Iceland the shop should be suing Iceland the country, not the other way around

Iceland wants to sue Iceland for misuse of its name. The former is a north Atlantic island whose fishermen-turned-financiers set standards of irresponsibility in the mid-2000s that made Wall Street’s Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros look like small-town building societies, attracting £20 billion of British depositors’ money into their mismanaged banks as they launched their own national economy into a mad caricature of boom and bust. The latter is a British supermarket chain, founded by Malcolm Walker in Oswestry in 1969 and offering a value-for-money -frozen-food range that is well appreciated by budget-conscious family shoppers. I’d say if anyone has a claim for reputational damage, it’s Iceland the retailer that should be suing Iceland the country.

This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any Other Business’, which first appeared in this week’s Spectator.