Dashwood: Put your Hands together for the Guy and Jerry show

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Women may still be struggling to reach the upper echelons of the Footsie boardrooms. But the fairer sex rule the roost at The Rocco Forte Collection, the luxury hotels group behind The Balmoral in Edinburgh and Manchester’s The Lowry, at least.

Dashwood hears Giancarla Alen-Buckley, the sister of chairman and chief executive Sir Rocco Forte, and wife of RAB Capital founder Michael Alen-Buckley, has been made a non-exec director.

Sir Rocco’s two daughters Lydia and Irene, meanwhile, have been given jobs on the restaurant and branding divisions of the company respectively, after “learning the ropes” since their teens.

Girl power. Dashwood only hopes Sir Rocco, the only male Forte shareholder in the 99pc family-owned business, alongside his three sisters and his wife, Lady Aliai Forte, isn’t feeling too henpecked.

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No-one said running the world’s second-largest arms dealer would be easy.

But BAE Systems’ newly installed chairman, Sir Roger Carr, looked so “floored” by tricky questions on Bahrain and Saudi Arabia at last Wednesday’s annual meeting, that even the protesters dressed in ironic combat gear – complete with non-regulation facial hair – felt sorry for him.

Given that Sir Roger had to endure a BAE remix of the Jessie J song “Money” that included the line: “You just wanna make the world hurt,” Dashwood sympathises.

No wonder an exasperated Sir Roger declared: “This is a pantomime.”

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harriet.dennys@telegraph.co.uk

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