Business Diary: NPower's cricket parties run out of gas

With the rain putting the dampeners on the one-day cricket series against Australia, it appears that we will not see a repeat of the "Cricket in the Park" bashes that the Test sponsor Npower dubbed "the next best thing to being at the match". No bad thing, given the way it all ended. Fans were turned away by security staff who claimed that the event was over at 5pm, despite Australia's final wicket falling 45 minutes later. Diary can now reveal that this was because staff simply lost count of the number of spectators and had to close it on health and safety grounds. Let's hope Npower do rather better at keeping count of energy bills.

Spitzer has the Post all hot and flustered

According to the New York Post, Eliot Spitzer, one-time scourge of Wall Street, is planning a comeback. Spitzer, who might have proved useful in the current financial crisis, was brought low on the threshold of a glittering political career after a prostitution scandal. The temptation of running the headline "You Can't Keep a Bad Man Down" proved too much for the Murdoch-owned tabloid. Spitzer is a Democrat, after all.

Lola's warning may just get its cakes crushed

Here's the upmarket bakery Lola's with some sound advice for the delivery personnel who get its cakes from A to B: If you knock, kick or turn this box upside-down, you will ruin (underlined) the cupcakes and all our very hard work. Please take care when handling! Unfortunately, to Diary's eyes that really looks rather like a red rag to a bull.

Spinning around the farmyard is no fun

Friends Provident's spin doctor-in-chief, Peter Timberlake, has a hidden talent: he does impressions of farmyard animals. Interviewed by the financial website headlinemoney, he claims to be able to call the local farmyard fauna to his Surrey home with his repertoire of neighs and moos. Diary hopes his parrot is up to scratch. He'll be needing to change his tune quite dramatically, having at first told the world that Friends didn't want to accept a bid from Resolution because of its eccentric corporate governance arrangements, only for it to succumb a few weeks later under pressure from institutional shareholders.

Number of the day: 11.5 minutes

The amount of time between home repossessions in Britain, according to the debt charity Credit Action.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk