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Imagine for a moment that you were sitting in the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral at the royal wedding of 1981, waiting for the mismatched bridal couple to arrive and idly speculating about the best way to save up for a wedding present for their first-born, a generation hence. The odds are that you would not have given much thought to British Government stock, or gilts, as the investment of choice. (This article was written for The Spectator, issue of 21 May 2011).

The most damaging aspect of the Warren Buffett-David Sokol sharedealing episode to my mind is not the issue of who said what to whom and when, or even whether Mr Sokol’s behaviour was illegal – the latter’s actions surely fail in the court of good judgement, regardless of the precise legalities of the situation. The more worrying aspect for any long-standing Buffett admirer is the evidence that his latest big idea was sourced from a list of potential targets supplied, in the first instance, by a corporate financier at Citigroup, from whom Mr Sokol originally got his idea.

We are barely ten seconds into our interview when Jeremy Grantham, onetime bedpan salesman from Doncaster, now a hugely successful money manager in the United States, is off on a favourite tack – mixing it with his competitors in the investment world. In this case what has drawn his ire are some reported comments from a well-known American fund manager whose views I have unwisely chosen to allude to in a recent newspaper column.

My latest contribution to The Spectator explains how I came to be involved four years ago as a founding shareholder and director in Agrifirma, a private company whose business is buying and developing farmland in Brazil. The company currently owns 42,000 hectares of land in the state of Bahia, with a further 27,000 hectares under option.

This will be my last column in this space for a while, as I am taking time off from regular back page writing in order to take up, for a stint, the cause of long term investors in the institutional market. Although I will continue to offer periodic thoughts on the state of the markets on my website, where you can find more details, and an archive of my past columns, it seems like a good opportunity to award some informal gongs to those whose thoughts or actions have most impressed me over the course of the past three years writing for the FT.

Two decades ago, Japan attracted the frenzied admiration of the world. Yet far from becoming the global ‘Number One’, its economy has this year been overtaken by China. Pundits now suggest that Japan’s decline from economic pre-eminence will mirror that of Argentina over the twentieth century. Such gloomy prognostications should whet the appetite of all contrarians.