to give money to banks, but in fact nothing is injected anywhere.

When Britain devalued its way out of the last great economic recession in 1931, a bewildered Labour chancellor, Philip Snowden, wailed that: "Nobody told us we could do that." Nobody seems to have told David Cameron and George Osborne that you cannot kickstart growth by using QE, only by really pumping real money into the real economy. They have been duped by the greatest bankers' swindle on earth.

It takes more than a stroke of genius to become a true champion

Dominic Lawson in The Independent

When does talent become genius? We all have a view; but when asked to be precise, it's hard not to sink into the hopelessly circular argument that we know what genius is when we see it. Yet anyone who watched Roger Federer's forensic dismantling of Andy Murray in the men's final at Wimbledon would have no problem in identifying the Swiss as a genius, and that simple fact as Murray's nemesis.

Thus a familiar-sounding headline on one report of the match was: "Only one winner when talent meets genius." Familiar sounding, because it repeats what was written the last time the two met in a grand slam final, the 2010 Australian Open: "Federer's genius alone beats Andrew Murray". Murray cried after that one, too. Well, it must be frustrating when you push yourself to the limits and beyond, and the opponent wins with apparently effortless ease.

Except it isn't like that at all. Although we tend to think of genius as something akin to magic, a kind of short-cut to mastery of the elements, it is nothing of the sort. A proper investigation of the careers of the supreme achievers, whether in sport or other fields, reveals that they are based above all on monomaniacal diligence and concentration. Constant struggle, in other words. Seen in this light, we might define genius as talent multiplied by effort. In cricket, this would be true of Sachin Tendulkar; in chess, Bobby Fischer.

I was at a dinner with that supreme raconteur among philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, when he was asked how he would sum up genius. He immediately recalled the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who was questioned about how he managed to leap in the way he did. The Russian replied that most people, when they leapt in the air, would come down at once, but: "Why should you come down immediately? Stay in the air a little before you return, why not?" That effortless ease defined genius, said Berlin. To watch Federer at his greatest is to see something similar to Nijinsky's description: the movement of his body appears to defy the laws of gravity, as if hovering above the surface of the planet, free of all weight or friction. Yet in logic we know that this cannot be. He is constructed of the same matter as the rest of humanity, with nothing remotely abnormal or other-worldly in his skeleton or musculature.

In a wonderful 2006 essay entitled "Federer as Religious Experience", David Foster Wallace wrote that "Roger Federer appears to be exempt from certain physical laws... a type that one could call genius or mutant or avatar, a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light." Yet this is nothing more than an illusion – one which the performer will be keen to encourage, both to thrill the public and to intimidate his opponents. Nijinsky, for example, must have known very well that his astounding entrechats and grands jetes were the product of thousands upon thousands of hours of excruciating practice, without which his talent could never have evolved beyond dilettantism.

By the same token, the greatest talents of our age appreciate that in a brutally competitive world, to skip a day of such rigorous training is to risk decline and even mediocrity. If you saw the film [Itzhak] Perlman in Russia – about the supreme violinist's 1990 tour of that country – you will probably have been struck by his great discomfiture when asked to perform a piece spontaneously on a visit to the Moscow Conservatory. "But I haven't practiced today," Perlman says; and yet when you watch the Israeli play in concert, he can make even the most appallingly difficult pieces seem like a bit of fun, or as easy as drawing breath. It is, as the saying goes, the art that disguises art.

Perhaps the idea of the effortless genius is partly born of the need to reassure ourselves in our relative laziness: if genius is simply something innate, God-given and unimprovable, then perhaps we can also do as well as we are able without making extraordinary efforts. Unfortunately, this is not so: and we must recognise that what the greatest musicians and sportsmen have which the rest of us lack is not just an aptitude, but a fierceness of desire and a commitment to self-improvement which we can scarcely begin to comprehend. Nowadays, Federer seems a serene spirit, but as a young, up-and-coming player, he was a noted racquet hurler, with no less of an inner rage to succeed than, for example, John McEnroe.

In the purely cerebral sport of chess, the one living player most often described as a genius is the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen – who at 19 became the world's highest-ranked grandmaster. Yet his father Henrik told me that what had first alerted him to Magnus's possibilities was the fact that as a toddler he would spend hours doing 50-piece jigsaw puzzles; the very young Magnus had an astonishing capacity for hard work and concentration– which is, after all, the very essence of learning.

Francis Galton, the slightly creepy founder of eugenics, sought to define genius by reference to an inherited form of intelligence, which he thought could be measured via the analysing of a person's reaction time and sensory acuity: this Galton referred to as "neurophysiological efficiency". You might think that, within sport, the activity most requiring preternaturally quick reactions would be Grand Prix motor-racing. Yet viewers of the BBC1 series Top Gear might recall Jeremy Clarkson engaging in a competitive test of reaction times with Michael Schumacher,: the lumbering Clarkson demonstrated that his reactions in a hand slapping contest were the equal of the then Formula One champion's.

This is actually what one should expect: we all have the same basic reaction times, which are determined by the nervous system rather than the brain – as evidenced by the fact that we all pull our hand away from a flame with identical suddenness. The difference between us and the champions is that they have trained their minds to process information with astonishing speed in situations requiring complex assessment. Watch how Federer reacts in the less than half a second it takes for a first serve from Murray to reach the opposing baseline and you see just what a special talent honed by obsessive determination and hundreds of thousands of hours of practice can achieve.

Conducting the on-court interview after his victory, Sue Barker began: "Genius tennis?" "Yes," Federer replied, deadpan. If only it were so simple; and the fact that it looks so simple is the strangest thing of all.

Is it OK for celebrities to hog the best seats in the house?

By Jemima Lewis in The Telegraph

While my husband was chewing on the sofa cushions in an agony of doomed hope, I was busy spotting the celebrities at the Wimbledon final. “There’s Posh and Becks! Doctor Who! Ronnie Wood! One of the Middletons! And another one! And another one!” There were so many famous faces – from the Prime Minister to the merest boy band singer – it made Elton John’s annual White Tie and Tiara Ball look like a quiet night at the bingo.

Nor is this just a Wimbledon-related phenomenon. At any fun-packed event of national importance (or not), you’ll find celebrities hogging the best seats. At the Queen’s Jubilee pop concert, the royal box was so packed with stars that one newspaper provided a numbered chart to help us identify them all.

It does seem that the rich and famous find it mysteriously easy to come by tickets that other mortals couldn’t get if they removed their right arm and handed it over at the box office. Yet the strange thing is, most people don’t find this annoying. They accept the superior rights of the famous as meekly as previous generations deferred to the aristocracy.

A couple of years ago, my husband and I managed by circuitous means to get VIP tickets to a children’s musical, based on a hit TV show. It was a revelation.

We – the VIPs and our Very Important Toddlers – were given seats in the front rows, cordoned off from the proles who’d actually had to pay for their tickets. Before the show began, we were plied with cupcakes and party bags, and invited to bring our children on stage to meet the cast.

The Unimportant Persons at the back had to sit and watch for the best part of an hour, while their agitated toddlers demanded to know why they couldn’t have their photos taken with their favourite furry characters. Why indeed? “I’m sorry, darling: it’s because neither of your parents have ever presented breakfast TV.”

Bank of England says Libor scandal may be going on in other markets too

The market for determining one of the world’s key interest rates was a “cesspit” and banks cannot be trusted to be honest in several other major markets, the deputy governor of the Bank of England has warned.

By James Kirkup, and Angela Monaghan in The Telegraph

7:51PM BST 09 Jul 2012 

Paul Tucker told MPs that Barclays’ abuse of the Libor system may be only one part of the banks’ dishonesty over crucial financial information, suggesting that other markets should now be investigated.

An official inquiry into Libor – which helps determine interest rates for householders and businesses – should be broadened to include several over markets where banks are trusted to report their own data, he said.

Mr Tucker’s evidence to the Treasury Select Committee also reignited the political row over the Libor scandal as he insisted that members of the last Labour government had not “absolutely not” put pressure on him to reduce Libor.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, has said that that the last government was “clearly involved” in the banks’ dishonest under-stating of the interest rates they were paying to borrow on money markets.

Labour last night demanded Mr Osborne withdraw his claims, but Treasury sources insisted that question remain about Labour’s direct dealings with dishonest banks during the 2007-08 financial crisis.

Barclays has been fined almost £300 million for deliberately lying about the rates it was paying during the financial crisis, in order to downplay the financial pressure it was under.

Other banks are also being investigated for distorting Libor, which is calculated on major banks’ own reports of their borrowing costs.

Mr Tucker said he could not be sure that abuse of the Libor system is not continuing to this day, telling the committee: “I can't be confident of anything after learning of this cesspit.”

The Libor scandal could be repeated in a number of other “self-certifying” markets where prices are determined, he said.

“Self-certification is clearly open to abuse, so this could occur elsewhere,” he said.

A Financial Services Authority inquiry into Libor should be extended to other self-certifying markets, he said. The Treasury said last night that the review, led by Martin Wheatley, was free to examine markets other than Libor.

An expansion of the FSA review could take in a number of other interest-rate-related data as well as some complex financial instruments measuring the difference between banks’ borrowing costs and that of the US government. Some markets in gold and oil are also based on self-certification.

Mr Tucker faced intense questions from the MPs about why the Bank had not acted on abuse of Libor earlier and had not apparently been aware of abuses until a few weeks ago.

He admitted that the Bank had been concerned about the integrity of the Libor process during the financial crisis, but did not suspect deliberate wrongdoing. “We thought it was a malfunctioning market, not a dishonest market,” he said.

The Bank had opened the door to changing the way Libor was calculated in 2008, but did not act because of the turmoil in the global financial system, he said.

“We made a judgement that moving away from the existing method of self-certification was just not feasible during a financial crisis”.