CITY DIARY:  City lawyer Nilufer von Bismarck receives OBE (2024)

Respected City lawyer, Nilufer von Bismarck, was among the recipients of an OBE in the New Year’s honours.

Whitehall has certainly been good to raven-haired Nilufer, 56, whose brother Naguib Kheraj is former boss of Cazenove.

She’s a partner at magic circle firm Slaughter & May, which billed the Treasury a whopping £22million during the financial crisis for its help in bailing out the banking system.

Sir Philip Green eschewed his usual New Year’s berth at Barbados’s Sandy Lane Hotel, preferring to spend the Christmas period aboard his £100million yacht Lionheart in Miami. Hopefully, the Atlantic’s restorative salty tangs provided a momentary and welcome distraction from his daughter Chloe’s romance with the ‘hot felon’ Jeremy Meeks, 33, which, if reports are to be believed, shows no sign of cooling.

Portugal’s national carrier TAP has been voted the airline with the most handsome crew by lifestyle magazine Monocle. The promise of toothsome cabin staff is by no means a guarantee of success. US ‘breastaurant’ chain Hooters launched an airline in 2003, mobilising its famously scantily-clad waitresses to man the aisles. Hooters Air ceased operations three years later, reportedly costing the firm £30m.

Barack Obama continues his vain habit of revealing his reading list, citing Ron Chernow’s biography of president Ulysses S. Grant and Naomi Alderman’s feminist sci-fi novel, The Power, as his favourite reads last year. Coincidence, I’m sure, that eight out of Obama’s 11 choices from 2017 are published by Random House, which last February handed he and wife Michelle a rumoured £47million advance for their memoirs.

The tragic loss of ex-Compass boss Richard Cousins, who was killed in a plane crash in Sydney on New Year’s Eve, robs the City of a first-rate operator. But as his obituary in The Times attests, he could also be prickly. When introduced after a convivial lunch at the House of Lords to arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, pro-EU Cousins remarked: ‘I think you’re a c***.’

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