April flowers suggest a whole bunch of feel-good

City Diary

At last - could the elusive feel-good factor finally be emerging? Yes, according to Interflora, the flower delivery people. Hard on the heels of buoyant new car sales for April 1996 comes an unexpectedly large sales rise for Interflora in the same month - up 12 per cent year-on-year. Previous years' April figures have seen increases in single figures only.

Howard Park, head of the company's marketing department, said: "For most people, flowers are still a discretionary purchase and represent a pretty good barometer of the nation's economic fortunes. At the beginning of the 1990s, the industry stagnated and over the past couple of years our sales increases have been modest."

Worryingly for John Major, Interflora's sales may actually have more to do with recent link-ups with Sainsbury's and CompuServe.

Marmaduke Hussey, the former governor of the BBC, joined the board of Maid yesterday. The on-line information company's shares promptly fell 12p on the news, then recovered to close 4p down at 235p. Obviously the City doesn't hold Auntie Beeb's management in great esteem.

Coopers & Lybrand, Britain's biggest firm of accountants, no longer has an audit department. Instead it has a "corporate assurance" department. Apparently, the bean-counters want to show clients they aren't just boring auditors, but can offer lots of exciting business advice as well. Could be confusing for companies like Prudential which will now have to establish "assurance committees"...

Vaux Breweries' chief executive Frank Nicholson doesn't mince his words when money is at stake. Vaux sponsors Sunderland football club, and Mr Nicholson yesterday told journalists how he watched the match last Sunday.

Sunderland had just won promotion to the Premiership, and Nicholson was painfully aware that they would be wanting to increase the amount they get from their sponsors. He was just creeping away at the end of the match when he was collared by Sunderland's chairman, who asked: "Can I have a meeting?" With the decisiveness of a Vinny Jones tackle, Mr Nicholson replied: "If it's to talk about money, the answer's no."

Chuck Whitney, president, CEO and general head honcho of Southern Electric International, the American group that has been politely told to pack its suitcases and stop trying to buy up more chunks of the UK power industry, was in a sarcastic mood yesterday.

Addressing the Adam Smith Institute's Utilities '96 conference, he said he had first written his speech in Atlanta, Georgia a month ago. He then tore it up. He wrote a second speech earlier this week and threw that away. He then wrote a third draft which had been discarded 45 minutes ago.

This couldn't possibly have been a coded criticism of the Government's policy on takeovers in the electricity industry, that was lucidly explained to delegates by the Trade Secretary Ian Lang just 45 minutes earlier?

N Brown, the Manchester mail order company chaired by Sir David Alliance, has a tradition of offering items you can't get anywhere else, such as size 24 dresses and portable bidets. It sprang to fame a couple of years ago with a survey on the changing shape of women. Now it has turned to women's feet. Apparently a full third of the shoes bought by women don't fit properly because they aren't wide enough. They need worry no longer as N Brown has produced the "Shoe Tailor" catalogue with over 3,500 sizes of shoe listed. This includes a quadruple E width fitting, two inches bigger in circumference than a size D. The company surveyed over 700 pairs of feet to produce the catalogue, which must have been a fragrant task for some lucky employee.