Financial Times writer Lucy Kellaway has admitted making up a letter which appeared in the paper’s agony aunt column yesterday.
In the letter, ‘director, male, 50’complained that: ‘My wife, who works at the same company as me, has for some months been conducting an affair with our chief executive….. I find myself having to work directly for the man who has cuckolded me – which is intolerable to my pride.”
As the Daily Mail reports today, ‘avid followers of scandal within the Square Mile quickly put two and two together and came up with. . . the Aviva triangle.”
This was a minor scandal in the City last month in which the £2.2m a year boss of insurance giant Aviva, Andrew Moss, admitted have a relationship with a junior member of staff who was married to head of human resources Andrew Moffat.
According to the Mail, there was widespread speculation in the City that Moffat had written the letter to the FT himself.
But FT writer Kellaway last night told the Mail that she wrote this particularly letter herself saying: “None of the letters are made up out of the blue, entirely. Seventy-five or 80 per cent of the problems are sent in directly by readers.
“The other ones are based loosely on problems that have either happened to my friends or that I know have occurred.
“It’s a glancing reference to the Aviva situation. I thought that was terribly, terribly interesting on a general point, a good variation on the normal eternal triangle.
“ll I was trying to do is raise topical problems in general. I am definitely not giving advice to Mr Moffat. I don’t know the ins and outs of the situation.”
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