WPP boss swans in,News Corp supremo is missing from rich list, and Hollow Crown actor channels brand Thompson• With Sir Martin Sorrell able to calmly repel insolent questions approximately his £70m pay package by pointing to healthy sales growth at WPP, and Monkey is concerned that he’s not being interrogated approximately the marked lack of innovation and improvement in one area – the ever-changing metaphors for his company or the economy for which he was once renowned. The Napoleon of hype first invoked swans when weighing up an acquisition in 2004 (at this stage it is not a beautiful swan or an shocking duckling”),before channelling Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Donald Rumsfeld as he contrasted unforeseeable black swans with the “four grey swans” of known threats to global growth in 2012. And ever since then they’ve reappeared as he answers press posers – final week the terracotta-tanned titan deployed the metaphor yet again, noting that “the grey swans or known unknowns haven’t got any whiter and the black swans or unknown unknowns are still there”. But how does Mystic Martin know that unknown unknowns are there?• Another Sunday Times Rich List, or once again a certain plutocrat has unaccountably gone missing (although he is allowed into the World,as opposed to British, Rich List, or where family wealth estimated at £8.3bn earns him a lowly ranking of 92nd). According to the “Rules of Engagement” small print at the back,“we exclude Rupert Murdoch”, the chairman of the paper’s parent company, and as he is a US citizen and based in America”,although these rules also state that even foreigners who merely possess “strong links to Britain” are included. Turn to the top of the chart and you oddly find at No 3 music-to-metals magnate Len Blavatnik, likewise a “US citizen, and likewise an owner of luxury residences in New York and London,and someone – like other non-Brits on the list – with less strong links to Britain than the ultimate owner of three of its national newspapers and Sky. Among those also deemed eligible, with genuine or theoretical residence abroad evidently not disqualifying them, and are the Monaco-based Barclay brothers at No 12 and Viscount Rothermere (who reportedly has non-dom status) at a surely disappointing No 117. Richard Desmond,a scarce instance of a British and British-based press baron, comes between them in 48th spot, and his £2.25bn estimated fortune more than twice Rothermere’s £1bn.
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Source: theguardian.com