Get Me Out of Here! last year, is alleged to have stormed out of the former premier’s London home saying, “Lady Thatcher, you were a great prime minister but you are a terrible mother”.Mr Aitken, jailed for perjury in 1999, had a two-year relationship with Carol Thatcher that he ended just after the Conservatives won power in 1979.Writing in detail about his friendship with the Thatchers for the first time, Mr Aitken reveals intimate details of their family life. Lady Thatcher’s friends sprang to her defence yesterday after Jonathan Aitken revealed intimate details of her “dysfunctional” family life. The former prime minister felt guilty that she had failed as a mother, had a chilly relationship with her daughter and was rarely, if ever, physically affectionate, according to Mr Aitken’s latest memoirs.
He also claims that Carol believes her brother Mark has received “an over-large slice of the inheritance cake” and details recent clashes with her mother.Carol Thatcher, who won ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… The ongoing refusal by the Government to properly compensate people who lost out when their employers went bust is a serious fly in the ointment.n n n Whisper it quietly, but carpetbaggers are back. Kent Reliance, a medium-sized building society based in Chatham, has dropped rules requiring speculators opening accounts with it to assign any future windfall rights to charity.

The society says it now welcomes applications for membership from carpetbaggers.So should you open an account? Well, while there’s no prospect of Kent Reliance staging the sort of demutualisation seen at societies such as Halifax in the Nineties (when members received windfalls worth thousands of pounds), there have already been three building society takeovers announced this year in which members have been promised smaller payouts.Just this week, for example, Newcastle said it would take over the Universal Building Society, the members of which will now get a few hundred pounds each if they back the merger.Kent Reliance says no deal is planned – but you never know, and £100 gets you membership rights.. And therein lie two major worries still to be dealt with.The first is that many employers will feel justified in reducing the pension benefits they offer to the minimum provided by the NPSS, in which case total pension savings will fall.Second, we still have to tackle the current lack of trust in pensions if we are to persuade people to save. Add in the typical pension likely to be produced by Lord Turner’s new National Pension Savings Scheme (NPSS) and you still won’t be much past the 40 per cent mark.Could you live on a pension worth just more than a third of the wages you were earning before retirement? The answer for most people is likely to be a pretty resounding no.In other words, you will have to make additional savings in order to be sure of a decent standard of living in retirement. The Government’s failure to offer all British citizens a basic state pension irrespective of the tax and national insurance they have paid is disappointing. But reducing the national insurance contributions required will help tackle the fact that less than half of all women qualify for the full basic state pension.So, can we say that we are now close to solving the pensions crisis? Here, unfortunately, the answer is less positive: we may be nearer to a solution, but serious challenges remain.Above all, even those who qualify for the full state pension will still only receive an income worth 30 per cent of the average wages earned by people just coming up to retirement. So persuading them to even consider reform has been an achievement in itself.Nor should we be too concerned that not every single recommendation made by the Pensions Commission has made its way into the White Paper.The fact that the link between earnings and pensions will not be restored until 2012, rather than 2010, is no disaster.

There are no votes in the issue, and, if the current problems are not tackled, the ramifications will not be felt until well after both the Chancellor and the Prime Minister have left politics. That we even have a White Paper represents huge progress on a year ago – for that alone, Lord Turner of Ecchinswell deserves huge credit. This time last year, it seemed inconceivable that ministers would be prepared to grasp the nettle of raising the state retirement age or, after years of refusing to countenance it, to accept the case for the restoration of the link between earnings and the basic state pension.
Lord Turner had to drag both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair kicking and screaming to the pensions reform table. In all of the arguments about the merits and failings of the White Paper on pensions reform, one truth should not be overlooked. “This is something that needs to be made easier for people to do for that reason alone.”.

However, most people only consult their files after they have been turned down for credit.”Monitoring your file is also an important weapon in the battle against identity theft,” Stamp added. “One in three people who consult their credit reference files say that they have found an error in the information held about them, so this is really crucial.”Under data-protection laws, everyone has a right to request details of their files from credit reference agencies, which lenders access when they are making decisions about applications for financial services such as loans. Currently, people have to check their files with several different agencies, including Equifax, Experian and CallCredit.
And consumers generally have to pay for each search – a £2 fee is typical – though individual agencies have started to make special offers or free trials.”This is something that should be free to consumers all the time,” said Barry Stamp, managing director of the new agency. The service will enable anyone in the UK to check the information that lenders hold about them through one online check. The Credit Reporting Agency, which has access to the files on individuals held by all of the UK’s major reference agencies, will offer the service locally from next week, and nationwide in August. A Cornwall-based credit- reference agency is to launch a free online service ( www.annualcreditreport.co.uk) available to anyone who wants to check their credit file. Longer term, however, there are going to be lots of new opportunities, especially in volatile emerging markets, for the younger generation.jd independent-investor .

The jury is still out on the current setback in share prices. My best guess is that we are probably in for a long and unrewarding summer, which may well become a cyclical bear market. The fact that stock markets still appear reasonably valued against historical benchmarks is neither here nor there.A dollar crisis would be ugly and cannot be discounted. Anyone with the bulk of their investing or house-owning life ahead of them has no real interest in permanently rising share and house prices – in fact the opposite.Different generations legitimately have different interests in (and different expectations) from markets, which is why the changing demographic profile of most Western countries will in time have an impact on future returns from shares and bonds.In the short term, however, we’ll all continue to worry when markets fall suddenly. How do young people gain from house prices rising to record levels every year? How do they benefit from stock markets at all-time valuation highs? They don’t. If you are investing for your retirement 20 years away, it may give you a warm feeling that your fund grows at 10 per cent a year for the first 10 years, but what matters much more is what the growth rate is in the second 10 years.In fact, the odds are that you will end up with more money if prices fall rather than rise in the fist 10 years, as your entry cost will be much lower, and the eventual returns, if you believe in reversion to the mean, that much higher.So, just as with the housing market, much depends on where you are in your personal investment cycle. Buy low, sell high is not a complex idea to understand.The longer your time horizon, the more important your entry price becomes.