CITY DIARY

As the chairman of Marks & Spencer, Sir Richard Greenbury, finishes off the final version of the CBI draft report on directors' pay and perks today, he may be interested to note Labour research's report on executive pay.

The report, published yesterday, reveals that John Clark, chief executive of BET, the cleaning and security company, is worth 127 cleaners.

Labour researchers obviously toiled hard to reach this conclusion, which is based on "directors' pay as a multiple of average employees' pay in the top 50 UK multinationals".

Mr Clark takes top spot on the differentiation scale, closely followed by Thorn EMI - where in 1994 the music division head, Jim Fifield, earned as much as 376 members of the workforce - up from 274 the year before.

A spokesman for Labour research says the companies had to be UK multinationals, ranked by number of employees, so it was rather a surprise to see UK-based multinational M&S, which employs 67,000 people, had fallen off the list. A spokesman for Labour research said they forgot.

Balls are back, which means it must be summer. Market makers, brokers and others will soon be out in the lunchtime sun aiming at croquet hoops.

Golf Croquet, although the game has little to do with golf, is an improvement on last year's City game craze, which involved pushing a ball around with a broom.

Sponsored by Corney and Barrow wine bars, up to 80 teams of two will take part in 15-20 minute matches at Exchange Square at Broadgate. Names for teams are wince-making: for example Veuve.Click.Oh! from Scottish Widows, and UBS-a-daisy from UBS. The free Pimms being dished out should ensure less than straight lines but at least some improvement in imagination.

Two plum jobs in the small world of economic forecasting have, unusually, been vacant at the same time: now one has been plucked.

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research announced yesterday that its new director is Martin Weale, 39, a Cambridge University academic. Mr Weale has done stints at the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The second plum, heading the London Business School's Centre for Economic Forecasting, will be decided today.

The stockbroker James Capel would appear set to move into market making in a big way. It has nabbed Douglas "Dougie" Baker, head of market making, from NatWest Securities. Capel has not hitherto been renowned for its market making activities, although a company spokesman insisted that current activity in that area was "quite extensive".

While he was at NatWest Mr Baker built up a reputation for himself as one of the best market makers in the business, and it is thought that Capel must have paid something of a premium to win him over. No date for Mr Baker's arrival has yet been set.

Sir Richard Greenbury:

M&S missed off the list