Any other business

Making jokes is hard, and is certainly no laughing matter

The most valuable people on earth are those who can make you laugh. Laughter is the great restorative and rejuvenator. I’m surprised more philosophers have not written about it: only boring Bergson. In recent years the people who have made me laugh most — ‘shriek’, as Nancy Mitford called it — are Carla, Leonie and

Leadership, clarity and a very thick skin

If you get up early enough you might spy the solid frame of Allan Leighton running round one of the London parks before he pays a surprise visit to a Royal Mail delivery office. The reaction of the postmen and women is usually the same. ‘They always say, “Oh s***, it’s the chairman”,’ Leighton laughs.

Every home should have a hedge fund

John Andrews says investing is like motoring: it’s not the vehicle that’s dangerous but the way it’s driven Dave wins millions on the lottery, and the first thing he does is sprint down to the nearest Ferrari showroom and jump into the latest model with extra-deep bass woofers and a little fold-down table for his

Don’t leave it all to Gordon by mistake

Ian Cowie says the simplest ways of avoiding inheritance tax are the best — especially when the law keeps changing If there is one thing worse than paying inheritance tax, it is discovering at the graveside that an expensive IHT-avoidance scheme has proved a waste of money, in addition to what you are going to

No wise man, and no great artist, leaves God out

I can perfectly well understand why someone should be an agnostic. But to be an atheist — to deny flatly and without qualification the existence of God — is to me wholly unsympathetic. The depth of folly, indeed, and not without malice to us all. It makes little sense in reason. For if it is

Why Google has already passed its peak

If you happened to be scripting a James Bond movie and were looking for a role model for a fabulously sinister corporation, there can be little doubt where you would look for inspiration today. Gold no longer matters to the global economy, oil is running out, and old-style media magnates are too busy fretting about

Bear market strategies

Ever thought of investing in teddy bears? Before you collapse in a fit of laughter, consider the fortunate person who found a large Steiff teddy bear abandoned in a skip and took it to Christie’s, where it sold for over £7,000. Or the person who sold a Steiff ‘teddy girl’ to the Yoshihiro Sekiguchi Museum

Where’s the beef? What Cameron has to do to win the business vote

Simon Nixon says the Conservatives should start saying a lot more about tax cuts and deregulation and a lot less about ‘work–life balance’ To see where business stands in the Conservative leadership’s current list of priorities, take a look at next week’s party conference agenda. The platform that used to proclaim the Thatcherite gospel of

Secret admirers: Frogs and rosbifs

The relationship between Britain and France, in business as in so many other things, seems always to have been built on incomprehension, or at least on very different points de vue. The two former great colonial powers are said to have built their empires on very different institutional models, for example: trading posts or comptoirs

Britain is not America’s economic poodle

Irwin Stelzer argues that in trade and finance, Anglo–US relations are surprisingly well balanced Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with America is not confined to foreign policy. In more ways than one, our economies are interconnected in special ways, with neither being the other’s ‘poodle’. Start with finance, where Britain seems set to be the dominant partner,

The mystery of Moscow’s empty supermarket shelves

My local supermarket in Moscow is, by any standards, a well-heeled place. It’s called the Alphabet of Taste, and its mission is to present its wealthy Moscow consumers with refined new ways of parting with their money. The deli counter offers more than 80 cheeses (including such exotica as Bûche d’Affinois and two sorts of

A vision in lilac driving a world-class business

Rupert Steiner meets Bupa chief Val Gooding, one of Britain’s most successful female bosses A silhouette of a faceless giant hangs on Bupa’s atrium wall. The piece is bisected and has vaguely medical undertones, appropriate for the corporate offices of a private healthcare group. But the parallels do not stop there. Bupa has another almost

The rich West must stop grabbing the profits but ducking the costs

Heroes of anti-capitalist protest don’t usually hang out at the Savoy. But Joe Stiglitz is different: the establishment figure who turned on the establishment. He’s a former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel laureate. He chaired Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and he’s not afraid to tell you about it (‘When

Happy birthday, index funds

What has been the single most successful and socially useful investment innovation of the last 30 years? Although paradoxically few investors will know what it is, or why they should be grateful that it exists, my nomination is the index fund. On 31 August this year, largely unheralded in the media, this dull but remarkable

Are these Spanish builders really fit to run Heathrow?

After the chaotic scenes of the past few weeks, with probably more than a million travellers caught up at Heathrow alone, it is surely time to rebrand BAA. In the fashionable corporate way, those three initials no longer actually stand for anything, but everyone thinks they still signify the British Airports Authority. This unloved operator