If this is the case, and a Wall Street correction is just around the corner, the decision by those in the know to sell out of Goldman will look rather prescient.Murky view of LibertyAs predicted last week, the Standard Bank shareholder meeting, at which the sale of its stake in Liberty International to British Land was to be approved, has been adjourned. The delay should make an already murky battle even more opaque.Do British Land’s shareholders want John Ritblat to do a U-turn and withdraw from the fray? It appears not. Will Mr & Mrs Van der Merwe of Johannesburg and Sea Point back Donny Gordon’s scheme to pay over the odds to gazump British Land’s purchase of the Standard Bank stake in Liberty? Not if they have any sense.The fact is that it can hardly be in Liberty investors’ best interest for Liberty to buy in the shares. The price is too high and it would almost certainly deter British Land from mounting a bid for Liberty.All would be a little clearer if Donny Gordon gave up the irritatingly arcane accounting practice of including stamp duty and estate agent’s fee in his valuations of Liberty’s properties. Should he not include the time spent by executives assessing the purchase, the taxi to and from the building and lunch at a nice trattoria round the corner as well?Come on Donny.

If you want shareholders to support you when John Ritblat is slavering at your door, you have to be a bit more transparent.Jason Nisse. Whatever you think about Leo Abse, former Labour MP and unauthorised psychoanalyst to the stars, he certainly knows how to kick off a work of political philosophy. “Sixty-five years ago, as a callow provincial youth of 17,” the introduction to his new book begins, “I was for the first time proffered a blow-job.” Eat your heart out, John Stuart Mill, one might be tempted to say, if spending time with Abse didn’t leave one preternaturally alert to Freudian ambiguities The experience, he goes on to reveal, was not a happy one. He was in Paris as a delegate for the Cardiff Young Socialists, attending an international peace congress, and had taken time out from fraternal exchanges to lose his virginity at a brothel behind Montparnasse Station. Finding him stiff with fright, and not in any other way, his initiatrice moved downwards.

The resulting excitement was not exactly what she had bargained for: “I recoiled with amazement and horror, all my castration anxieties aroused,” Abse confesses, “and in the subsequ

Whatever you think about Leo Abse, former Labour MP and unauthorised psychoanalyst to the stars, he certainly knows how to kick off a work of political philosophy. “Sixty-five years ago, as a callow provincial youth of 17,” the introduction to his new book begins, “I was for the first time proffered a blow-job.” Eat your heart out, John Stuart Mill, one might be tempted to say, if spending time with Abse didn’t leave one preternaturally alert to Freudian ambiguities The experience, he goes on to reveal, was not a happy one. He was in Paris as a delegate for the Cardiff Young Socialists, attending an international peace congress, and had taken time out from fraternal exchanges to lose his virginity at a brothel behind Montparnasse Station. Finding him stiff with fright, and not in any other way, his initiatrice moved downwards.

The resulting excitement was not exactly what she had bargained for: “I recoiled with amazement and horror, all my castration anxieties aroused,” Abse confesses, “and in the subsequent mélée the girl fled the room.”
Sixty-five years on it’s clear that Leo Abse is still deeply troubled by the act. Indeed, he’s about to publish a sort of phallic philippic – Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love – in which President Clinton’s preference for oral sex stands as “a paradigm of the psychic enslavement which oppresses so many”, and in which Tony Blair, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown are strapped to the couch and found wanting. The Lewinsky scandal, Abse points out, didn’t actually trigger his analytical interest in the social implications of oral sex, but it could reasonably be said to have brought it to a head: “I suppose it acted as a catalyst, the whole Clinton affair – when suddenly one saw that the whole constitution of the United States was being assailed – right? – because a man was being jerked off by some hysteric.” The “right?”, incidentally, is very characteristic – his speech is peppered with these verifying murmurs which make sure you’re keeping up – and so, in a slightly different way, is the word “hysteric”. It sits poised between insult and clinical exactitude, and thus perfectly matches the intellectual belligerence which makes his works so readable. In Who’s Who he describes his recreations as “Italian wine and psycho-biography”, but his targets, who have included Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell and Tony Blair, are just as likely to think of him as a Freudian stalker: scrutinising their public statements and behaviour for the unhealed wounds that lie within and then – unconstrained by any professional duty of confidentiality – exposing them to the world.Not that the world is always ready for the revelations. If I’ve correctly understood the latest addition to his oeuvre, the argument runs something like this: fellatio barely existed as a popular sexual practice before the 1960s but has since spread everywhere. This is a bad thing, because it represents a retreat from true engagement, one that is symptomatic of much wider failings of love.