It’s not every day a former KGB spy invites you to interview him. But Alexander Lebedev is not your typical KGB spy. He’s made billions in stock-market trading, he throws lavish parties in London attended by the likes of Tom Wolfe and J.K. Rowling, and he might just be the most serious critic of Kremlin
The wet weather this summer has made me think about umbrellas, and the curious moral associations they attract. It is not so in the Orient, where they were invented (in China) sometime early in the first millennium bc. There they were designed to protect exalted persons against the sun. They were carried by attendants in
We’ve all been there: the brain stuck in first gear during an interview; an inappropriate remark to a senior colleague or client; uncontrollable shaking before a speech in public. For most of us these are relatively isolated incidents. There are, however, serial offenders whose failure to control their manners and nerves ultimately proves fatal in
Shoppers stay home as rates and floods rise — but there’s a bit of better news for M&S Shoppers have spent these past few weeks sheltering from incessant rain, rising interest rates and renewed threats of terrorism. Fuel- and flood-hit food prices are on an up-trend too, so we must brace ourselves for a spate
Ah, the terrible persistence of the irritating jingle. It’s nearly 30 years since ‘Thousands of parts for millions of cars’ last assaulted our ears, but I’ll bet millions of middle-aged Britons, motorists or not, can render it pretty faithfully. The company behind the jingle was a leaky lifeboat from the sinking British Leyland. It was
Retirement, especially for a prime minister, used to being frantically busy in the full gaze of the public, is a melancholy thing. The younger he — or she — is, the more it hurts, with long years of inactivity and growing oblivion stretching ahead. I often think that the most successful of all British politicians,
In Washington, the campaign to put another Clinton in the White House is well underway. In Argentina, the next president could also be the wife of a man who has held the highest office before. President Néstor Kirchner, who grabbed the top job four years ago after polling just 22 per cent of the vote
On 20 July, one of America’s most influential businesswomen, Cathy Kinney, will swap Wall Street for the boulevards of Paris. Kinney is one of the New York Stock Exchange’s big chiefs — president and co-chief operating officer of the newly merged $20 billion NYSE–Euronext group — and she’s moving to the French bourse’s headquarters at
An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a pub. The Englishman turns to the others and says, ‘What’s that awful smell?’ ‘Och,’ says the Scotsman, ‘it takes a wee while to get used to.’ ‘Ah, so it does,’ says the Irishman, ‘’tis what pubs really smell like when you get rid of the
A MasterCard survey shows that London is now the most important and efficient city in the world — financially that is — and another reveals it is also the most expensive, Moscow alone excepted. The two are connected no doubt. Certainly a lot of successful people live here: over 10,000 of them, I hear, earn
At the end of the second world war, 43 allied nations gathered at Bretton Woods to reconstruct the global financial system. The result was an economic version of Pax Americana: a liberal trading and financial regime centred on US strength. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency and the free world fixed its exchange rates
Funny creatures have begun to appear in Somerset. Little herds of vicuna, llamas and guanaco, and other similar animals. They are farmed for various purposes, chiefly hair. We already have riding camels, but I am expecting camels to appear any moment as a dairy herd. What, can you drink camel’s milk? Certainly. The view of
Amid the acres of coverage devoted to the 40th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most celebrated record in pop history, one irony has been overlooked. The album was considered as ephemeral as any other when it came out, but has grown mightier and mightier; the company that made it, on the
There aren’t many people who can say that Gordon Brown has cut their taxes. In fact, as far as I’m aware there are just managers of private equity funds — and me. The Chancellor’s introduction of the flat-rate VAT scheme in 2002 was so uncharacteristic that it took me a whole year to work out
The £6 billion merger of Saga and the AA is a gift for cartoonists: a company whose ideal customer is Victor Meldrew with a broken fan-belt on the hard shoulder of the A22. To complete a brand conglomerate for grandads — and since all three are owned by private equity funds — why not bring
The company Gordon Brown will be watching most closely as Prime Minister is the polling company most closely watching him. YouGov named Harriet Harman as the deputy best able to help him win the next general election, for example; until that day comes, it will constantly measure Brown’s popular support. YouGov’s polls did not trouble
At my time of life, and in my circumstances, I ought to be calm and unruffled. I should be like a saddhu in a Himalayan cave, whose pulse rate no merely external event in the world of appearance can raise. Instead, whenever I read the Guardian (which is often), a wave of irritation comes over
Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriters always struggled to get her to do the jokes. I once had a similar problem with Shriti Vadera, the former banker who will next week become, arguably, the most powerful woman with a paid job in Downing Street since Lady Thatcher’s departure. Miss Vadera is Gordon Brown’s most trusted policy adviser and
It will come as little consolation to Guy Hands, the financier who complained this week that he must be the last person in Britain still prepared to defend the private equity industry’s generous tax breaks. But I have a confession to make: I, too, am opposed to clobbering private equity funds — and if that
Every city needs a David Webb. Hong Kong, a heaving, sweating shrine to capitalism, cronyism and cartels, is lucky it has the real thing. Shareholder rights and corporate governance remain largely alien concepts in this former British colony, which is about to mark the tenth anniversary of its return to China. It sometimes feels that