When I first moved to Britain in 1995, after a misspent youth in France, there were few Gallic accents to be heard outside the tourist hotspots. The long-established community in South Kensington had been joined by a growing number of French students at institutions such as the London School of Economics, but that was about
How disappointing it is that our legislators spend so much of their time arguing about reform of the House of Lords when the whole of Parliament is crying out for reform. The House of Commons just carries on as though nothing has happened in the way of a European Parliament with 78 MEPs, or a
I suspect gluttony, the excessive consumption of food and drink, was the first of the deadly sins to be committed. The least glamorous of them too. It is universal today, to judge by the number of fatties and the stomach-heaving coverage of food, restaurants, chefs and booze in the media. Ugh! It was always thus.
Guillaume Pepy doesn’t look like a man in a hurry. An elegant 47-year-old Frenchman with impeccable manners, he doesn’t look like an archetypal railwayman either, which may be because he isn’t. It’s true that he’s an énarque, a graduate of France’s elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, but he’s also been both a judge and a market-research
The regulator of premium-rate telephone services, ICSTIC, is investigating television companies which dangle prizes before viewers’ eyes and then make it extremely difficult to claim them. When it has finished with that, perhaps the watchdog might turn its attention to a similar scam: Gordon Brown’s tax credits. In last month’s Budget, the Chancellor held out
It’s bleak, cold and nearly dusk at Kingspan’s industrial estate at Holywell in north Wales. Gene Murtagh runs up a ladder to show off a roof garden made with Kingspan’s insulated panels, which are being tested to see how much soil they can take. Roof gardens are a must-have for all self-respecting eco-warriors — like
To Armoury House, headquarters of the Honourable Artillery Company, for lunch with the recruiting officer — not with a view to joining up, though the PT would do me good, but to inspect the morale of this ancient City institution and inquire how it is adjusting to the pressures of the modern world, military and
Noah was the first believer in climate change. He saw it coming and acted in time. So it’s odd he is not the hero of the greens. But then they are all atheists. The two things go together, for being green, a secular form of pantheism, is a substitute for religion. Hence the fanaticism, so
How much do you hate Big Brother? A lot perhaps; but enough to welcome the demise of Channel 4? This is a real possibility: an Ofcom report due in a few days time will detail just how precarious Channel 4’s finances are becoming. While the report’s contents are still unknown, the challenges C4 faces are
Gordon Brown’s 11th and final Budget was a masterpiece of spin and obfuscation, with his headline-grabbing reductions in the basic rate of income tax and corporation tax more than made up for by a series of stealth tax raids. On that point, my friends and I are in complete agreement. But for the first time
In Bond Street tube station an ad catches my eye every morning: ‘140 million people, 9th largest market in the world, 42 billion tonnes of bitumen, 3rd largest movie industry in the world, Africa’s fastest growing telecommunications market. Nigeria …it’s more than what you think it is.’ The effect is slightly ruined by the grammar
In 1987, shortly after joining Christie’s auction house in London as a 23-year-old English Literature graduate from Oxford, Jussi Pylkkanen nervously approached the head of the Impressionists department, James Roundell, and asked if he could transfer to his team. ‘He was a kind of god in the company. He’d just sold Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to
Ever wanted to kill your boss? Well, now you can — and, as long as it doesn’t become a regular occurrence, you won’t even have to pay tax on the cost of the exercise. Welcome to the wacky world of employee benefits and workplace incentives. Here, of course, the corporate regicide is imaginary — the
Those who fear that private-equity bidders, if they secure control, will destroy national icons such as Boots and Sainsbury’s, might consider that J. Sainsbury fared pretty well as a private company for 104 years before it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1973. Family control with its paternalistic overtones may appear different from highly
The Luftwaffe blitzed Plymouth for two months in 1941 and destroyed 20,000 houses, 100 pubs, 42 churches, 24 schools, eight cinemas and six hotels. In a symbolic act of defiance many of the survivors formed up behind the lady mayoress and danced on the Hoe, where Sir Francis Drake had played his similarly symbolic game
Art is not going to the dogs in every field. Take flower painting. The Ancient Egyptians were depicting garden scenes from about 2000 bc, especially in private tombs, painting with delight and verisimilitude plants such as the mandrake, the red poppy, cornflowers and (a favourite) the blue and white lotus. In Europe, mediaeval and Renaissance
Jamie Oliver would make an excellent investment manager. Not because he’s moonlighting as a private-equity mogul — although his rival influencer of public opinion, the rockstar/philanthropist Bono, is doing exactly that — but because Jamie knows that in putting together a good dinner, or even a single dish, two aspects are vitally important. All the
Before every Budget, for as long as memories extend, stock-brokers and fund managers have written to the Chancellor telling him that unless stamp duty on share purchases is abolished, the Square Mile will shrivel to nothing. Nowadays, the pre-Budget report gives lobbyists a second annual opportunity to make these special pleadings, while word-processors have made
Even before the world’s stock markets had their latest wobble two weeks ago, an interesting debate was gaining currency at some lunch tables in the City. As always, the debate in the moneyed classes is primarily about risk. It’s only those without money who spend their time worrying about beating the market and making the
When China sneezed on 27 February, the whole world caught cold. Within a few hours the Shanghai composite index plunged 8.8 per cent, its biggest one-day fall since February 1997, causing Hong Kong’s markets to shiver. The contagion quickly spread to Japan, Korea, Australia and India. Before the day was out, leading stocks in Europe