Note from the editor. The Spectator has been informed that, due to an EU Court ruling, the below article will now longer show up under Google search results. Here’s the rather creepy email:- So someone, somewhere, doesn’t want this article to show up when you Google for a certain name, or company, or somesuch. We had received no complaint
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
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
Dominic Midgley says a great institution of national life is under threat from the credit crunch, the smoking ban and cheap supermarket booze — but there are signs of hope The sounds of merry-making could be heard from the street as 300 journalists, suppliers and associated hangers-on gathered at The Northcote pub in Clapham last
A Guardian survey published last Friday showed that eight out of ten members of the public backed the BBC against its detractors. The opinion poll was commissioned in response to a wide-ranging attack on the corporation by James Murdoch, son of Rupert and chief executive of News Corporation for Europe and Asia. In his MacTaggart
Financial crisis has transformed Robert Peston from egghead to celebrity, says Dominic Midgley, but the BBC business editor indignantly denies he’s a government mouthpiece The cover of the hardback version of Who Runs Britain?, Robert Peston’s masterly dissection of how the global economy got into the mess it’s in today, features an abstract version of
Porsche and Aston Martin haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the recent boom in City bonuses. There’s a new generation of customers at Holland and Holland, Barbour and Land Rover — stockbrokers, traders and lawyers who are swapping their pinstripes for plus-fours of a weekend, and heading to the country for a spot of shooting.
Think Formula 1 and it’s not long before a short man with a terrible haircut and an unfeasibly tall wife comes to mind. But while Bernie Ecclestone is very much the face of the world’s premier motor-racing series, it’s a different story with A1 Grand Prix. This weekend the upstart rival to Formula 1 will
The news that Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative party, is to become the European chairman of Diligence, a US-based corporate intelligence company, is the latest sign of gentrification in a sector that was once seen as the preserve of shifty types who rifle through bins under cover of darkness. There is still
Herbert Smith, a firm of City solicitors, last month announced that it had hired its first ‘inclusivity manager’. There were chortles all round, and the Times ran a short piece about the appointment under the headline ‘Political correctness seems to have broken out at one of London’s top legal firms’. The caravan swiftly moved on,
Dominic Midgley on how Britain’s service industries are busy separating London’s free-spending New Russians from their cash A senior member of the Chamber of Commerce in Moscow once said that any mention of the word ‘oligarch’ had the average Russian reaching for a gun. That’s because much of the population is furious at the way