Fancy a taste of Mr & Mrs Smith’s wine? Hollywood couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have put their new wine on sale.

The first 6,000 bottle release of their Provence rosé called Miraval sold out in just five hours on the internet, but the remaining 15,000 cases are now available in restaurants and shops in the USA and UK.

Pitt and Jolie bought the beautiful Chateau Miraval, near Correns, with its 60 hectares of vineyards for a reputed £40 million back in 2008. Instead of cashing in on the wine harvest immediately, they decided to enlist the help of top soil scientist Claude Bourguignon and winemaking experts, the Perrin family from Chateauneuf du Pape’s top estate, Chateau de Beaucastel – with the aim of making the best Provençal red, white and rosé they could. Five years later, with active involvement from Brad and Angelina in the blending and packaging choices, a vinous addition in the form of a swish-looking rosé joined the Pitt household.

It might all sound like an unlikely association selling on hype and curiosity, but the new Miraval rosé vintage has scored a very decent 90/100 in a blind tasting with respected US wine magazine Wine Spectator. It is a classic Provence rosé blend of four grapes: red grapes grenache, syrah and cinsault – and white grape vermentino – with 5 per cent oak. What sets it apart is its overtly glamorised packaging in a custom-made Champagne Ruinart-lookalike bottle which seems at odds with the style of wine. Not surprisingly Miraval has a hefty price tag to match the Jolie-Pitt & Perrin endorsement on the back label.

This is not the first famous wine from the vineyards of Chateau Miraval in Provence. In the past, prior to the Pitts’ purchase, it produced a rosé called Pink Floyd, named after the rock band who recorded The Wall in the studio at Miraval in 1979. What the Pitts have done is raise the bar in wine quality. They will be 
releasing a white wine this summer and a red next year.

This Hollywood A-list couple are not the first to use their name to promote wine. Celebrity wines are now all the rage. Involvement varies from owning the vineyard and actively making the wine like Gerard Depardieu at Chateau de Tigne in the Loire, to just lending their name to another producer. Other celebrities such as Sting at his Tuscan Tenuta il Palagio, Johnny Depp in Provence and the Beckhams in California just make wine for their own use.

The best-known celebrities selling their own wines under their name include Francis Ford Coppola at Rubicon estate in Napa, Cliff Richard in the Algarve in Portugal, Sam Neill at Two Paddocks winery in New Zealand’s Central Otago, racing driver Jarno Trulli at Podere Castorani in central eastern Italy and Ernie Els at Engelbrecht Els in Stellenbosch in South Africa.

Those lending their name for a short period of time to a winery to help sell the wines include Carlos Santana who gave his name to Champagne Mumm to produce sparkling wine in California called Santana DVX – and Bob Dylan who gave his permission for Italian Fattorie Le Terrazze to use his Planet Waves album cover and name. Singer Mick Hucknall formed a collaboration with Italian Salvo Foti – as did golfers Arnold Palmer with California’s Luna Vineyards, Nick Faldo with Katnook Estate in Australia’s Coonawarra and Greg Norman with Mildara Blass.

The latest famous golfer to add his name to the celebrity wine list is Englishman Luke Donald. He spends a great deal of time in California, where he has formed an association with his friend and winemaker Bill Terlato to make a Napa Valley Cabernet blend and Carneros Chardonnay – just released onto the UK market this spring.

The wine list

Luke Donald Carneros 
Chardonnay 2011

I preferred Donald’s sleek Burgundian-style white to his hefty Napa red. Very elegant, rich, citric notes, oaky undertones, well balanced with a fine long finish. Stylish and not too pricey considering its origin and celebrity endorsement.

(£24.99, www.cellarviewwines.com)

Miraval Rosé 2012

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s rosé is a beautiful pale pink, with attractive red fruit notes, fresh flinty acidity and mouthfilling weighty fruits on the palate with a touch of bitterness on the finish: expensive for a Provence rosé (I can think of several others I would prefer well under this price) but this is a very well-made wine.

(£18.95, Berry Bros & Rudd, www.bbr.com)

First Paddock Pinot Noir 2010 Two Paddocks Vineyard

As a lover of Central Otago pinot noir, I have to admit that I adore the cherry and plum fruits and succulent length of this wine. Sam Neill’s offering is hugely overpriced – but well made.

(£46, Haynes Hanson & Clark, www.hhandc.co.uk)

Join Rosé’s Beginners’ Wine Course in Edinburgh, with classes from £35, www.rosémurraybrown.com

The Tour de France kicks off today. All that distance, all those mountains. No wonder that, when the inaugural race was dreamt up as a publicity stunt to sell copies of the newspaper L’Auto, back in 1903, it was considered completely and utterly bonkers.

HOW MUCH?

Dinner for two, excluding drinks,

£54.55

FOOD

8/10

AMBIENCE

9/10

TOTAL

17/20

To unwittingly compound the challenge, back then they imagined that drinking water would dilute one’s energy. In the heat, 
dehydrated cyclists would fall to the ground like crumpled-up energy bar wrappers.

Crazy indeed, and my cue to visit this ten-year-old French restaurant – La P’tite Folie (aka the little madness), which has two branches in Edinburgh, the other of which is on Frederick Street.

And the medium-level madness? That would be cycling there, despite the west-end roadworks, potholes and marauding taxi drivers, who bend round corners at high speeds, with their black chassis hoisted up like kirtles.

But at least I was well-hydrated.

My bike was locked up outside the mock Tudor building, which was designed by Thomas Duncan Rhind and built around 1900. This venue is tres chocolat box charmant, outside and in.

Especially upstairs, where we were, with the wooden-clad walls and ship-related souvenirs (not sure what the nautical connection is, but it IS galley-shaped and like being on the Mary Rose in here). Almost all of the other diners had that tanned, South of France, pink shirted, Melvyn Bragg-esque look.

The menu is relatively pricey at dinner, although they do a two-course lunch menu for £10.50. It’s also sort of old-fashioned in parts. You wouldn’t feel shocked to see an avocado fan on there. I think I did.

I went for the roulade (£5.25) as a starter. Like a very posh canapé, it featured three tightly swaddled and sticky-centred pin-wheels of courgette, aubergine, artichoke and cream cheese, alongside a strip of a chunky and garlicky gazpacho sauce. There was also a lightly-dressed lemony salad, with frisée and those purple-headed micro-herbs that resemble spent matchsticks.

It was six bites of enjoyable-ness (or 23 mouthfuls in total if you were to count the salad).

The tuna carpaccio was good too (£6.50). Four petals of cool meat were peppered on the outside and presented alongside a zig-zag of sweet red pepper coulis and a bank of more salad.

All fine, but our mains were the yellow jersey winners.

The butter! The cream! The note-to-self about being good tomorrow!

Especially when it came to the chunky piece of monkfish (£17.95), which was doused in a champagne-coloured and nutty lemon beurre noisette. There was also a little clutch of blistered tomatoes, well pummelled mash, a pile of crisp green beans and a wedge of lemon. It wasn’t trendy (I mean, there are chives sprinkled everywhere, as if it were the 1980s) but it was simple and special.

Same goes for the ballotine of corn-fed chicken (£14.95). This was sliced into chunky crispy-skinned discs, each of which was packed with pine-nuts and chopped apricots. They’d been generous with the frothy soubise sauce too, which made me happy, as it was so balsamic-y and dreamy. On the side – more mash and green beans.

Sometimes I dread a chocolate torte (£4.95). The texture is so often just plain weird – claggy, gluey or granulated, and it camps out in your oesophagus and refuses to budge. Not this one. It was a pile of rich gooey ganache on a crumbly and almondy pastry base. Lovely.

The lemon and vanilla cheesecake (£4.95) was a pile of zesty fluff. So innocent looking. “I’m not a lifetime on the hips, honest”, it said. We noshed it.

I really like it here. It’s the sort of place you go to when you’ve been pedalling uphill all day. You stuff yourself with buttery goodies until you feel as if you’re on the downhill straight, high on Lucozade, feet off the pedals, butter round your mouth, weeeeee.

Two new dramas offer a view of the past a world away from Downton Abbey, focusing instead on the people below stairs, writes Liz Hoggard

When Peter Moffat’s Sunday-night epic The Village went out on BBC1 in March, viewers were transfixed by its portrayal of a village in early 20th-century England. With its focus on rural poverty, alcoholism and child abuse, this was the antidote to the green and pleasant land of heritage drama. In place of Downton Abbey’s starched sheets and formal gowns, we got muddy boots and blood-stained linen, but visually The Village was equally ravishing, with panoramic shots of acres of fields, hills and sky.

Some critics accused it of being “bleak” and “unrelenting” but The Village drew six million viewers and series two was immediately commissioned — and the “grime drama” genre was born, reflecting a new appetite for authored series that help us understand the recent past.

Fans of The Village must wait until next year to find out how it unfolds into the 1920s. Meanwhile, two new dramas in the same strand of intelligent populism and based on real-life characters go out this summer. Channel 4’s The Mill, set in a Cheshire cotton mill in 1833, features characters – rebellious teenagers and an upwardly mobile working class – who wouldn’t be out of place today, while BBC2’s gangster drama Peaky Blinders, starring Cillian Murphy, Helen McCrory and Sam Neill, is based on a criminal gang in creator Steven Knight’s own family history.

The year The Mill starts, 1833, was “the year the working class found their voice”, according to the drama’s writer, John Fay, but its heroine, mill worker Esther Price, is instantly recognisable today.

Peaky Blinders, however, reveals an underworld that will be a revelation to viewers. “It’s a world you’ve never seen,” McCrory says, “the slums of Birmingham and 1920s gangsters.”

Both dramas focus on the people below stairs and, like The Village, The Mill doesn’t pull its punches about the brutality of working-class life. It looks at the Industrial Revolution through the eyes of real-life apprentices – in particular Esther, a Liverpudlian girl (newcomer Kerrie Hayes).

It’s based on the archive at Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire and is C4’s first factually inspired period drama. It’s a collaboration between the channel’s history and drama departments but is anything but earnest.

Having written for Torchwood and Clocking Off (in 2005 he won a joint Bafta for Coronation Street), Fay understands how to keep an audience gripped. People fight, have sex, become politicised – this is social history that educates without hitting viewers over the head.

“When you set something in tough times, there should be a sense of people surviving and triumphing without being glib and Hollywood about it,” Fay says.

Knight’s drama follows Tommy (Murphy), leader of a feared black-market gang called the Peaky Blinders (they sew razor blades into their caps). Neill is Churchill’s police chief sent to wipe out the gangs and also communist revolutionaries (the General Strike is a few years away).

What stops it being another run-of-the-mill gangster piece is that these men had been soldiers in the trenches.

“It’s this fascinating period when you have traumatised men returning to cities where there’s no work, to wives who had been coping pretty well without them,” says Knight. “And this great tide of men washing up against the heart of the city is bound to result in crime.”

Knight’s great-uncles ran a notorious gang and as a little boy his father walked into the family’s two-up, two-down and found an illegal betting shop, with immaculately dressed men surrounded by piles of money. The anecdote became the opening scene of Peaky Blinders.

Knight wrote the films Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises but needed a larger canvas for Peaky Blinders. “Everyone’s learned that television can do this better than any other medium, if you’ve got these big family stories that take time to unravel.”

Yet Peaky Blinders is so cinematic – “It’s filmed like a western,” says McCrory, who plays the Shelby family’s matriarch – that it’s premiering at the Edinburgh Film Festival later this month.

Birmingham of the 1920s, with its canals, industrial buildings and Chinese quarter, looks like Gangs of New York. There are gangsters with razor-cut hair and Benjamin Zephaniah plays a preacher. The soundtrack is by Nick Cave and The White Stripes.

Class plays a prominent role in these grime dramas but it’s not a simple face-off between toffs and commoners. Murphy’s gangster, for instance, is intent on escaping his roots and becoming respectable.

The Mill is similarly complex. Quarry Bank Mill would be likened to a sweatshop today – a third of the workforce were unpaid teenage apprentices – but its owners had philanthropic tendencies, providing a village, school, church and surgery. They even campaigned against the slave trade overseas – although their own workers were known as “the white slaves of England”.

And yet workers could rise up the ladder. “In the 1830s there were more millionaires in Manchester than anywhere else in the world,” says Harrington.

The other gripping theme of these dramas is the emergence of strong women; one of the joys of The Village, for instance, was watching Maxine Peake’s downtrodden and abused wife, Grace, blossom, while McCrory is central to the drama in Peaky Blinders, keeping the Shelby family’s hardmen under control, and Esther is The Mill’s touchstone character.

“When have you seen a teenage girl’s perspective on history on television, and her doing her bit to try to change the world?” asks Julia Harrington, Channel 4’s commissioning editor for history.

For McCrory, part of the series’ appeal was in taking a fresh approach to historical drama. “We usually do the top bits of British history,” she says. “It’s so nice to film a period we haven’t seen before. Everyone is the hero of their lives and that’s how they shot Peaky Blinders.”

In series two of The Village, Moffat will move the action into the roaring Twenties, the same era as Peaky and series four of Downton Abbey. The Mill’s first series finishes in 1914 but Fay wants to take the story to the present day, when Quarry Bank Mill becomes a National Trust property.

The common thread of grime dramas is to feel the past viscerally, to understand how the generations before us made us the people we are today. “People should be aware that as well as being awful and grim, those industrial times in Britain were filled with energy and strong characters,” says Knight. “It’s like this big volcano of life – and so many of us are descended from what happened in that melting pot.”

The Mill starts on Channel 4 this 
summer. Peaky Blinders is on 
BBC2 this autumn

A comedy full of celebrities mocking their public personas, This is the End is made for our star-struck age, writes Alistair Harkness

THIS IS THE END (15)

Directed by: Seth Rogen, 
Evan Goldberg

Starring: Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig 
Robinson, Emma Watson

Star rating: * * *

The sometimes blurry division between movie stars and the characters they play has long been part of the fun of going to the cinema, but the degree to which it has now been normalised is self evident in This is the End, an apocalypse comedy in which Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and several of their movie star pals confront the end of the world while holed up in James Franco’s house.

The film is written and directed by Rogen and his frequent writing partner, Evan Goldberg, and their decision to dispense with character names altogether and instead have everyone play versions of themselves feels like the culmination of a process on the rise since self-lacerating TV shows such as The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm made it desirable, credible and funny for celebs to mock their own public personas. Indeed, over the last decade more and more actors have been willing to play themselves on screen, perhaps as a way of re-establishing a degree of mystique in the age of fame, reality television and 24-hour entertainment news. Whatever the reason, This is the End feels simultaneously self-indulgent in the extreme and appropriate for our celeb-hungry times; a cinematic belch caused by pop culture gorging on itself.

That it’s sporadically funny and features a bunch of performers who haven’t yet worn out their welcome saves it from being the one-joke monstrosity it could have been, although befitting its title, it does feel rather like Rogen et al are having one final blowout before moving on to other things.

As such, the film is at its funniest in its earliest stages, when the apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelations arrives in the midst of a housewarming party being thrown by James Franco. The righteous experience the rapture right away, but plenty of misbehaving movie stars – including a smarmy coked-out-of-his nut Michael Cera – meet spectacularly gruesome ends, leaving behind a core band of survivors holed up in Franco’s ridiculous compound-like home. These include Franco himself, Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson and eventually Danny McBride, whose unrepentantly toxic presence may actually be worse than the biblical wrath being visited upon the outside world.

With the exception of Franco – who riffs on his own ongoing public experiment with his image by playing himself as a pretentious dilettante – everyone pretty much conforms to the types of characters they usually play in their own movies, and Rogen and Goldberg use this to tease out tension within the group, shaping their relationship dynamics to resemble those found in any apocalyptic survival film.

Of course this being a film from the writers of Superbad and Pineapple Express means that the bromantic bond that exists between best buds must also be explored and the plot-kicker is really Seth’s relationship with his long-term best friend, Jay, cast here in the role of the Hollywood outsider upset by of his friend’s decision to embrace the LA lifestyle now that he’s rich and famous.

It perhaps goes without saying that a high tolerance for self-referential gags and a familiarity with the back catalogue and working relationships of the cast will aid enjoyment here. There are some amusing callbacks, for instance, to Freaks and Geeks, the short-lived Judd Apatow-produced TV show that launched Rogen’s and 
Franco’s careers, and the film manages to use a discussion 
between these two about a possible sequel to their stoner hit Pineapple Express to transform This is the End into a meta sequel to that very film.

There are also some big gross-out laughs to be had – mostly involving masturbatory etiquette in confined spaces – as well as a few additional cameos that help spike the laughs whenever the film threatens to flatline completely. Alas Emma Watson’s arrival in the film is not one of those times and the Harry Potter star looks uncomfortable when her presence facilitates an extended rape gag that’s too self-congratulatory to be as edgy as Rogen and Co clearly think it is.

It does, however, play into the central joke of the film, which at least attempts to satirize the warped, solipsistic perception movie stars have of their own 
beloved status in the world. With Hell erupting on Earth, there’s a reason they’ve been left behind and their only chance of being saved is figuring out what that is. In this respect the film conforms 
to the idiot redemption formula that has dominated Hollywood for the last 10 or 15 years, but it also plays into the “this guy?” brand of comedy that has made Rogen a star by placing him in scenarios for which he seems wholly ill-equipped. Given that This is the End stretches that to breaking point, hopefully its title really will prove prophetic.

ALISTAIR HARKNESS

ALISTAIR Harkness reviews the rest of this week’s film releases

Hummingbird (15)

Directed by: Stephen Knight

Starring: Jason Statham, Agata Buzek, Vicky McClure, Benedict Wong

Star rating: * *

Testing even my love of Jason Statham, Hummingbird is a fairly terrible showcase for the chrome-domed action star’s brand of mayhem. As with last year’s magnificent Safe, it finds him cast again as a former high-level professional reduced to living on the streets after a personal trauma. Alas, unlike Safe, what transpires in the London-set Hummingbird isn’t thrill-a-minute action, but a misconceived, honkingly executed tale of spirituality and redemption in which Statham’s alcoholic, ex-Special Forces hard-nut Joey Jones assumes another man’s identity to track down the killer of a homeless woman forced into prostitution.

Marking the directorial debut of screenwriter Stephen Knight, the film over-eggs Statham’s avenging angel status by having him engage in an unconvincing and embarrassing romantic dalliance with a Polish nun (Agata Buzek) who begins questioning her own commitment to God while urging Joey to lead a more virtuous life. Fast & Furious 7 can’t come fast enough.

Despicable Me 2 (U)

Directed by: Pierre Coffin, 
Chris Renaud

Voices: Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Benjamin Bratt, Russell Brand, Steve Coogan

Star rating: * * *

2010’s Despicable Me was a disposable piece of silliness designed to delight the younger end of the animation market, so it’s no surprise that this sequel offers more of the same. Steve Carell returns as the voice of Gru, the wannabe evil genius whose adoption in the previous film of three adorable little girls has led him to seek a less nefarious means of making his mark on the world.

Now putting his scene-stealing pill-shaped Minions to work running a jam manufacturing company, Gru is pulled back into the super-villain world by a secret government agency that needs his help to foil a new threat known only as El Macho (Benjamin Bratt). That’s 
really just an excuse to partner Gru up with Kristen Wiig’s Anti-Villain League agent Lucy Wilde, and the moment she arrives on screen, the film sparks to life a little as Gru’s fear of the opposite sex starts getting in the way of his ability to act on the crush he has on Lucy.

Stories We Tell (12A)

Directed by: Sarah Polley

Star rating: * * * *

Having already established herself as one of the finest actors of her generation, Sarah Polley is rapidly becoming one of its most interesting filmmakers thanks to her work on the acclaimed Alzheimer’s drama Away from Her 
and the infidelity-themed Take This Waltz.

Her third feature sees her changing tack a little by delving into her own personal history with a remarkable documentary investigation into her parentage told from the conflicting 
perspectives of those who know her best.

If that sounds like the height of narcissism, rest assured that Polley has a keen awareness of her own worth as dramatic focal point and shifts the 
perspective of the film quite brilliantly to the role that memory, myth and secrecy plays in defining a family and how its members relate to one another.

What emerges is a fascinating and illuminating story, one that runs the gamut from intense joy to deep sadness and features a couple of surprising twists that take proceedings off in strange and unusual directions.

The East (15)

Directed by: Zal Batmanglij

Starring: Brit Marling, Alexander 
Skarsgård, Ellen Page, Toby Kebbell

Star rating: * * * *

Rising star Brit Marling reteams with her Sound of My Voice co-writer/director Zal Batmanglij for another 
indie thriller set in the world of secret cults. This time, however, they’ve traded the mystical overtures of their previous film for a more grounded, 
ultra-contemporary tale of eco terrorism and corporate malfeasance, one that riffs on contemporary concerns without getting too preachy.

The title refers to an Anonymous-style agitprop group determined to hold the executive class accountable for their actions by staging “jams” to give those responsible for damaging the world a taste of their own medicine (literally in the case of one pharmaceutical firm responsible for manufacturing debilitating drug cocktails).

Marling plays Sarah, a new recruit at a private security firm that specialises in gathering intel to help its clients counteract anti-corporate activism. She finds her loyalties tested almost immediately, however, when she infiltrates The East and becomes a member of the inner circle – a group of young, messed-up idealists living off the grid in a dilapidated mansion owned by the group’s charismatic leader Benjie (Alexander Skarsgård).

Shot in a crisp, contemporary style that’s notable for not referencing other movies, The East feels very now in its look, themes and ideas and Batmanglij and his cast invest the story with enough nuance and feeling to make the thriller that unfurls feel like it matters.

Stand Up Guys (15)

Directed by: Fisher Stevens

Starring: Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Alan Arkin, Julianna 
Margulies

Star rating: * *

Viagra jokes and hip complaints are present and correct in this latest geriatric groan-fest, which finds Al Pacino and Christopher Walken as a couple of creaky crooks facing what could be their last night on earth. Having just got out of prison, Pacino’s Val cottons on quickly to the fact that his best pal Doc (Walken) has been burdened with the task of killing him as horrible payback for a shoot-out gone wrong some years earlier. Instead of doing the deed, however, they decide to have one last hurrah and prove that getting into trouble is the best way to stay alive and remain vital.

Springing their other ageing buddy, Hirsch (Alan Arkin), from a nursing home, it’s not long before they’re visiting brothels, stealing cars and beating up kidnappers, all the while trying to stave off the inevitable moment of truth. It’s depressing to see the likes of Pacino reduced to making erectile dysfunction jokes, more so when the film labours the gag by having him overdose on Viagra. Whatever small pleasures are to be had from watching him play off Walken requires a very 
indulgent frame of mind. What a waste.

ALISTAIR HARKNESS

JIM GILCHRIST

When we spoke earlier this month, he’d been supporting the American blues star Bonnie Raitt and was embarking on a tour to promote his new, solo album, Vagrant Stanzas.

A few days earlier, he’d appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters with The Full English, a band assembled with English folk performers such as Fay Hield, Seth Lakeman and Sam Sweeney, to promote the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s newly launched digital archive of early 20th century English folk arts, including more than 58,000 manuscripts.

Himself an industrious trawler of traditional song from both sides of the Atlantic, Simpson is enthusiastic about the archive, which went online this month (www.vwml.org.uk). “All that material has been ... I won’t say languishing, but it was in the EFDSS archives. Now you can go online and see not only the text of a song, but get a real sense of what was going on, the letters and the relationships between the collectors and the people they collected from.”

He is less enthusiastic about another guest on the same Music Matters programme – Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove. Perhaps fortunately, singer and politician were in different studios, otherwise Gove may have found himself serenaded, with a vengeance, by Simpson singing Palaces of Gold, Leon Rosselson’s eloquent indictment of inequality, which features on 
Vagrant Stanzas (Topic Records).

It is, he agrees, an intimate recording, produced by neighbour in Sheffield, Richard Hawley. After their first day in the studio, the Britpop hero, with whom Simpson regularly shares kitchen singing sessions, told him that he wanted to hear what he heard over the kitchen table. “So I set out to make a record that had that sort of intimacy,” says Simpson.

The album swings between traditional British and old-time American songs and tunes, as well as contemporary material, including two of his own songs, and features Simpson’s masterly fingerstyle as well as his much-loved slide guitar and banjo (he spent 15 years living in New 
Orleans).

Simpson, a superb “teller” of a song, credits this partly to the “PhD in song accompaniment” he underwent during his years playing with the great June Tabor. “If you’re going to accompany her ... boy, you have to be listening.

“It hooks you when somebody is able to speak to you when they’re singing and that’s something I’ve worked on really hard.”

• Martin Simpson and Andy Cutting play the Eastgate Theatre, Peebles, on 19 July. www.martinsimpson.com

Wednesday’s opening concert of the 2013 East Neuk Festival (ENF) will be the very stuff of musical legend, for it will be the last European appearance by the world-famous Tokyo String Quartet.

Three days later, at its resident base at Yale University, the 44-year-old ensemble will perform for the very last time.

The classical music world was rocked last year when the Quartet – famous for its seminal Beethoven recordings and award-winning discs of Haydn and Brahms – announced its intention to disband after nearly half a century of international success.

The decision was triggered by the announcement that the two longest-serving members – violist and founding member Kazuhide Isomura, and second violinist Kikuei Ikeda, both in their sixties – would be retiring this summer. According to British-born cellist, Clive Greensmith, the time was right to call it a day.

“Yes, of course, there was a moment when I thought we should go on,” explains Greensmith, who replaced the original cellist Sadao Harada in 1999. “But there’s a 20-plus year gap between Martin Beaver [1st violinist] and me and the older two players. It was getting more difficult to do touring and to keep what we had, never mind adding new repertoire.

“It’s a very intense way to earn a living. I felt 14 years was more than I expected to be there, and it seemed right, at 46, for me to face a different challenge.” Greensmith and Beaver are moving to Los Angeles to 
co-direct the string programme at the city’s prestigious Colburn School of Performing Arts.

So what prompted such a 
legendary outfit to choose Fife for its European swansong? According to Greensmith, it was simply a combination of the ENF’s early planning and, in the festival’s case, a stroke of luck.

“Because their invitation came in so early on, we were happy to accept it and to plan the rest of our UK touring – which includes Aldeburgh, Deal and Cambridge – around the East Neuk date, not knowing at the time that it would be our last UK concert,” Greensmith explains. “None of us had been there before, but we have good memories of playing in Perth, Glasgow and Edinburgh, so we’re 
really looking forward to it.”

In Crail Church on Wednesday, the four regulars will be joined by cellist David Watkin in a performance of Schubert’s Quintet in C. But not before they, themselves, present a classic Tokyo combination of 
Mozart’s Hoffmeister Quartet and Webern’s Quartet in E.

Many put the unique Tokyo sound down to the liquid homogeneity that exists between its players, and which took root when the four original members studied together in their native Japan – where the Quartet was effectively formed in 1969 – before transferring en masse to New York’s Julliard School.

Greensmith acknowledges that signature cohesion of the early days, but reckons that a greater sense of freedom emerged with the successive appearance of new personnel – not least the arrival of 1st violinist Peter Oundjian in 1985, now music director of the RSNO – and with it new approaches.

“When I listen to early recordings I’m struck by the remarkable unanimity and discipline of the ensemble. It was tough for me coming into a group that had already passed its 25th birthday, especially as my predecessor had been there from the very beginning. There is more freedom now, but still, if you go out on a limb as an individual, it may have to be discussed.”

That cohesiveness is helpedby the four Stradivarius instruments – all once owned by Paganini – that have been on loan to the Quartet through the Nippon Music Foundation since 1995. “The cello is a glorious instrument, with a burnished resonance that is very seductive.” But this week’s performance will be the last featuring the instruments. “They have to be handed back the day after East Neuk. They’ll go to another quartet; we don’t know which one yet,” says Greensmith.

If he has any regrets, it’s about repertoire the Quartet didn’t explore. “I’d like to have done Berg’s Lyric Suite, and I wish we had played Schoenberg’s Second Quartet more than we did.” And what will he miss most? “I’ll miss the quality of repertoire, and the wonderful partnerships with wonderful audiences,” Greensmith admits. “That will be tough.”

KEN WALTON

• The East Neuk Festival runs from 3-7 July. www.eastneukfestival.com

Within the commerce of Condé Nast’s fashion photography, iconic art still emerges from the artifice

Coming Into Fashion: A Century

of Photo-graphy at Condé Nast

City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Star rating: * * *

Man Ray Portraits

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

Star rating: * * * *

I’m not a high fashion type of person. Last time I checked, Harvey Nichols was a shop rather than a temple. I own three pairs of Birkenstocks and I’ve never worn a pair of killer heels. My daily wardrobe is Cos not Costume National.

I’m also a bit resentful when fashion creeps into the places once 
reserved for art. I’m concerned about the corporate creep of the fashion brands in museums worldwide. It’s therefore through gritted teeth that this week I’m going to recommend a visit to an exhibition of fashion photography. But the truth is, for all its flaws, I really liked Coming Into Fashion.

A trawl through a century of 
archives of the Condé Nast Empire, the exhibition runs from the New York society gals portrayed by Baron de Meyer for the pages of Vogue in the early years of the 20th century to the bubblegum pop of Sebastian Kim’s images for Teen Vogue in 2011.

From Man Ray to Diane Arbus, the most experimental of artists learned their trade or made a steady buck in the pages of the Nast Empire. Painters like William Klein and Arthur Elgort jumped ship into glossy print. Amongst the most fascinating fashion photographers in the show are the self-taught women who made the transition from modelling to working behind the camera: Deborah Turbeville in New York in the 1960s, Sarah Moon in France in the 1970s, Corinne Day in 1990s London.

All three seem to share an acknowledgement of what a weird hothouse world fashion is. It’s there in Moon’s soft focus yet strangely sinister group shoots, and Turbeville’s brooding, ambivalent portraits of designers like Jean Muir and Sonia Rykiel with their human mannequins. I can still recall the visceral shock of first seeing Corinne Day’s 1993 spread for Vogue of a 19-year-old Kate Moss in her flat, the shoot that gave rise to the debate about ‘heroin chic’. By the time of her 2000 exhibition at London’s Photographers’ Gallery, Day was recognised as a documentary photographer and as a grim realist in the mode of the American artist Nan Goldin.

Think of a fashion moment and you’ll find it in this show: from Cecil Beaton’s arch, aristocratic images of early couture to supermodel Cindy Crawford. Some of this is absolutely gorgeous; some of it is a bit grim. There’s a thesis somewhere, I’m sure, on the way that mainstream fashion photography and underground pornography flowed into one another. In the early 20th century it’s diaphanous and “artistic”. In the 1970s it’s plucked and shiny or dead-eyed and enervated. In the 1980s it’s gym-bodied Baywatch voyeurism. I have always found the fetishistic footwear spreads of Guy Bourdin fascinating and there are some great examples here. Yet the neo-porn of the wretched Terry Richardson makes me retch.

Much of Coming into Fashion is about the way that the fashion world responds to the times. The extraordinary images of the Russian Constantin Joffé for example, who was in the French Foreign Legion and escaped imprisonment in the Second 
World War, pictured his models 
in front of aerial imagery of 
bombing raids.

Erwin Blumenfeld’s epoch-making image of a girl in evening dress, dancing atop the Eiffel Tower, can now be seen as flying a flag in May 1939. Blumenfeld, once a radical European artist, moved to the US to become a giant of mainstream imagery and the show makes much of the constant pendulum swings between Europe and America. The former is art, the latter commerce.

In the post-war era it was the story of Nast’s powerful Ukrainian art director Alex Liberman and his arch rival Alexey Brodovitch at competitor Harper’s Bazaar. In our own age it is the story of how fleet of foot European publications like Vogue Italia under Franca Sozzani fed the lumbering giant US Vogue.

Across at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, this transatlantic story is deftly and dramatically told in a single career: that of Man Ray. A towering giant of 20th century artistic mischief who also earned a daily crust as a jobbing portrait photographer for publications like Vu, Vogue and Vanity Fair, Man Ray was the right man at the right time, a painter and provocateur who first learned to take photographs in order to document his work.

From Marcel Duchamp to James Joyce, Coco Chanel to Catherine Deneuve his portraits have shaped if not defined how we see leading figures of the age. He played with type and with individual physiognomy, and his images are full of jokes and subversive twists. Informed by his intellectual involvement with Dada and Surrealism in New York and Paris, and a life of high bohemianism and high jinks, Man Ray’s photographs are stylish, defining, dark and oft-times erotic. There are the boys dressed as girls, the girls dressed as boys. The lovers like Lee Miller and the model Kiki de Montparnasse are often not dressed at all.

There is an amazing image of Man Ray himself from 1932, his face obscured with gunk as he sat for a life mask. He is the man who gave avant-garde artists, as well as the glossy worlds of high society and Hollywood, the faces they wanted to show in public. It doesn’t matter what his images obscured, their artifice has become a kind of truth in itself.

Both exhibitions are let down by gaps. It is too easy to come away from Man Ray Portraits with a partial picture of the man and his wider artistic life. Yet the detective work involved in obtaining the highest quality vintage prints means that the portraits provide a far richer texture of the 20th century than any of the well-known reproductions or tomes.

With Coming Into Fashion, neither the captions nor the beautiful catalogue credit models or designers routinely, so patterns of collaboration, interpretation and promotion are subsumed. It’s a show that doesn’t shy away from either beauty or controversy but it calls for matching scholarship.

Neither show is art in the strictest sense, but nor are they simply market economics. This summer I may need to revise my attitudes towards fashion and the fashionable.

• Coming Into Fashion runs until 8 September, Man Ray Portraits until 22 September.

DART Energy, the Australian-listed gas developer, has pledged not to use controversial “fracking” techniques at a site in Dumfriesshire.

The firm inherited the Canonbie licence last year after buying Greenpark Energy, which planned to use hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, whereby high-pressure fluids would be injected into rocks to free coal-bed methane, a gas sold as a fuel.

Now Dart has promised not to frack, but will instead drill horizontally into the coal bed. The firm claims it has demonstrated that commercially viable levels of CBM can be produced without fracking.

It says it is working with the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) to alter its permits so that it does not need, nor have licences to use, fracking for coal-bed methane.

Friends of the Earth Scotland campaigner Mary Church argued: “While it’s good news Dart is in talks with Sepa about giving up its fracking permits at Canonbie, there’s nothing to stop it applying again in the future.”

News of the move comes just weeks after Dart asked the Scottish Government to rule on its plans to drill for coal-bed methane at Airth, near Falkirk.

A report last week from the British Geological Survey said there is 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Environmentalists oppose fracking for shale gas, arguing it causes earthquakes, pollutes water and distracts from investment in renewable schemes.

At the Tramway in Glasgow this evening, a last lucky audience will have a chance to see the final performance of Paul Bright’s Confessions of A Justified Sinner, the latest show directed by Scotland’s most playful and inventive theatre genius, Stewart Laing.

Laing is a Lanarkshire man who emerged from the Citizens’ Theatre in the 1980s, first as a designer, then as a director; his recent work includes the 2011 Salon Project, which had a whole audience of 60 people dressed up in elaborate period costume to attend a strange, timeless party at civilisation’s end.

In Paul Bright’s Confessions, though, he is dealing even more directly with questions of performance and illusion; in that he has created the most elaborate reconstruction – involving a magnificently detailed archive exhibition, as well as a 90-minute monologue by the actor George Anton, and superb sequences of film, sound and graphic imagery – of an alleged attempt back in the late 1980s, by a now-forgotten young Scottish director called Paul Bright, to create a six-part site-specific adaptation of James Hogg’s great 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner.

The show, in other words, involves an extended, brilliantly realised in-joke about the state of Scottish theatre then and now, complete with spoof interviews with luminaries like Giles Havergal and Annie Griffin; and Laing is far from alone in his drive to make theatre about the creative process itself.

Last weekend, the Edinburgh International Film Festival screened the 50-minute film based on The Making Of Us, a 2012 Tramway show by artist Graham Fagen and theatre director Graham Eatough, in which the live audience was invited onto a film set, to watch the story-within-a-story of a young man – one of us, the audience – who is gradually ensnared by the dangerous compromises of autonomy involved in becoming a successful film actor. And if you open this year’s Edinburgh Fringe programme, you will find plays on every page about actors, directors and playwrights wrestling with inner demons, and introspecting about the world they inhabit.

So is this increasing self-absorption in the world of the arts a healthy development? Of course not; the audiences for shows like these are composed to a frightening extent of other arts professionals, and some of the work seems to have no ambition to communicate beyond that narrow group.

At best, this strand of work simply reflects a society in which all professional groups remain increasingly within their silos, and social mobility seems to have slowed to a snail’s pace, silencing conversation between classes and groups. And at worst, it is a monument to a generation brought up with the infinitely destructive post-structuralist idea that art should always be interrogating itself, rather than confronting the wider world of human experience; although art that interrogates itself in a political and social vacuum is likely to come up with blindingly silly answers.

And yet, just at the moment when it’s tempting to condemn the whole genre of art-about-art, theatre conspires to prove again that in this art-form at least, there are no rules. For all its introspection, The Making Of Us captures something vital about the way all of us, in a world obsessed with celebrity and mediation, surrender elements of privacy and control to systems we barely understand, simply in order to be seen and heard.

And amid all the fun and self-mockery, Paul Bright’s Confessions is also a dazzlingly brilliant theatrical response to James Hogg’s great novel, notoriously difficult to adapt; a show about men driven by demons then and now, and about a blazing radical impulse in Scotland, fading to oblivion.

It should be silly, self-absorbed, unbearable. Yet in the end, as in all the best theatre, the sheer brilliance of the work transcends the genre; to make something rich and strange, and undeniably new.

A SCOTTISH business leader has urged First Minister Alex Salmond to intervene and throw out proposals to build a container terminal at Rosyth.

Charles Hammond, chief executive of Forth Ports, is demanding the government reverse its intention to back engineering giant Babcock’s £85 million plan, which he claims is unjustified.

Babcock wants to develop the derelict site on land that was reclaimed but never used for the refitting of Trident nuclear submarines. It says it will create hundreds of jobs.

But in a letter to Salmond, seen by Scotland on Sunday, Hammond says there is no demand for another container facility and would be further concerned if there was any public funding support for the project. However, the land is owned by Babcock.

Following a seven-week public inquiry last year, ministers are said to be minded to back the plan, which will go to the Scottish Parliament for approval.

Hammond has sent copies of his letter to a number of MSPs, including Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Transport Minister Keith Brown. He claims the inquiry did not properly examine the case for building the facility.

“The proposed facility has no independently justifiable needs case,” he writes. “No proper account has been taken of potential container capacity at Grangemouth specifically or of the other options available on the Forth, or of economic need more generally. In Forth Ports’ view, the proposed facility is completely unwarranted.”

Hammond says the proposal is “fatally flawed” in a number of respects, including an inadequate environmental impact assessment, and says Forth Ports would consider a legal challenge if the project gets ­final approval.

“In our view, Scottish ministers’ decision to adopt the recommendation to approve the order, as contained in the report of the inquiry into the application, with little if any further explanation even on those matters which the reporters chose either to overlook or to leave for Scottish ministers’ decisions, is completely un­justified.

“At Forth Ports we have no issue with new competition from Babcock or others, but we do expect fair treatment and a level playing field. Unfortunately, we do not feel this has occurred in this case.”

He goes on to argue that “this is not the right answer for Scotland” and that “in the interests of justice and proper planning and development of new infrastructure”, Scottish ministers should “review the position” and the Parliament should not approve the order without being satisfied that it meets the national planning framework.

Hammond’s case has been supported by a number of other objectors, including the Freight Transport Association which cast “serious doubts” over the need for the terminal.

A Transport Scotland spokesperson said: “Scottish ministers have accepted the findings of the reporter following a public local inquiry and confirmed that an order for construction of the Rosyth International Container Terminal will be made, subject to parliamentary approval. The development will support local jobs and generate substantial local economic activity, as well as bringing significant benefits to the Scottish economy.

“Scotland’s Second National Planning Framework (NPF2) identifies the need for additional container capacity on the Forth, including Rosyth, and ministers are satisfied that this development accords with it.”

FAST-growing Barrhead Travel is taking up slack in the market left by struggling rival Thomas Cook, including a major push into the corporate travel market and international expansion ambitions.

Next month the firm will launch a new travel shop targeting business customers in Glasgow as it expects to boost sales by £14 million in corporate travel bookings in the next year to 18 months. At the same time, Barrhead is set on conquering the English market with its expanding franchise model. The firm has hired Trevor Davis, a former senior executive from Thomas Cook, to lead its expansion in England.

Sharon Munro, the chief executive of Barrhead, declines to revel in her competitor’s misfortunes but admits the Glasgow-based firm has benefited from the retrenchment of the bigger, listed travel agency as it struggles to manage debt.

Munro added that Barrhead is debt free after she led a management buyout of the business from her father, chairman Bill Munro, in 2007.

The firm has invested £300,000 in expansion in recent months and has developed a new software-based performance management system it calls Nevis. Earlier this month the company formed a partnership with the Midcounties Co-operative, a significant travel business with 54 branches in England. The group will use Barrhead’s new trading platform and the two firms have joined forces to form a buying group for flights and beds. Together the two have a turnover of around £600 million.

Munro said: “We don’t have shops where they are, they don’t have shops where we are. They are going to take our technology and together we feel as if we have the buying power to get better deals and pass the savings on to our customers.”

The Nevis system will also be used to spearhead Barrhead’s expansion in Australia, both licensing the technology to other companies and establishing franchise operations. But Munro adds that a potential acquisition of an Australian business for Barrhead was “still very much on our radar”.

“We have been talking to people in Australia who actually want to buy the system. They are blown away by the technology we have developed.

“We believe we have a great franchise model so we are looking to franchising in Australia, but on top of that we are keen to open our own offices in Australia.”

The company’s flagship corporate travel office will open next month in Glasgow in a former furniture store premises employing 60 people.

“We have been doing corporate travel for some time now. However, the technology we now have and the teams of people we have been building up has allowed us to have this growth.

“Corporate travel is definitely back. People are travelling more than ever before. I don’t think they are travelling first and business class as much but they are definitely travelling.”

LISTED firms that bore the brunt of the backlash over excessive boardroom pay during last year’s “shareholder spring” have been urged to learn lessons from their employee-owned rivals.

Kim Lowe, the out-going managing director of John Lewis’s Glasgow branch, said that the department store chain has “considerable” checks and balances in place to control remuneration.

Five of the employee-owned retailer’s staff, which it calls “partners”, can be elected to sit on its board – alongside five executive directors and three non-executives – and on its remuneration committee.

She added: “The shareholder culture drives very short-term thinking, because it’s just about deriving shareholder value for the next couple of years. Our model allows a much longer-term view.”

Rows over executive pay saw bosses such as Aviva’s Andrew Moss and Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey fall on their swords last year, even though votes on remuneration are only advisory.

From October, Business Secretary Vince Cable will make votes binding, giving investors powers to block excessive pay.

Lowe told Scotland on Sunday that the retailer’s chairman has to present its results to an elected “council” of staff members every year, and members are able to vote to remove him from office, for example if he “suddenly started paying himself silly money”.

The John Lewis group, which also owns supermarket chain Waitrose, has been chaired by Sir Charlie Mayfield since 2007. He earned a basic salary of £825,000 last year – 60 times larger than the average member of staff.

Lowe, who has worked her way up from the shop floor and is due to take over the group’s new flagship store in Birmingham next year, was speaking ahead of the first ­national “employee ownership day”, which will be held on Thursday to promote the benefits on offer to companies and their workers.

Jo Swinson, the UK minister for employee relations and consumer affairs, said firms that adopt this model can experience lower absenteeism and higher productivity because staff are more committed to the business. Employee ownership is an important and growing part of the UK economy. It helps to create both a stronger economy and a fairer society,” she said.

According to the Department for Business, employee-owned companies generate turnover of more than £30 billion, and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has been one of the most vocal proponents of the “John Lewis economy”.

Clegg has pledged that the UK government will set aside £50 million a year to encourage more firms to adopt employee-owned models, along with capital gains tax relief for companies that sell a controlling stake to their staff.

Among the companies that have followed in the footsteps of John Lewis is speech recognition software firm Voice Technologies, which has 24 staff across its offices in Paisley and Sheffield.

Company founder Heather Wylie last month sold a controlling interest to an employee benefit trust for an undisclosed sum, saying that “shared ownership offered a unique and entrepreneurial way forward”.

DUNDEE has the potential to become a world-class base for the offshore wind industry, attracting fresh investment and hundreds of jobs, as the city’s waterfront redevelopment pushes into its next phase.

Backers of the £1 billion masterplan say the ambitious project – one of the biggest urban regeneration schemes in the UK – has reached a critical stage with committed investment topping £500 million.

The landmark halfway total was reached after work started on a series of infrastructure, property and transport projects, including major demolition and building works.

It is expected that additional schemes due to launch this year – including the £32m Olympia swimming pool, the £8m Malmaison hotel on the site of the former Tay Hotel and the commissioning of creative industry units at Seabraes – will release a surge of further investment.

Work is also set to start on the waterfront’s centrepiece: a £45m outpost of London’s Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum. The centre is expected to attract further hotel operators as the city looks to add some 500 bed spaces to its current complement of 1,250.

Mike Galloway, director of city development at Dundee City Council, one of the two partners in the waterfront project alongside Scottish Enterprise, said a key focus now was to grow commercial space within the area.

“The office market has been virtually non-existent for a number of decades,” admitted Galloway. “However, we have had some success recently with a speculative development that is approaching full capacity.

“In particular, we want to have space for companies associated with offshore wind. We believe Dundee is going to be one of the big locations for manufacturing, assembly and maintenance. We are already seeing engineering companies looking to the city as a potential base.”

He said the completion of major infrastructure works would create a series of mixed-use development sites, “shovel-ready to go”.

SCOTTISH housebuilders are finally starting to pick up the pace as rising consumer confidence and government help schemes take effect.

Mactaggart & Mickel chief executive Ed Monaghan said the group will build 20 per cent more homes this year. He said the pick-up is small so far, but he expects a £120 million help-to-buy scheme due to be launched by the Scottish Government in the autumn will give the market a further boost.

He said: “We are undoubtedly seeing a subtle shift in consumer confidence: while sales were steady throughout the last financial year, there has been a detectable upturn in the first half of 2013.

“One of our Ayrshire sites, Greenan Views, recently sold five units in a week, which is a pace of sale we haven’t seen in that location since the downturn.”

But he warned that the recovery is fragile and mortgage availability is still a major drag on the housing market.

Builders south of the Border are already enjoying the benefits of a £5.4 billion package of state loans and guarantees. Listed companies Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey are both expected to report a robust pick-up in sales this week.

Philip Hogg, chief executive of industry body Homes for Scotland, said builders seemed to have turned a corner, but from a very low base. Last year fewer homes were built in Scotland than in any year since 1947.

“Things are looking a little better, but it would be hard for them to be worse,” Hogg said.

THE pensions system could be poised for a radical shake- up following Scotland’s referendum – whatever the outcome – industry insiders say.

Malcolm Paul, chairman of multinational JLT’s burgeoning Scottish business, says differences in life expectancy and demographics north and south of the Border could make the case for a more flexible system.

If Scotland were to vote “yes” in the referendum then the likely date for independence – 2016 – would coincide with the introduction of the flat rate state pension in the UK. At the same time, the UK government will carry out the first of its obligatory five-year reviews of the new ­system.

Paul said that if that coincided with Scotland becoming independent, it could choose whether to take on the new system or not.

“There are a lot of big questions that will arise,” he says. “The state pension age is a big one because the UK government is trying to drive up the retirement age.”

He says Scotland may find that it does not have to introduce the rises in the state pension age due to be phased in across Britain. Because Scots have, on average, a lower life expectancy they could be given more money or allowed to retire early. But Paul warns that set against that the “demographic time bomb” – the problems associated with an ageing population as baby boomers retire – is more acute in Scotland.

However, Paul believes there could be pressure for change even if Scotland remains part of the UK, as the disparity in life expectancy makes the flat rate state pension a poor deal for those who are not likely to live long to enjoy it. He suggests a system that is already being used to address black holes in company schemes could be considered.

“Companies are getting fed up of throwing money into their pension black holes,” he said. “We are finding a lot of interest in looking at alternative solutions, a lot of which involve giving people the flexibility to agree their own terms.”

This allows people to look at taking a pension at an age that suits them and perhaps giving up the index linking of the payout in order to get more money in the early years of retirement, which Paul says can make sense to some people as many pensioners are more active in the early days of retirement.

“Under the usual system the biggest payment someone gets is the one before they die,” he says. “But pensioner inflation is not really like consumer price inflation because people tend to spend less as they get older.”

The problem of black holes in private sector pension schemes would become much worse for many companies that work across both sides of the Border should Scotland become a separate member of the EU. Firms operating in more than one member state come under European pensions rules that would oblige them to address any deficits.

John Wilson, head of research at JLT in Scotland, said under Solvency II rules that apply to other parts of the financial sector, the UK pensions black hole could be as big as £450 billion, although industry measures put it at a still worrying £100bn.

JLT’s Scottish workforce has grown from around 50 to 200 in the last seven months.

Twitter: @DominicJeff78

ON THE face of it, the plan to build a container terminal at Rosyth should be positive news for the economy, creating jobs and a first-class facility for moving goods in and out of the country.

But Babcock’s proposal has run into all sorts of objections, including environmental issues and from Forth Ports, which today turns up the pressure on the Scottish Government for a rethink.

As a rival firm running its own container ports there are obvious reasons why it might object, but its arguments for opposing the Rosyth plan are based more on capacity and the realities of economic growth in the next few years.

A letter from chief executive Charles Hammond to First Minister Alex Salmond spells out the commercial case for halting this plan and suggests the public inquiry last year did not examine a number of issues adequately.

There is supporting evidence for Forth’s case. Scottish business is served by facilities at Grangemouth, Greenock, Freightliner at Coatbridge and to some extent by Teesport. Market commentators say there is enough supply, indeed some say it is over-supplied. The container market was expected to grow at between 5 per cent and 7 per cent a year but actual growth is 2 per cent. A number of container ports have been put on the back burner, including one planned for Hunterston in Ayrshire. Grangemouth is currently working below capacity and could therefore soak up any expansion in the market, potentially for up to ten years.

A niggling worry for some objectors is whether public money is being used to support Babcock’s plans. If so, this issue could end up in the courts.

Lloyds set to be first up for sale

AFTER all the speculation of recent weeks there seems to be some real momentum at last behind selling the taxpayers’ stakes in the part-nationalised banks.

Some have argued for a delay until shares in both Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland have at least reached break-even, and it looks as if they will get their wish in the former if not the latter.

Lloyds continues to stay above the water line, brushing off the recent market slump, and may therefore be showing enough robustness to be readied for a sale.

RBS is a different story. The decision to force chief executive Stephen Hester out of office before privatisation hit the shares badly and confidence in the bank remains low. The government’s holding is now worth about £14 billion against £45.5bn pumped in to rescue it in 2008.

However, UK Financial Investments, the body charged with “looking after” these holdings, last week launched a tender process for advisers to work on privatising the two banks.

This is as clear an indication of government intent as we have so far seen and should provide some encouragement to work-starved investment bankers. Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse are said to be favourites.

Lloyds will certainly be first on the block, and if the price holds it is possible the Treasury’s entire 39 per cent holding could be offered for sale. Currently worth £17bn, it would be a giant privatisation.

Advisers will be appointed to work with RBS, but because of its ongoing underperformance, it looks unlikely to be put on the market for at least a year.

Attack on Leahy hints at troubles

THE extraordinary outburst on Friday by former Tesco chairman Lord MacLaurin at the “sad legacy” of retired chief executive Sir Terry Leahy hinted at the deep-seated issues troubling Britain’s biggest grocery chain.

It also showed the extent to which even the brightest of stars can lose their shine. Leahy has been feted as one of the country’s best bosses, but he is now being remembered for his failures in the US and for the fall in profits that followed his departure.

MacLaurin told shareholders it would take up to three years to turn the company around.

His words will at least offer some comfort to incumbent chief executive Philip Clarke, who will feel the load has been lifted somewhat.

This episode is also the latest to provide some chastening advice to the company and its supporters about the dangers of over-ambition.

Twitter: @TerryMurden1

ONE of Edinburgh’s best-known restaurants is closing at the end of August after failing to find a buyer.

Bar Roma in Queensferry Street had been approached by pub chain Wetherspoon’s, but it is understood those talks have stalled.

Owner Mario Cugini said he and his wife Bibi wanted to retire and had no-one to take on the business, which has been in the city’s West End since 1981.

He said: “The restaurant has not been sold and there is no-one to take over. Yes, it will close at the end of August.”

It appears that potential buyers have not met the asking price. An agent has been appointed but there are not thought to be any other interested parties.

Some staff have already left and the remaining 25 still without other jobs will be made redundant when the restaurant shuts.

Rumours of its closure have been circulating since February and the news will disappoint thousands of regulars and visitors.

Over the years, Bar Roma has been the choice of a number of television and sports stars. Heart of Midlothian Football Club has been among those to hold functions at the restaurant.

Speculation about its closure coincided with the death of a popular waiter. Twenty-five-year-old Dante D’Onofrio died of a rare medical condition.

He had been well known for entertaining diners with his singing and dancing. His death prompted more than 2,500 tributes to Bar Roma’s Facebook page.

SO WHAT is the first thing incoming Bank of England governor Mark Carney has done? An intriguing vignette was provided by the Bank last week when it issued a press notice saying his first “substantive interaction” with the media will be the Inflation Report press conference on 7 August. Please do book early.

Carney, on authoritative accounts, has left behind a Canadian press corps who held him in highest regard. He seems intent on getting off on the right foot here – good media relations being a key tool in his distinctive policy of “forward guidance” which he pioneered in Canada.

He enters the Bank with the highest expectations as a combination of working-class hero, firefighter and action man who simultaneously kept Canadian banks out of trouble while delivering a rate of economic growth that proved the envy of the Western world.

Here is someone who can surely dispel the torpor and policy exhaustion at our own central bank and who can single-handedly break the bonds of the past and energise the Bank and the UK economy into a new era of hope and recovery.

However, I suspect one of Carney’s first and most pressing duties will be to lower these runaway expectations rather than inflate them further. No other governor in the history of the Bank has taken up the role with a greater sense of imminent transformation. Until the era of the raffish Montagu Norman, who held the post for 24 years (1920-1944), a grey train of no fewer than 108 Bank of England governors seldom held the post for more than two years.

They were men of continuity and, above all, stability. They formed a train of deeply conservative, low-profile bookkeepers of the currency and national debt. But even in the 69 years since the Norman era, none of the subsequent eight governors has taken up the post with such an expectation of radical change both in substance and in style.

There are good reasons for Carney to restrain these expectations. First, he may well have a reputation as a champion of loose monetary policy, having been the first major central bank governor to cut interest rates as the storm clouds gathered six years ago. But it is not as if in the UK we have not tested radical action to near exhaustion.

Interest rates have been slashed to their lowest levels for more than a century. The Bank has also engaged in a policy of monetary easing without precedent. It has loosened monetary conditions through a massive £375 billion programme of quantitative easing. Seldom before has the UK central bank bought up more government debt.

It has also collaborated in measures designed to stimulate commercial bank lending to business, and small and medium-sized businesses in particular. Finally, the Bank has stretched its policy of inflation targeting to the extremes of credibility, the 2 per cent inflation target having been breached for most of the past four years. Today, at 2.9 per cent, the inflation rate cannot be allowed to rise much further without undermining public and business confidence in this central pillar of Bank policy.

The air of policy exhaustion around The Old Lady is there for a reason. It has already pulled every lever available to it in a period of radical monetary activism without precedent.

Nor is it the case that Carney will enjoy the same freedom he enjoyed as governor of the Central Bank of Canada. He was not burdened with an independent-minded interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee making decisions on a monthly basis by majority vote. Nor did he have to concern himself with published minutes summarising the arguments and showing which way each member voted. Things are different here.

Former Chancellor Alistair Darling, remarking on the Bank governorship of Sir Mervyn King, famously likened it to the rule of the Sun King, implying that he enjoyed unfettered power. How King would have smiled at that. He does not enjoy such rule over the MPC. Its members have proved themselves over the years to be wayward in their opinions to the point of bloody-mindedness. Chancellor-recommended appointees in the past have ranged from the arch Keynesian David Blanchflower to the utterly unpredictable Willem Buiter.

In recent months, no fewer than six members have regularly turned down King’s pleadings for an additional £25 billion burst of quantitative easing. They have even expressed scepticism over the “forward guidance” approach under which the Bank would commit to holding rates for a period into the future. That, say some, is not at all a good idea and may leave the governor a hostage to fortune. So a major task for Carney in the months ahead will be to persuade this box of frogs of his policy recommendations, and even if he is unsuccessful in this, to sell and promote the Bank’s policies to a weary and sceptical public.

A further burst of quantitative easing now looks questionable given the (albeit glacial) signs of economic upturn and a strengthening housing market, leading to fears that in some areas we are stoking a new house price bubble – a big concern in Canada. Cynics say Carney has got out in the nick of time.

In addition to all this, Carney now finds himself in charge of bank regulation and supervision. Does he feel that bank capital reserve requirements are too strict or too lenient? Should the banks be broken up into “good” and “bad” banks? How soon should the stricken banks Lloyds Banking Group and RBS be returned to private ownership?

The open, approachable charm of Mr Carney may mark a huge and welcome change. Bring it on. But don’t expect the magnitude of our problems to shrink before this Canadian charmer.

Twitter: @Bill_Jamieson

FARMERS in Caithness are poised to tuck into a multi-million pound sales boost after Prince Charles’ Mey Selections brand secured a deal with Campbells Prime Meat to distribute its beef and lamb throughout Europe.

Under the contract, Linlithgow-based Campbells will handle meat reared within 150 miles of the Castle of Mey, which was the Queen Mother’s residence in Caithness. Mey Selections’ meat was served at Prince William’s wedding to Kate Middleton.

The Duke of Rothesay founded the North Highland Initiative (NHI) in 2005 to develop the economy of Caithness, Ross-shire and Sutherland. NHI launched the Mey Selections brand to promote beef, lamb and mutton, with the range now extended to include biscuits and oatcakes.

Products from Berry Good, Caithness Chocolates and Caithness Summer Fruits have also been included in the brand’s Christmas hampers.

David Whiteford, the NHI’s chairman, said the deal with Campbells could be worth £100,000 a week to farmers in the north of Scotland.

“The initiative is about premiumising naturally produced produce from the Highlands,” explained Whiteford. “We do our best to add value and then make sure that value is returned to the producer.

“That’s what the Prince wanted to do when he set up the initiative and what our staff are focused on now.”

Beef from Mey Selections is already going on sale, with lamb due to be added when the season begins.

Whiteford added: “Campbells are the right people to distribute for us – they have the knowledge, staffing and contacts with Scotland’s top chefs. We’re not just looking at the Central Belt though, we want to go to the rest of the UK and Europe and, after visiting China and Japan with Scottish Development International in November, we want to help meet the demand for heritage brands with royal patronage in the Far East.”

The deal with the NHI is the latest step in the recovery of Campbells after its premises in Broxburn burned to the ground in 2009.

The company – which has supplied meat to restaurants including the Kitchin, Martin Wishart and Ondine, as well as Saughton prison in Edinburgh – bounced back by opening its £6 million facility at Heatherfield, near Linlithgow.

In April, accounts filed at Companies House noted that the new site had helped Campbells to overcome the “highest inflation in red meat price in the past 20 years”, allowing it to grow pre-tax profits to £827,901 in 2012 from £302,147, despite sales edging up by just 1 per cent to £50.7m.