Bunhill: TV's Ruth Lea

HOLTHAM'S departure leaves a vacuum in Lehman's economics department since his colleague, Ruth Lea, is also on her way to pastures new. She is the incisive, frizzy-haired diva who regularly appears on our TV screens to explain the latest collapses in the stock market. Appropriately, she will become ITN's economics editor this week.

While I extend to her my warmest welcome to the honourable 'profession' of financial journalism, I cannot help remembering a little confession she once let slip about her work in front of the cameras. I was asking her what made a good TV economics pundit. 'You have to know quite a lot about economics?' I suggested shrewdly. 'That helps,' she shot back, 'but at least as important is that you have a bit of the thespian in you.'

I look forward to the prospect of ITN's autumn Budget coverage being delivered in blank verse.

(Photograph omitted)