Disruptor

For the grand finale of the second year of our Economic Disruptor Awards, sponsored by Julius Baer, we returned to the same atmospheric science-fiction venue: London’s Postal Museum at Mountpleasant, with its still-working Mail Rail miniature underground train that, until 2003, shuttled sacks of letters between the capital’s major sorting offices.
 
Imagine it as a scale model of HS2 and tell us what you think of that whole blighted project, said Spectator chairman Andrew Neil in his prize-giving speech. Imagine it as a time machine that could show us the role of the economic disruptor down the centuries, I said in my own welcoming remarks: if it could take us back to the Stone Age, we’d probably find primitive tribes warring over superstitions that history would forget — but we might also find a geek in a cave thinking, ‘What if I made the wheels on the cart round instead of square?’.