Business Diary: March 30

Yorkshire's presence in Gordon Brown's Cabinet has been well-documented, but the region also has its sons – and fans – in the corridors of power abroad.

Martyn Warr, UK Trade & Investment director for Spain and Portugal, grew up in Hull and told Diary of going to watch the Tigers play at Wembley as a child, but the link does not end there.

Giles Paxman, the British ambassador to Spain, isn't lucky enough to have come from Yorkshire but his mother is from Shipley and his father is from Selby.

"I always had a secret ambition to become a Yorkshireman," he said at Leeds in Barcelona, the festival of commerce and culture. "I supported Leeds United and aspired to play cricket for Yorkshire."

When Mr Paxman was growing up, however, the Tykes only took players who born within its borders, so it could never have happened. Is his brother, Jeremy, as keen a fan of God's own county?

Suckers for punishment

Leeds in Barcelona gave Yorkshire businesses a taste of Catalan culture. The Spaniards' clothes were stylish, their hotels luxurious and their tapas tasty.

There was one innovation Diary doesn't want to see in Yorkshire any time soon, however – cheese lollipops.

They were a strange concoction. Cooking wafer-thin pieces of strong-cheese and then attaching them to tiny wooden sticks left the Leeds delegation baffled when they hooked up for a bloggers' event at Hotel Barcelo Raval.

But it was probably better that, for once, Diary laid off the snacks.

Benn in the pulpit

YOU wouldn't have expected veteran Left-winger Tony Benn to love the banking system. So it was hardly surprising that he sought biblical inspiration to condemn greed from the pulpit at York Minster.

Delivering the Ebor Lecture on The Morals of Politics, he said: "We all have to make moral choices and the basis is the same, what is right and what is wrong."

"We all need guidance when tackling problems and I prefer the Ten Commandments to the ethos of the Dow Jones and the FTSE."

He had a tongue-in-cheek response to the question: Should the Bishops be removed from the House of Lords?

Mr Benn responded "Well, of course the Church of England is the oldest nationalised industry – Henry VIII saw to that, but I do think the Church should pick its own Bishops rather than the Prime Minister."

The lectures are put on by an ecumenical group led by York St John University. The next is by Prof Elaine Graham of Manchester University, on April 28 at York St John University. Her subject is: "Crisis or Opportunity? Doing Theology after the Crunch." For more information see www.yorksj.ac.uk/eborlectures

Snow business

AS Yorkshire's business community looks forward to the first blooms of spring, a trainee lawyer from the Leeds office of DLA Piper is facing more snow drifts after travelling to Moscow to spend six months learning the ropes of the Russian legal system.

Rebecca Lightfoot is facing icy conditions on her daily commute to DLA Piper's Moscow office, where she is working as part of the corporate law team.

She said: "Russian law continues to evolve in the commercial market. As a result, the certainties offered in English law are attractive to many domestic and international players in the Russian market."

Ms Lightfoot is spending time in Moscow as part of her two-year trainee contract at DLA Piper.

A welcome Hero

A brewer who is raising thousands of pounds for the benevolent fund of a crack infantry regiment in Afghanistan is searching for a counterpart in Yorkshire to get his new beer called Hero on sale here.

The Benevolent Fund of the Royal Anglian Regiment – whose 1st Battalion has recently lost three soldiers in Afghanistan – is receiving 7 for every cask sold, and 10 pence on each bottle.

Since it was launched, thousands of beer drinkers have been buying Hero in pubs, off licences and Tesco branches.

Wolf Brewery has more than 300 outlets in East Anglia and has now started selling Hero in the Midlands. The aim is to get it on sale in Yorkshire.

Lt Colonel Tony Slater, area secretary of the Royal Anglian Regiment, said: "The Fund is playing a big part in helping soldiers to face the adaptations to their life if they are wounded – and to the families of those who lose their life. There could not be a worthier cause."

Wolf Brewery proprietor John Edwards or the head brewer Derek Dunstan can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected]