The symbolism of the Olympic flame, last seen meandering through Kent, has been much misunderstood. Forget the propaganda about ‘shining a light on local communities’. When Toby Young took his children to watch the relay pass through Dartmouth, he found it ‘not merely tarnished, but ruined by the heavy-handedness of the sponsors’ — Lloyds TSB,
The biggest mis-selling scandal to break this month was not the one which involved banks forcing small business borrowers to buy expensive interest-rate hedging contracts, under threat of not lending to them at all if they refused. The FSA hasn’t got to the bottom of that one yet: in terms of identifiable victims it could
‘My dad once said that the only time he’d ever heard me say “never” was when I was asked if I’d had enough,’ Bob Diamond told me in 2009. You might guess, given the nine-digit fortune he scooped from Barclays during a 16-year tenure which ended on Tuesday morning, that what he could never get
The great NatWest-RBS computer cock-up has upstaged my personal campaign to expose the lamentable standards of service offered by high-street banks. I was relieved not to find 12 million emails in my inbox from all those whose wages have not been paid or whose house purchases have been held up, and now have to chase
‘Greeks choose austerity over chaos,’ said a typical headline on Monday morning. But in truth the argument for austerity is pretty much lost, and we might as well move on to the argument about inequality — and related arguments about volatility, more of which below. While anti-austerity socialists secured a majority in the French parliament,
In this anxious lull between the Spanish bailout and the Greek election result, the most potent symbol of the continent’s perilous financial state is Madrid’s Puerta de Europa, or ‘Gateway to Europe’. That happens to be the name of the twin skyscrapers that lean towards each other at a sickening angle over the shoulders of
I’m not quite as bowled over by IMF chief Christine Lagarde as the BBC’s Robert Peston seems to be, but I’m an admirer — and I’m finding it hard to shake off a mental image of her as a teenage member of the French synchronised swimming team. That apart, she’s almost alone on the world
While François Hollande was being shoulder-barged by Angela Merkel as they inspected a rained-on guard of honour during the French president’s tense first visit to Berlin, I was enjoying a parallel encounter with military formality in the spring sunshine of Rome. In town to lecture at the Nato Defence College, I shared a staff car
An auction of French government ten-year bonds three days before the triumph of François Hollande met strong demand from investors and produced a borrowing cost of 2.96 per cent, a fraction cheaper than a similar issue in April. This fact told those who noticed it that France was not the story to watch last weekend.
‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,’ wrote Geoffrey Chaucer, long before scientists realised that wind turbines cause climate change by raising night air temperatures. If Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales gave us pungent insights into late 14th-century English life, then its modern equivalent
If we are happy to venerate a Palestinian patron saint — it occurred to me, as I composed these thoughts on St George’s Day — then we can’t really object to a foreign governor of the Bank of England. The idea may offend the self-esteem of indigenous bankers, but that’s the way the betting has
You wouldn’t thank me for filling this column with arithmetic, but the way in which the government has sought to defend George Osborne’s proposed tax-relief cap for charity donations, and the way most broadcasters have tried to challenge it, has displayed woeful if not wilful ignorance of the tax maths involved. It’s as though ministers
Should Bob Diamond of Barclays be paid a whole lot more than Stephen Hester of RBS, António Horta Osório of Lloyds or Stuart Gulliver of HSBC? Arguably he should, for reasons I’ll try to explain, but a group of institutions including Standard Life, Fidelity and Scottish Widows intend to vote against his £17.7 million haul
This week marks the 20th anniversary of John Major’s election victory and my debut in The Spectator. The two events were connected: going to press on the eve of a close poll, the editor needed one more non-political feature — and pulled my essay on the follies of the 1980s City out of the pile
As lead balloons go, last week’s Budget went down faster than James Cameron’s submersible in the Mariana Trench. The closer the small-print scrutiny afterwards, the worse it got. The pro-business measures were hardly sufficient to justify the claim that ‘this Budget unashamedly backs business’ — certainly no small businessman I met that evening, when I
‘The faster the government starts selling its stake, the better for everyone,’ RBS chief Stephen Hester told the British Chambers of Commerce conference last week. In doing so, he opened up what may become the hottest financial debate after the Budget hoo-hah has died down: when and how should the government’s holding company, UK Financial
I wrote here in November that ‘history may judge the HBOS men to have been the worst of the lot’, and the FSA, in its grindingly slow, bureacratic way, is finally about to catch up with them. The regulator has at last issued a ‘Final Notice’ to the Bank of Scotland arm of HBOS to
In my early twenties I spent memorable holidays crewing on a yacht in the Mediterranean. One afternoon we were entering the creek-like port of Ciudadella in Menorca when we realised that a departing car ferry was heading straight for us, gathering speed. Our entire crew, including me, began hollering uselessly and pleading with the youthful
Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s declaration that 2011 would be ‘the year of corporate giving’ to the arts was never likely to be fulfilled, given how tough it is to stay in business these days. Trying to shift the onus on to companies to replace cuts in state arts funding was an obvious political manoeuvre, but
One consequence of the Greek crisis — in which default remains a strong possibility despite the latest bail-out, and either way the Greek economy will be dead for a decade — must surely be a wave of Greek migrants looking for work across the EU. And since they won’t find a welcome between Macedonia and