When I read news of a fresh strategic plan for Barclays, I seem to hear a ghostly rustling from the corner cupboard in the living room. Could it be a forlorn protest from the dusty bundle of share certificates that are the last vestiges of my late father’s lifelong service to Barclays from junior clerk to deputy chairman? They were a modest farewell reward – 40 years ago, in the era before mega-bonuses for senior executives – that might once have been swapped for a country cottage but today would barely yield enough to pay for his upcoming centenary dinner.

Even the Qatari sheikhs have sold down their Barclays holdings in despair. But out of misplaced loyalty and sentiment, our family has hung on, watching the shares languish at less than a quarter of their pre-2008 price and, in recent times, half the bank’s net asset value. So what relief does chief executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan – Venkat for short and successor to the disgraced Jes Staley – have in mind for us, after expensive advice from a new set of consultants rehashing the recommendations of their predecessors?

Greater focus on the retail sector, of which the recent £600 million purchase of Tesco’s banking business is a signal, and on wealth management; concentration on higher-value corporate clients; a drive for better returns from the trading floor and a reallocation of capital away from high-risk investment banking; oh, and another round of cost-cutting. Heard it all before? I’ll say we have, several times over.

Moribund stock-market valuations of banks that ought to be blue-chip building-blocks of every pension fund and small investor’s portfolio – reflecting the failure of those banks to steer a straight and prudent course from one decade to the next – are among the greatest failings of modern capitalism. Hope for Barclays shareholders rests not on a cunning new plan for capital growth but on the promise of higher dividends and, more significantly, large-scale share buybacks. Perhaps Venkat will pop round and help me clear out the corner cupboard.

Captain Staunton

What are we to make of Henry Staunton, the sacked Post Office chairman who has emerged blinking into the gladiatorial arena to face the wrath of Kemi Badenoch? The fact that he was already 74 years old when appointed in December 2022 tells us that the headhunters may have struggled to produce a stellar shortlist. The fact that his Companies House record lists almost 100 directorships – all the way from W.H. Smith (where he was chairman) and Legal & General (vice chairman) to Kingswood Lawn Tennis Club – speaks of a vastly experienced stickler for corporate procedure: W.H. Smith in particular is known for its high management standards.

But the chairmanship of a single-shareholder public-sector company such as the Post Office can be uncomfortably powerless: ‘You’re a useful idiot if needed,’ as one close observer put it to me. Out of the loop as Staunton seems to have been – he had not even met Badenoch while he was in post – most of us had never heard of him until his sudden ousting. We’ll be hearing a good deal more, including the curious subplot of Badenoch’s bullying allegation against him of which he denies all knowledge. But the impression so far is of an old-school, upright, guileless operator – more Captain Mainwaring than Indiana Jones, you might say, wholly ill-equipped for the political snakepit into which he was parachuted.

French toast

I’m beginning to feel sorry for Électricité de France. Across the Channel, the state-owned power company has returned to profit after a low patch when several of its nuclear reactors were out of action. But in Somerset, its Hinkley Point C nuclear project is an unending challenge of engineering and finance. It has more than doubled in estimated cost – now heading for £46 billion – since it was approved by a divided EDF board in 2016, and its completion date has shifted from optimistic suggestions of 2023 to the latest target of 2031 if we’re lucky.

Meanwhile, EDF has taken an £11 billion ‘impairment charge’ in its accounts for Hinkley and will absorb more than its share as time goes by because the 32 per cent minority shareholder, China General Nuclear Power CO, has taken its bat away. The Chinese went into a sulk after being excluded from the follow-on Sizewell C project on the Suffolk coast, which has instead become a joint venture between EDF and the UK government.

It’s barely worth guessing what Sizewell might cost or when it might be completed. Hinckley and Sizewell are each intended to provide power for the equivalent of six million homes (13 per cent of national demand between them) but the greater the problems at Hinkley, the smaller the chance of Sizewell moving forward as planned, even though its predecessor station, Sizewell B, is due to shut down in 2035. That’s a huge gap to fill with wind turbines and if it’s all a fiasco in a decade’s time, it’s EDF that the politicians will be sure to blame.

Beats me

On the value-for-money eating front, my latest discovery is Mar i Terra in Gambia Street, Southwark, offering authentic tapas and robust rioja for around £35 a head. And a wider search for unusual businesses that please the customer took me last week to a basement in the hinterland of Old Street station, where Mad World Fancy Dress offers 35,000 costumes for hire.

I had been asked to return a pair of gendarme uniforms, rented for a theatrical project – but when I emptied the bag it also contained two long black plastic truncheons, evidently sourced elsewhere. ‘What on earth am I going to do with these?’ I asked the handsome manageress as she passed them back to me. ‘Well, m’darling,’ she grinned, ‘have you forgotten it’s Valentine’s Day?’ Whatever she meant, her glittering treasure cave is worth a detour.