To the Dorchester for the annual feast of industrial self-abuse that is The Grosser Gold Awards. As usual, they were rolling in the aisles - but this had less to do with the 'entertainment' on offer than the booze, which had been sourced at a quid a pop from the increasingly arid grocery desert that is Asda.

Certainly the Niersteiner Schlechtes Pissental was flowing freely at Bondy's table where, Daniel Craig-style, Agent Orange had unhooked his Ronald McDonald bow tie and was engaged in lively conversation with a succession of young cocktail-dressed retail lovelies who seemed beguiled by his tales of derring-do at the crap end of the supermarket business .

But at least he was faring better than the Tesco contingent, where the charming Lucy Neville-Rolfe-Harris was standing in for El Tel, as he couldn't be facked to pick up his meagre scrap of token iron. Poor Lewshy. She had been backed into a corner by ex-banker Jason 'Little' Gissing, founder of the catastrophically cash-degenerative Ocado, who was giving Her Rolfeness a hard ride on Ocado's price-matching pledge with Tesco and the ASA's recent ruling that it was a load of bull.

All of this provided a welcome distraction from a mumbling keynote speech by Vince 'Dr Death' Cable, which reasserted the Liberal Democrats as the first choice of drooling geriatrics across Britain.

Why The Grosser doesn't choose me as its guest speaker I'll never know. So, I sat at the bar, sipping on my Underberg shandy, congratulating myself on a job well done for Peter Marks of the Co-op. He's a sly one, Marksy. A few weeks ago, at his behest, I slipped a document to the Daily Telegraph, involving a few items of expenditure incurred by some of my MP 'friends'.

It proved just the distraction he needed, such that news of his new £100m HQ and the couple of million in bonus he's copped this year went under the radar. Now you don't get THAT on the Divi.