Diamond Bob’s quick on the draw

THE FRIDAY THING: I CAN’T help but feel that if there never was an outlaw called Diamond Bob in one of the many cowboy films I enjoyed in my youth, there certainly should have been.

The present-day Diamond Bob might not be rounding up cattle or robbing banks (no, really) and he might not be able to claim to be the fastest in the West but he is certainly the richest.

The figures on Diamond Bob’s most-wanted (by him, that is) poster are, well, mind boggling. He has already pocketed £120 million and stands to trouser a further £23 million for leaving Barclays. Even Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the entire James gang couldn’t have got that kind of money in their saddlebags.

Few of us understand what has been going on behind the walls of Barclays HQ in London. Apparently some underlings have been fiddling interest rates (called Libor, which sounds like some mythological monster) and whether Diamond Bob knew what was going on or not (and if he didn’t as multi-million pound-paid chief executive he should have done) he appears to be the sacrificial lamb to the slaughter.

But he is not going quietly (not least because of the grunting exertion of carrying all that loot home) and is pointing his loaded Colt 45 (a bit like a P45 only noisier) at the Bank of England, former Labour politicians and the City marshal whose job it was to guard against outlaws and bandits.

For those of us who remember when the banks were there to keep our meagre savings under lock and key, to lend us the money to buy our houses and to lend money to businesses who could then pay wages to workers, all this Libor dealing, no-dealing and getting a bottle of Champagne for joining the fiddle seems like another world. And it is.

Diamond Bob might be a scapegoat of sorts but he will not go down on his own and there are a lot of people in very high places who will be sweating this weekend wondering just what he will say and at whom he will be pointing the finger.

Diamond Bob has all the bullets in his gun and will not be afraid to pull the trigger.


DID the earth move for you on Saturday? Apparently it moved for all of us because we had the benefit of a “leap second”.
In other words, Saturday lasted 24 hours and one second. Did you notice the time dragging?

This gentle excursion into time travelling came about because the Earth takes just over 86,400 seconds to complete a 360 degree revolution but wobbles on its axis and effectively loses a second.

So time is adjusted to give us the odd 86,401 second day. I hope you made the most of it.

Still on matters scientific, boffins in Switzerland believe they have found the Higgs Boson, better known to you and me as the God particle which, they say, will tell us how the universe works (providing it is lucky enough to have a job).

So, after all this fuss and money, just what does the God particle look like? Well, we don’t know. Apparently though, it proves the existence of the Higgs Field which is an invisible and all-powerful force, and not the venue for this year’s Oldham Carnival.


FINAL WORD: Another week, another Government plan to cut the ever-increasing benefits bill. There are, no doubt, a lot of so-called jobseekers who will not seek anything while they continue to draw benefits and the concept of giving cash only to those who are at least making a recognisable effort makes sense.

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