Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
The list of business leaders who have damaged their careers with a single word famously begins with Gerald Ratner, who wiped half a billion off the value of his jewellery chain in 1991 by describing one of its offerings as ‘crap’. Then there was Bank of England deputy governor Ben Broadbent, whose chance of succeeding
Back when Boris Johnson was editor of this magazine and MP for Henley, I was with him at a Tory party conference in Bournemouth. He was about to speak at a meeting on transport policy. An intern rushed up with some random downloaded pages, having evidently been told to Google ‘transport policy’. Boris grasped the
Among the numbers attached to the restructuring of Deutsche Bank announced by Chief Executive Christian Sewing this week, the 18,000 job cull is most startling. But others tell the story just as vividly. First, the fact that the venerable institution, a pillar of Germany’s post-war economic resurgence, had raised €30 billion of new equity in
We’re pleased to announce the regional finalists for The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer. We were delighted to receive some 50 per cent more entries this year — including many more from the regions outside London and the South. Business sectors represented range from fintech to funerals, and
How surprising to read one former Tesco chief, 82-year-old Lord MacLaurin, badmouthing another, Sir Terry Leahy. The surprise is because both were titans of their trade and Leahy has always been seen as Ian MacLaurin’s protégé: it was MacLaurin who took Tesco to the top of the UK supermarket league in the mid-1990s, then Leahy
Friends of former Barclays chief executive John Varley — I don’t mean ‘people who speak to the media on his behalf’, but rather people like me who have known him all our working lives and hold him in high regard — were relieved to hear he has been cleared of fraud charges relating to the
There’s a palpable urge elsewhere in the media to see Sir Philip Green come to grief, whether as a result of allegations, denied by him, that he ‘spanked and groped a Pilates trainer’ in Tucson, Arizona, or through the collapse of his Arcadia retail empire, which includes Topshop and Burton, even if that were to
Hounds are baying for the blood of former star investment manager Neil Woodford, whose shrinking funds have closed for withdrawals. His promoters such as the broker Hargreaves Lansdown have also been taking media flak, as has the Financial Conduct Authority, whose critics say it should have spotted the problem early and intervened. There are suggestions
We don’t hear enough about Network Rail these days. By that I mean that the entity recently described by the Sunday Times as ‘synonymous with incompetence and delays’ doesn’t receive anything like the abuse it deserves for failing to provide the infrastructure essential for a 21st-century railway. I refer you to the Crossrail project, in
The cryptocurrency winter has turned to spring: having slumped from $20,000 in late 2017 to $3,200 a year later, bitcoin has lately risen like a rocket to $8,800. Though it doesn’t change my negative opinion, I admit that if I had bought a fistful of these wacky gaming chips last October when I gave the
There’s a strong sense of déjà vu in this week’s steel crisis. The whole Brexit saga seems to have been bookended by trouble in what’s left of the British steel industry, beginning in 2016 when Tata of India announced plans to sell its entire UK steel business — the remnants of the privatised British Steel,
This column has long been a fan of the concept of ‘challenger banks’ offering alternatives for personal and small business customers who were mistreated or underserved by the big banks before and after the 2008 crash. Most challengers were internet-based, but Metro Bank — founded in 2010 by US entrepreneur Vernon Hill, whose early career
Sainsbury’s chief executive Mike Coupe faces a fight for his job after the Competition and Markets Authority ruled against his proposed £12 billion merger with Asda that would have created a supermarket giant bigger than Tesco and supposedly better equipped to face down the discounters Aldi and Lidl. The CMA said the deal would have
On the matter of whether former defence secretary Gavin Williamson was the real ‘H’ in Line of Duty, I admit I may have lost the plot. But meanwhile the rest of the media has rather lost sight of the key issue with Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant whose involvement in UK 5G networks was allegedly
If you’re a bloke in a suit who’d like to apply for the governorship of the Bank of England (deadline 5 June), I suggest you browse the website of Sapphire Partners, the headhunters appointed by Philip Hammond to conduct the search. Run by ex-JPMorgan banker Kate Grussing with an all-female team plus Cherie Booth and
It’s not much comfort, if you like pubs, that the rate at which they’re closing across the UK has fallen from 138 per month for the past several years to 76 per month in 2018; small consolation too that this is partly the result of a rare example of government policy working — in the
If you know my personal history with Barclays, you may be wondering whether I’m for or against Edward Bramson. To recap, I’m a former second-generation employee of the bank as well as the custodian of a family shareholding that’s never likely to be sold — and nowadays, rather miraculously given everything that’s happened to me
‘Virgin trains could be gone from the UK in November,’ blogged Sir Richard Branson from his billionaire hideaway after the Department for Transport barred Stagecoach, Virgin’s 49 per cent joint-venture partner, from bidding for new passenger rail franchises. This followed a row over Stagecoach’s reluctance to help fill a £6 billion black hole in the
Trade associations are even better journalistic sources than talkative taxi drivers. If you want to know what’s happening in the economy of physical goods, consult a conclave of forklift truck operators; for a barometer of optimism among middle-class homeowners, mingle with managers of the nation’s garden centres. And if you want to feel the true
This is no time for schadenfreude — but take comfort from the fact that the UK isn’t built like Germany. Being a world-leading exporter of manufactured goods — which they are and we’re not — is all very well until orders from China fade, Donald Trump adds you to his list of trade foes, your