Pelican brief

Here's a BP spinner thinking out loud: "Those pelicans are brown pelicans. They are brown anyway. It's not because they are coated in oil."

Sort of. But will BP boss Tony Hayward be brave enough to try that line out on Obama?

FT hires its biggest fan

Congratulations to my old friend Mark Kleinman, the City editor of Sky News, for landing a new column at the FT to replace the one he lost at the Times.

Kleinman's scoop-getting qualities are renowned across Fleet Street, but does he rate his new colleagues quite as highly as he and others rate himself?

Tweeting on the Pink 'Un last year, Kleinman mused: "FT just put out a news alert on RBS story I broke on Jeff Randall's show tonight - well done for watching the TV!"

Sindy Column...

This week's column...

BP's embarrassing windfalls

BP shareholders have watched the value of their investment slump by a third since the leak in the Gulf of Mexico. But some canny investors saw significant profits before disaster struck.

Who were these prophets? Step forward BP chief exec, Tony Hayward, and Andy Inglis, boss of exploration and production, who respectively trousered £1.4m and £498,000 via share sales in March, just a month before the blast that killed 11 workers and triggered environmental catastrophe. I wonder if the pair might make a magnanimous gesture and donate their profits to charities helping the local flora and fauna get their lives back?

"Ha!" said a BP spokesman, before composing himself: "Er, erm ... I'll get back to you." Like a Gulf of Mexico solution: still waiting.

A deafening silence

Ocado, the unprofitable soon-to-be-floated online retailer co-founded by ex-banker Jason Gissing, right, has hired UBS, JP Morgan Cazenove, HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Numis, Jefferies and Goldman Sachs to assist. Might handing so many banks a slice of the pie come with a price - i.e., no heckling about the float from their analysts? "I think there are a few more analysts around than just those at these banks," blocks a mouthpiece. Possibly, but the tactic seemed to work on the laughable Prudential rights issue, which boasted a team sheet that read like the Who's Who of investment banking. Coincidentally, it attracted virtually no objective comment by their biddable analysts.

A Wanless wonder

Sir Derek Wanless defiantly refuses to allow career embarrassments keep him out of the public eye. Having spent the credit crisis as the head of Northern Rock's risk committee, he followed that triumph by accepting pointless honorary degrees from former polys before moving to the speaking circuit. His latest appearance came last week at Durham University, during a seminar on water. Has the man no shame?

Music, maestro!

For 20 years, Nigel Brown, the founder of NW Brown Group, has been supporting promising musicians by forming syndicates to buy them instruments - which they can then buy for themselves during the span of their careers.

These are decent - tax efficient - investments, as these rare instruments tend only to rise in value ("Antonio Stradivari has given me an undertaking not to make any more," says Brown). If you want to hear how they sound, pop along to Cambridge's West Road Concert Hall on 14 June, when the businessman is staging a concert featuring his prodigies. They include Natalie Clein, pictured, the cellist and former Young Musician of the Year. Nigel Kennedy was also given a boost by these syndicates, but let's not hold that totally against Brown.

Surveillance...

Numerous fire engines and ambulances outside the offices of the Financial Services Authority earlier this afternoon as firemen attempted to coax some poor soul down from outside the building. A banker about to jump? Sadly not. A window cleaner whose rig had jammed.

Lax Lex fails to plug the gaps

As BP struggles to plug its leaky well in the Gulf of Mexico, I wonder if the Financial Times's once respected commentary column, Lex, is struggling to fill its own holes left by a recent reshuffle.

In today's paper the column says: "The last time BP cut its dividend, by 50 per cent in 1992, its chief executive resigned shortly afterwards."

Bollocks. Back then, David Simon (later Lord Simon of Highbury) had just been appointed chief exec - and he hung around in that role until 1997. Might Lex actually be thinking of former BP chairman, Bob Horton, who resigned five weeks before the oil group cut the dividend?

Does Alan Parker also want his life back?

As BP's share price slumps day by the day, and chief exec Tony Hayward feels unable to resist gaffes about wanting "his life back", how is the oil group's hired PR help bearing up to the inconvenience of this unscheduled trip to America?

I hear that Alan Parker, the supremo of City spinners Brunswick, is holding Hayward's hand out in the US having done a deal at the start of the crisis whereby he'd mind Hayward, while senior partner Nick Claydon was apparently tasked with looking after BP chairman, the invisible Carl-Henric Svanberg.

The best laid plans, and all that. That arrangement was cooked up when it was believed that Svanberg would be going to the US, with Hayward staying in the UK.

For some reason, Svanberg has not travelled, meaning Parker has had to.

Test Match Special Offer wide of the mark

Much talk on Test Match Special on Monday that MCC nearly had to fork out £42,000 if young bowler Steve Finn had taken 10 wickets in the First Test (he ended up with nine). The Beeb reports: "[TMS presenter] Simon Mann reveals that it will cost MCC £42,000 if Finn takes the final wicket (because of their promotional offer offering refunds to anyone who bought tickets online between 16 April and 4 May if someone takes 10 wickets in the match)."

But would MCC really have been £42,000 out of pocket? Of course not. That deal was hedged with a bookmaker, so a 10 wicket haul would have been financially irrelevant to MCC. Arguably the club would have preferred to have paid out, as it would encourage future deals.