“This week there is said to have been a last-minute shopping surge that will tide the high street retailers over into the new year. But this is only because the retailers – who have to divvy up their rents tomorrow, in advance for the next quarter – have been slashing stock prices frantically in order to get the cash in the till. This may have worked short-term, as consumers wring the last drop of liquidity from their desiccated credit cards, but many retailers will surely go to the wall come January.”

To read the rest of Will’s Standard column this week, go here.

I had a letter this week from the fraud department of a major building society, informing me that someone had tried to open an account in my name, and asking me to call them to confirm itwasn’t me. My immediate reaction was to suspect fraud perpetrated by crooks pretending to be the building society; so before I phoned, I Google-mapped their office address.

Read the whole of Will’s Evening Standard column here.

At least disgraced tycoon David Ross has had the decency to resign from his position as the Mayor’s representative on the Olympic Organising Committee. Mind you, his parting words are open to interpretation: “I do not wish to distract others from the important work still to do in making 2012 the success I know it will be.” Presumably the “important work” that Lord Coe and Tessa Jowell have still to do is shoring up the funding mess they’ve created because – just like Ross – their favourite sport of all was casino capitalism.

To read the rest of Will’s latest Standard column, go here.

There’s a strange sense of political limbo here in the States at the moment: this is the interregnum, with one American emperor dead but yet to be interred, while his successor is still to be crowned. Barack Obama may not have assumed the purple but he’s assembling his praetorian guard around him, and it’s these appointments that are beginning to make the liberals who voted him into office uneasy about what the future may hold: will the new ruler turn his slogan “Change” into a reality, or is the ancien régime about to reassert itself?   More...