Pembroke: Mormon on the loose after a change in image

AS CAREER changes go, this is a bit of a corker. Last December Kay Whitmore was forced out of the chief executive slot at Kodak, the US photocopier company, after a term in office that can best be described as a period of drift. Now Mr Whitmore is a man with a mission. From July he will be head of the Mormons in south London.

Mr Whitmore will be the unpaid president of the London south Mission of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. For three years he will oversee 200 proselytising young Mormons doing 'community service' in areas such as Camberwell and Penge.

(Photograph omitted)

THINGS GO from bad to worse at International Management, the venerable pan-European organ produced by Reed Business Publishing. With a loss of pounds 400,000 last year and nine of the 10 original staff gone after an unpopular move to a concrete wasteland in Sutton, Surrey, the magazine's publishers have added insult to injury by presiding over a farcical readers' poll.

Currently arriving in executive in-trays across the Continent is the April issue, in which the cover story names Europe's most admired executive. Sort of. The list includes five no longer in position, one who was in jail and another who had died on holiday.

In too deep to drop the lot, the magazine stumbled on to announce ABB's Percy Barnevik as the 'top among Europe's most admired CEOs'.

But new editor Andrew Brown can take some consolation from his own chief executive, John Matthews. In a congratulatory letter he wrote: 'This is a magazine that you can be justly proud' (sic).

HOW'S THIS for a scheme that is bound to appeal to the pompous and the vain in British public life? Richard Longfield is planning a book called Great British Speeches. But instead of collecting the wittiest and most thought-provoking examples of British oratory and then charging, say, pounds 20 for the book, he is issuing the book free but charging pounds 1,500 for each speech published.

'We don't want to be seen as vanity publishing,' Mr Longfield says. 'We will not just publish anything. It has to pass quality control and we maintain the right not to publish.'

Mr Longfield says he expects to receive speeches from politicians, captains of industry and environmental campaigners, who might well view pounds 1,500 as a relatively cheap way of reaching 9,500 subscribers.

The idea, he says, came from America, with just one little tweak: in the US the book is sold as normal and its publishers do not charge orators. Still, given the vanity of some of our public figures, the plan will probably work.

THERE HAS been much chortling in the promotions department at Cadbury, the chocolate company that sells 200 million Creme Eggs between January and Easter. The reason is in the entries to a little Easter escapade.

To promote its Creme Eggs (small chocolate eggs filled with a white and yellow glop), Cadbury has been holding a competition to find the most bizarre way of eating the things. The company teamed up with the photo booth operator Photo-Me International so egg addicts could send in the proof of their depraved eating habits.

Cadbury claims to have received more than 1,000 entries. Photos sent in so far include people who eat their eggs with a fork or in the bath. Cadbury denies there was a risk of a raid from the Obscene Publications department.

ALONG-TIME Reagan adviser and until recently the chief economist at Wall Street's Bear Stearns, Lawrence Kudlow joins the ranks of the working press this week, bringing with him two key job qualifications: a drinking problem and a cocaine habit.

In an emotional interview with the New York Times, Mr Kudlow confessed he had been forced from his post after missing a meeting last month with 150 Bear Stearns clients. Mr Kudlow, who has been in rehabilitation since the end of 1992, was to have been the featured speaker. He now takes up a post as economic editor of the National Review, a small but influential conservative journal.