TS would love to have been a fly on the wall at last week’s lunch in honour of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator/popular hero being feted by Ken Livingstone & co. The event was something of a lefty love-in, with Ken and others saying how wonderful it was that Hugo was standing up to the US, and what an all-round good egg he must be.

TS doesn’t deign to take a view on such matters, but was intrigued to see that Peter Voser, CFO of Shell, was on the guestlist.

Shell clearly has some pretty big stakes in Venezuelan oil, but at the same time it makes you wonder. What does a representative of global capitalism, the beancounter responsible for counting Shell’s almighty 13 billion beans of profits (in pounds sterling) last year, have to say to a man who is on record as saying that ‘capitalism is savagery’ and that it is also the cause of natural disasters around the world?