Business Diary: It's time to buy more gold, fool

The people behind Bloomberg TV are calm, sensible folk, just as you'd expect the management of a cable channel dedicated to finance to be. Still, one of the channel's bookers clearly has a sense of humour – and had a smart idea yesterday for a guest to discuss the ongoing gold price surge.

Enter stage left the A-Team star Mr T, whose credentials for discussing whether the price of the shiny stuff might go higher seem to go no further than his predilection for wearing gold jewellery. Still, he was more entertaining than the usual grey suits.

Toasting the Chilean miracle

It's the heart-warming story of the year and it keeps on giving. Waitrose reports that sales of Chilean wine in its stores have risen by 25 per cent in recent days – an unprecedented spike that can only be explained by all the attention on the mining rescue. Not one to miss out on the feelgood factor, Asda now plans to offer 25 per cent off its Chilean range over the next few weeks. Though thinking about it, surely 33 would be a more appropriate number?

Get Lord Sugar a new phone

Lord Sugar is no longer responsible for Amstrad,having flogged the company to Sky a couple of years ago. Still, a little loyalty might be nice. The new television advert for his forthcoming autobiography, shot in the great man's office, reveals it is stuffed with modelaeroplanes (a nod to his corporate jet business), but the phone on his desk is disappointingly normal – not an Amstrad E-M@iler to be seen.

A shave for the man at the Pru?

The confirmation yesterday that Sir Howard Davies is to join the board of Prudential – as this newspaper reported several weeks ago – prompts an important question. Has the former regulator, now on the board at the London School of Economics, retained the rather fetching beard he had been sporting in recent months? Clean-shaven for most of his career, Sir Howard seems to have felt the move into academia called for some whiskers. Will the job at the Pru prompt a change of heart?

businessdiary@independent.co.uk