People & Business

Roger Bright has been appointed chief executive of the Personal Investment Authority (PIA), just as it is about to be gobbled up by New Labour's answer to Godzilla, the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

Mr Bright will take over from Colette Bowe, who announced her decision not to apply for any posts at the FSA in September. She was thought to be miffed at not being offered one of the top FSA jobs. Ms Bowe has headed up the PIA since it was launched in January 1994 and will leave at the end of this month. She has been helping to arrange the transition of the PIA into the FSA, a process which should be completed by 1999.

Mr Bright is a former career civil servant,and joined the PIA two years ago as head of finance and operations. A fellow regulator says Mr Bright, 46, "started off as a bit of a back-office boy. He's very articulate and not afraid of defending his patch. He's very much a doer. Colette Bowe has relied on him to run the shop while she concentrates on policy.

"He's made quite a few changes," the regulator concludes. "He may turn out to be even better than Chris Woodburn, the new chief executive at the SFA."

The PIA also announced yesterday that Ron Devlin will head up an integrated division of FSA and PIA staff to tackle the pensions mis-selling fiasco. Look out for some more FSA appointments expected at the end of the week.

There was an appalling outbreak of stomach upsets and 'flu in the Square Mile yesterday, as well as a spate of meetings with teachers over offspring's educational progress, a surge of urgent client meetings out of town, and a sudden spate of visits to the dentist. Yes, it was the annual Varsity rugby match at Twickenham between Oxford and Cambridge.

A straw poll round the office revealed that roughly one-third of City bods we tried and failed to contact yesterday owned up to attending the shindig. The other two-thirds instructed their PAs to offer up a myriad of excuses. Thankfully, today the City has undergone a miracle cure

Ben'n'Jerry, the hairy pair of middle aged American hippies turned entrepreneurs, are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their ice-cream making empire with a book of their collected wit'n'wisdom: Ben and Jerry's Double- Dip: Lead with Your Values and Make Money Too.

The tome tells how Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield learnt to make ice- cream by correspondence course from their renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont

Since then, they write, "we've lost a few pounds. Lost a little hair. Had a couple of kids. Shared a lot of tears and laughter. The company's bringing in more money every month than we ever thought we'd see in our lifetimes, with sales last year of over $160m."

"We've got 700 employees, 13,000 stockholders, 132 scoop shops," they boast. Which just goes to show, you can make millions and wear open-toed sandals at the same time.

Marks and Spencer has hired an in-house poet to bring out the Wordsworth in its staff. A spokeswoman for the store said: "We want to encourage the creative side of our people." So 31-year-old poet Peter Sansom is running workshops for the staff. "Poetry is like dancing. Not all of us can be ballet dancers but all of us dance. Everyone has a poet inside of them struggling to get out," he said.

Mr Sansom was coy about how much he is being paid but is "hopeful of a discount on my favourite lambswool cardigan".