Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.

The clever radical who led the City’s transformation

It’s a vivid example of unintended consequences that the swimming-pool builders of southern England should owe so much to Sir Nicholas Goodison, the former chairman of the London Stock Exchange who has died aged 87 and whose obituaries suggested little inclination to frivolity, poolside or otherwise. Head-and-shoulders the most cerebral of the Exchange’s leading members

Could hydrogen power turn air travel green?

Have you been scanning airline websites for exotic destinations to which your double-jabbed status might allow you to slip away in August? I certainly have, but I’ve ruled out the parts of Canada and the United States that are stricken by record-breaking heatwaves and forest fires — and I’m wondering what impact such extreme climate

Will a John Lewis home be up Boris and Carrie’s street?

The Financial Times carried a curious story at the weekend about ‘the secretive process to elect the Lord Mayor of London’ being ‘thrown into disarray’ by ‘objections from some City leaders’ to the candidacy, for 2022, of Nick Lyons — who has just been elected as one of the City’s two sheriffs but who happens

The Nicola Sturgeon effect on house prices

Nicola Sturgeon depresses me and seems to be having the same effect on Scottish house prices. In a housing market described by departing Bank of England economist Andy Haldane as ‘on fire’, the flames have been rising higher the further away from London — but more or less extinguishing themselves at Hadrian’s Wall. Why buyers

Why private equity sharks are shopping at Morrisons

The late Sir Ken Morrison — founder of the eponymous supermarket chain that’s the latest UK target for US private equity — had the blunt manner of the Yorkshire cattle farmer he became in reluctant retirement after he was ousted by his own board. Criticising his successors from the floor at one of his last

Suddenly used cars are hot property

Companies should willingly pay tax wherever they generate profits — this column has long argued — because it’s fair they should contribute to the cost of the public services on which all business ultimately relies, and because the reputation of capitalism as a whole is tainted when corporate tax bills are reduced to absurdly low

Who cares who runs the railways? We just want them to run on time

The long-awaited review of the railways by former British Airways executive Keith Williams chugged past the platform of public debate without creating much stir. Politicos noted that it had become ‘the Williams-Shapps Plan’, indicating an urge on the part of Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, in Tony Blair’s words, to be personally associated with eye-catching initiatives

Is Farrow & Ball’s business model flaking?

The happiest thing that happens in May is the coming into leaf of my long beech hedge. The shift from brown to green symbolises, for me, an annual economic revival — of openings, reopenings and entrepreneurial optimism. This year, after April’s frosts on the end of a dismal winter, it was especially welcome. And as

The pandemic’s transatlantic divide in executive salaries

‘Consider a temporary cut in executive salaries’ was the Confederation of British Industry’s advice to members at the start of the pandemic. Back then I was gripped by fears of a backlash against capitalism: top pay cuts would indeed be wise, I wrote, not least because ‘sacrifice now is sensible insurance’. Looking at last week’s

Can Melinda still keep Bill Gates in check?

‘We are seeing very substantial inflation,’ the great investor Warren Buffett told shareholders in his master company Berkshire Hathaway at their online annual meeting last weekend. He was talking chiefly about the housebuilding businesses in his port-folio, hit by rising material costs in what he called a ‘red hot’ economic recovery. But his remarks align

Who’s really to blame for the Post Office scandal?

The alleged frauds for which the Post Office prosecuted no fewer than 736 of its sub-postmasters has turned out in almost all cases to be the result of faults in a computer system called Horizon which Post Office managers and the system’s supplier, Fujitsu of Japan, were reluctant to acknowledge. That’s the short summary of

Crypto is a virtual Vegas whose towers must fall

What should we make of the valuation of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange listed on Nasdaq last week at $80 billion — three times the market value of Nasdaq itself? Coinbase’s stratospheric debut is clearly a reflection of the mania for bitcoin, currently trading at five times its price of six months ago. And that spike

Can the ‘next Bicester Village’ take off without tourists?

Retail footfall will be the first measure of recovery this spring. Everywhere I look, from central London to small-town Yorkshire, shopkeepers who survived the winter cull have been dusting their counters, cleaning their windows — and waiting in their doorways for the crowd of customers who have accumulated £150 billion of savings during lockdown and,

Why I won’t invest in Deliveroo

‘The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism — because of greed, my friends.’ So Boris Johnson told his backbenchers last week, though he immediately muttered ‘Forget I said that’ while aides tried to explain it as a joke on the chief whip, who was munching a cheese and pickle sandwich at

Are we entering a new era of fractured trade?

Just as the auto industry embraces the electric future I wrote about last month, it hits a new crisis: a shortage of the microchips that power everything under the bonnet. As a parable of globalisation’s perils, this one has all the ingredients from trade war to fire, drought and Covid pestilence. When car production slumped

Can John Lewis and Waitrose really remain partners?

Historians of unforeseen crises talk about ‘chaos theory’ and the ‘butterfly effect’, in which a small perturbation far away — the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Australia, as it were — have impacts across much larger connected systems. More usually applied to weather events, the theory had its 2008 moment when the collapse of