City Diary: New Arts Council chief consults Tessa Jowell ahead of budget cuts Whatever the reason for the breakfast summit, relations between the pair are certainly cordial - there were kisses on both cheeks as Jowell departed in a swoosh of purple coat past M&S chief Marc Bolland, leaving Bazalgette to pick up the bill. Property dealer's prime location To Belgravia auction house Phillips de Pury for last night's awards hosted by Spear's, the high net worth title whose readers have average assets of £5.5m. "Excluding primary residences," clarifies editor Josh Spero. Among the well-shod crowd was Glentree International managing director Trevor Abrahmsohn, the super-prime property dealer whose clients have included WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell, Formula 1 tycoon Bernie Ecclestone and, in happier times, the disgraced Polly Peck fraudster Asil Nadir. Abrahmsohn collected a lifetime achievement award from Mayfair property king Peter Wetherell, after his 30-year monopoly on London's best addresses during which Abrahmsohn has sold 150 homes with an average value of £20m. But life wasn't always so glamorous - Abrahmsohn quit dentistry to fall into property in 1974, starting out with £10,000 from a Golders Green bedroom in "the worst post-war month of the worst post-war year." By contrast, the current downturn is a "walk in the park," he tells me. Making the case for brevity In Birmingham, meanwhile, the recent hearing between Mortgage Agency Services and Alomo Solicitors should have been a "straightforward solicitors" mortgage fraud case," said the judge. But arbiter Simon Brown QC was so frustrated by the "morass" of paperwork from defendent Alomo, he summed up the hearing with a historic punishment for long-winded pleas, as used by the Lord Keeper in 1596 for "a pleading 120 pages long." "[The Lord Keeper] ordered that the pleader be taken to Fleet prison," began Brown. His Lordship then ordered that the next Saturday the Warden of the Fleet bring the pleader into Westminster Hall at 10a.m., and then and there cut a hole in the midst of the pleading and place it over the pleader's head, so that it would hang over his shoulders with the written side outwards. Concluded the exasperated judge: "In my judgment, these wise words ought to be heeded, even though the first Elizabethan remedy is no longer viable." How is deputy governor of the Bank of England Charlie Bean celebrating Hallowe'en? By travelling more than 200 miles north to the unlikely destination of Hull to deliver tonight's JSG Wilson Lecture on the topic of monetary policy "through boom and bust." It's enough to give anyone a fright. Drop in the ocean for Polymetal The Sea of Okhotsk is a dangerous place - a cargo ship ferrying 700 tonnes of golden ore has vanished in the far-east Russian waters, with searches so far yielding "no positive results." A drop in the ocean, calculates one VTB Capital analyst, who says the missing $800,000 freight is not a "substantial loss" for its FTSE 100-listed owner Polymetal.