Marks & Spencer was a 20th-century paradigm of better business: a trusted brand and a benign employer that built strong relationships with suppliers and generated handsome returns for shareholders. Then its performance began to fade, as one management team after another failed to keep pace with retail trends in-store and online. By August 2020, when
Let’s talk about Fujitsu. In particular, let’s ask why the Japanese multinational IT supplier has not been taken to court, or heavily fined, or barred from bidding for new public-sector contracts, for the faults of its Horizon sub-post-office system and the mishandling of pleas for help from hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters who were wrongfully convicted.
A giveaway Budget in March preceding a general election in May against an improving economic backdrop: that, we’re told, is Downing Street’s favoured scenario. But still the election is Keir Starmer’s to lose, so here’s my start-the-year advice to him. Don’t bang on about Rishi Sunak being too rich; don’t make immigration the issue, because
It’s 10 o’clock on a Friday evening in early December. My crowded northbound train departed King’s Cross two hours late and has lost two more between Newark and Retford. Overhead line trouble, we’re told; engineers on the line. I’ve read this week’s Spectator from cover to cover. I’ve exchanged emails with friends in Los Angeles,
What position should the distant observer take on the COP28 conference in Dubai? That the sight of 70,000 delegates flying into a desert oil state from around the world to discuss human impacts on climate change is beyond satire and that its proceedings are never likely to rise above Greta Thunberg’s encapsulation of all such
My eye was caught by a passage of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement last week that other pundits, intent on analysing tax impacts, largely skipped past. As part of ‘progressing further capital market reforms to boost the attractiveness of our markets and the UK as one of the most attractive places to start, grow and list
Even the best-run companies have occasional leadership crises. But if you asked ChatGPT to come up with a blockbuster boardroom-bloodbath movie scenario, I doubt it would propose anything as extreme as this week’s events in its own San Francisco-based parent company, OpenAI. Chief executive and co-founder Sam Altman was fired last week for failing to
‘Place nose on dot.’ That’s what my screen is telling me to do as the first step in a ‘liveness’ test I must complete to be accepted as a signatory on a club bank account. But if I align the image of my face with the dot, nothing happens. If I press my nose to
In the New York trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange, there was never a moment when he looked like talking his way to freedom: he was found guilty on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy and now awaits what’s likely to be a very long sentence. Justice has been swift
When I wrote in July that Dame Alison Rose’s forced exit as chief executive of NatWest in the wake of the Nigel Farage scandal was ‘unnecessary’, many readers vehemently disagreed with me. Out she went, Treasury ministers having steamrollered the NatWest board’s brief attempt to hold her in post – and a subsequent Information Commissioner’s
Imagine you’re Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, drafting your Autumn Statement for delivery in three weeks’ time. Bookies’ odds for a Tory general election win have moved out to six-to-one (against Labour’s dead-cert one-to-seven) following by-election wipe-outs. The Lib Dems look set to nab your South West Surrey seat if you don’t stand down anyway. And you
A 10 per cent increase in oil prices translates to a 0.15 per cent loss of global GDP and a rise of 0.4 per cent in global inflation, says Gita Gopinath, deputy managing director of the IMF. Before Hamas launched its assault on Israel on 7 October, the Brent Crude barrel price had already moved 20
Market sentiment around the possibility of failures in the banking world remains as febrile as ever. Or so we might judge from coverage of Metro Bank – which reports suggested might have been edging towards collapse before finding a new owner over the weekend. Metro was the brashest of the ‘challenger banks’ that sprouted after
If the broadcaster and eco-warrior Chris Packham describes something as ‘an act of war against life on Earth’, sensible people might suspect that it’s probably, on balance, a good thing. Such is the case with the Rosebank field – the UK’s largest remaining undeveloped reserve of oil and gas, in deep waters west of Shetland,
In a fantasy world of wise government vision and decision-making, HS2 would have been announced in November 1964, shortly after the Tokyo Olympics. Visitors to those games saw the future in the form of the Tokaido Shinkansen – the first Japanese ‘bullet train’, which raced 320 miles from the capital to Osaka, carrying 1,300 passengers
Bernard Looney, the fallen BP chief, always had a certain swagger about him. I’ve no idea whether he was unsafe in taxis, but he was certainly prone to unguarded remarks. ‘Not every barrel of oil in the world will get produced’ was a bold way, back in 2018, to introduce BP shareholders to the idea
Amid reports of Chinese spies in Westminster, we learn that Huawei – the telecoms manufacturer western governments shun for fear of cyber espionage – has launched a smartphone containing microchips more advanced than anything China was previously thought capable of making. Some analysts say China is now ahead of the US in tech fields ranging
It would be churlish not to celebrate revisions from the Office for National Statistics that tell us the UK is not, after all, the post-Covid invalid of the G7. Contrary to previous figures suggesting we had struggled to regain pre-pandemic levels of economic output, it turns out that our gross domestic product passed that benchmark
The news that Heineken, the Dutch brewer, has sold its business in Russia to a local buyer for a token $1 – at a loss of €300 million, but with job guarantees for 1,800 Russian workers – raises moral issues about when and how multinationals should withdraw from pariah states. A database compiled by Yale
I have a memory picture of an urban highway in Shenzen, southern China. Recently built, with abundant flowering shrubs planted along its central reservation, it was lined as far as the eye could see by uncountable apartment towers, many of them unfinished. This was 2009 and it was my first glimpse of the debt-fuelled property
