Bunhill: Honour that is beyond price

NUMBER 10 was lucky that Roger Levitt, now a humble servant of the community, never got a gong. He certainly visited the place in days when he was rich and confident enough to think of hiring the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden for the evening, presumably to help sell insurance policies.

But he should have learnt that the honours business is pretty unpredictable, however much you subscribe - after all poor old Asil Nadir paid up in vain. At a more reputable level, Robert Evans, the departing British Gas chairman, would not be human if he didn't sulk. His great enemy, Sir James McKinnon, got his gong while director-general of Ofgas while he remains untitled. But then public service remains the Great Hope for the plain Misters among British businessmen.

Bob Horton's acceptance of the unpromising job of chairman of RailTrack must surely have had something to do with the fact that he was deposed from the chair at BP before receiving the statutory knighthood.

IN BRITAIN, WH Smith prides itself on being a family business. Yet in the US it is selling a range of pornographic magazines that would run the risk of prosecution under British obscenity and indecent display laws were they to be sold in its UK stores.

After a rapid expansion across the water, WH Smith has an extensive chain of gift shops and magazine stands across America, located in hotels or airport terminals. The magazines it is selling are widely available in the US, where laws governing pornography are much less stringent than in Britain.

None the less, many of Smith's rivals choose not to carry some of titles being sold at WH Smith, which include Hustler, Gallery and Club, the latter billing itself as 'the hardest magazine you can get'. Other big US retailers have a policy of limiting their 'top shelf' magazine selection to a few long-established men's publications, such as Playboy and Penthouse.

In practice, similar magazines are widely sold in the UK - but only via sex shops, or special annexes to shops, where entry is limited to people over 18 and which have double doors and entrance signs that warn what sort of material lies within.

Kevin Hawkins, corporate affairs director at WH Smith in London, said that the range of magazines stocked in the company's stores would 'reflect the local pattern of demand'.