So Anna Nicole Smith — the poor, talentless Texan girl who by virtue of the most enormous bosom became a stripper in a Houston clip joint and married one of its regular customers, a wheelchair-bound oil billionaire 63 years her senior — is to be the subject of a new opera that will receive its
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business It’s never easy to know what the Mayor of London really thinks — as many of us at The Spectator can attest from weekly experience during his benignly idiosyncratic editorship. His opposition to a third runway at Heathrow, and his espousal of an apparently fantastical alternative scheme to move
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Who’s the Manchurian candidate? That’s what I want to know. Even Tony Woodley, the hatchet-chinned joint general secretary of the Unite union, who has pursued a decade-long mission to cripple the competitiveness of the British airline industry, must realise that the timing of the BA cabin-crew strike is catastrophic
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business No sooner do I confess (6 March) to having dabbled in the dark art of off-balance-sheet finance, than along comes an official report into the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm led by the monstrous Dick Fuld, that reveals the mother of all financial disappearing tricks.
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business A dark hour imprisoned in a gridlocked multi-storey car park close to Old Trafford on a home-match evening gave me an opportunity to ponder what was once called ‘the beautiful game’. I was a Chelsea fan in my youth — the heroic era of Cooke, Wilkins and Droy —
One tried and tested rule in investment is that the bigger and more widely shared the worry, the less likely it is to be realised. Remember Y2K and the Sars epidemic? Both produced warnings of global disaster. Neither turned out to be anything like the threat that doomsters had predicted. Contrast that with the subprime
Barbie and Dr Who are perhaps not the first names that come to mind if you’re looking for things to collect for profit. Barbie and Dr Who are perhaps not the first names that come to mind if you’re looking for things to collect for profit. They’re hardly van Gogh, but they have been commanding
The permatanned television ‘entertainer’ Dale Winton is hosting an unintentionally hilarious series of commercials on daytime television these days. Using the same format as The Antiques Roadshow, the ads for something called CashMyGold show members of the public sitting round a table with Winton and an ‘expert’ who values their gold trinkets. They beam in
Ian Cowie says some of the Continent’s best companies are offering mouthwatering dividend yields these days Pity the poor estate agents. Now there’s a phrase you don’t see very often. Barely had they begun to market Spanish villas and French gîtes as bargains because of the weak euro, than the pound began its precipitous decline.
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I can’t claim to have invented the off-balance-sheet sleight-of-hand used by the Greek government, under the guidance of Goldman Sachs, to beggar itself so spectacularly. But I was certainly a pioneer in the field. Long ago, at Barclays, I devised a scheme to help a famous brewery (now, needless
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business And so to VAT — an opening that I realise sounds about as enticing as a job ad for a shorthand typist in the Prime Minister’s office. Frankly, I doubt even Bob Monkhouse had a decent gag about VAT in his repertoire. But like many things that are not
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business ‘I don’t want to be treated like a criminal,’ a senior Barclays trader told me recently, in a slightly menacing European accent. That gives you a clue that he was not Bob Diamond, the bank’s American president, or John Varley, its very English chief executive, who have both foregone
Richard Northedge has unearthed confidential papers that reveal the Bank of England and the Treasury at loggerheads over a banking collapse 35 years ago In the permanently uneasy truce between Threadneedle Street and Whitehall, Bank of England governor Mervyn King has never been shy of publicly criticising the Treasury. But confidential files on a banking
I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. Motor insurance, household insurance, pet insurance. Some, like cover for your car, you have to have by law. Other stuff, like cover for your cat or the contents of your house, you don’t.
Food security is the new energy security. So says Susan Payne, chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, a Surrey-based company which claims to run the biggest agricultural fund in Africa following the launch of its first fund less than 18 months ago. Payne, a Canadian who cut her teeth as an emerging-markets expert first at
Few individuals better personify the eccentric, combative and rarefied world of medal collecting than Michael Ashcroft, the businessman and controversially deep-pocketed Tory party eminence grise. A self-made man whose fortune is estimated by the Sunday Times at £1.1 billion — more than the entire net worth of Belize, the tiny Central American state he calls
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I was sorry to hear Gillian Tett, the FT’s fragrant financial commentator, calling the eurozone’s southern members ‘pigs’ last week. In sunnier times, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain were referred to collectively as ‘Club Med’, but lately the acronym of their initial letters has come into common usage, with
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Will I join the ticker-tape parade to welcome back Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Congressman Henry B. Steagall of Alabama? Well, I might lurk in the crowd, but I certainly won’t be cheering. These venerable legislators sponsored the US Banking Act of 1933 which built a wall between
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business If you don’t follow hospitality-trade news closely, you could be forgiven for thinking of Mitchells & Butlers as a Midlands-based brewery notable for its handsome Edwardian pubs. But it has not been that for decades, and if it was once an icon of progress in the beer trade, its