City Diary: Ex-KMPG partner faces seven years without cheap thrills Alistair Darling is in demand. The ex-chancellor has earned £131,070 on the after-dinner circuit this year, with fees ranging from £10,200 to £20,400 for speaking engagements for companies including Linklaters, Grant Thornton, JC Flowers and the British Property Federation, which booked Darling for its annual dinner at the Dorchester. The well-remunerated Mr Darling is represented by speakers bureau JLA Associates, which also looks after economic historian Lord Skidelsky, the author of How Much is Enough? About £131,070, some might suggest. Starbucks shares its tale of woe Who's this speaking at the Crisis Communications conference next May? A big hand please for the tax-disputing coffee chain Starbucks, whose UK head of advocacy and responsibility, one Hugh Milward, will advise on "preparing the board for a crisis" and choosing the right spokesman for "the different grades of a crisis." Elsewhere on the line-up for the convention, organised by Lord Heseltine's Haymarket stable, are HSBC's Pierre Goad, who will explore "how the shelf life of a crisis has changed," and Barclays spinner Alistair Smith, who will focus on the bank's efforts at culture change in the run-up to afternoon "refreshments." Of the stiff alcoholic variety, Diary imagines. IT WAS the night before Christmas and Jamie Berry, chairman of Berry Asset Management, had too much time on his hands and decided to improve on Charles Dickens" classic A Christmas Carol. Mr Berry's tale is set outside Bank tube station, where a solitary figure - "friendless" - is musing on the perils of the US fiscal cliff and a Canadian moving into the Bank of England. "Mark Carney is a fine man... he even runs marathons," reassures a ghostly apparition, leaving the banker standing "alone... the snow swirling around his feet." The End. Thankfully. Banker's stab at cheap fiction Fact or fiction? Diary hears there has been murky activity at the failing Royal Shire Bank, which has called in Detective Inspector Frank Brighouse to investigate the deaths of a circle of senior bankers tied in to a winner-takes-all bonus scheme. Fiction, thankfully - this is the plot of a thriller by ex-City high-flier Mike Crawshaw, called To Make a Killing. All profits will go to the Hands Together charity, whose patron is actress Joanna Lumley. "None of [the money] ends up in pin-striped pockets," Crawshaw reassures. Better safe than sorry, says Saxo Bank, which is preparing stock-pickers for the worst by publishing a list of "outrageous predictions" for 2013. So here goes: Spanish interest rates will rise to 10pc; the Hong Kong dollar will unpeg from the US dollar and re-peg to the Chinese renminbi; and Germany will move towards accepting the mutualisation of euro debt, causing the DAX to plunge by a third. The chance of these "extreme" events actually happening is low, says Saxo - but portfolios must be able to "weather a perfect storm." "Or any storm, for that matter," it adds.