Business Diary: McLaren's ideal shop window

Shocking news from One Hyde Park, a posh apartment block being developed in the heart of Knightsbridge: the residents of this exclusive development will have to share it with a car showroom. Now, admittedly, the cars on show are from McLaren Automotive, the racing car team, which is launching the McLaren MP4-1C high-performance sports car next year – yours for $250,000 – but even so.

And what about her singing?

Good luck to Laura Comfort, the CNBC presenter, who is quitting her day job interviewing business bigwigs in order to have a crack at a pop career (her album, The Comfort Zone, is due out next month). Still, her PR agency, doesn't seem to want to focus on the quality of her music. Its pitch for coverage of Laura's album offers "a chance to stick a picture of a very attractive woman on your pages", promising "she's really attractive and we have lots of great pictures of her". There's nothing like being taken seriously.

Own goal for football savers

With the football season due to get under way this weekend, Moneyfacts, the personal finance analyst, has published a useful survey of those savings account affinity deals that many clubs are keen to flog their fans. Its conclusion? They are almost all a terrible deal, with the best building society accounts paying 20 times as much interest. For the record, Birmingham City, West Bromwich Albion, Shrewsbury Town and Walsall are the worst of the lot, offering just 0.05 per cent a year.

Woodley lacks a sense of irony

They'll enjoy this down at British Airways HQ. Tony Woodley, boss of the Unite union, made a hard-hitting speech yesterday warning about the danger of public sector spending cuts. "It is madness to play Russian roulette with the recovery like this," he concluded. Wise words from the man running the union that keeps withdrawing its members' labour from British Airways, a company still trying to recover from its own catastrophic recession.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk