Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer

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

In praise of Pret

I shop at WH Smith with gritted teeth but I positively salivate when I spot a Pret A Manger. Some serious investors think likewise: the sandwich chain has just been sold for more than £1.5 billion by the US investment firm Bridgepoint to JAB Holdings, the vehicle of the German billionaire Reimann family who also

Martin Vander Weyer

Entrepreneurship is a way of life

James Espey was born in Zambia and educated in South Africa before moving to London in 1977. For many years he worked for international drinks companies, developing brands such as Malibu, Baileys and Johnnie Walker Blue Label. For the past two decades he has been an entrepreneur in his own right, as well as a

No wonder our productivity looks permanently sickly

With one state-imposed compliance exercise after another getting in the way of business, no wonder our productivity looks permanently sickly. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect this week, has imposed a huge bureaucratic burden on companies and charities — as well as, for those that do it properly, a sacrifice of valuable

Let’s not cancel the Crossrail celebrations yet

Until a few days ago, reporting of the almost completed Crossrail project had been focused chiefly on the impact of the new Elizabeth Line on local house prices, ‘Still time to buy into Acton’s Crossrail hot spot’ being a typical example. Now we learn that the project’s much repeated if slightly fudged claim about being

Hooray for a British industrial hero at the top of the Rich List

It’s heartening to see an authentic British entrepreneur heading this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, the industrial-ist Jim Ratcliffe, who has overtaken a coach-load of oligarchs as well as the Duke of Westminster with an estimated £21 billion fortune. This column has long admired Ratcliffe, whose Ineos chemicals conglomerate was built by buying up businesses his

Smart advice for entrepreneurs

All would-be entrepreneurs are told that ‘most start-ups fail’. A popular factoid from the US says nine out of ten new businesses don’t survive. UK statistics are more encouraging, but not spectacularly so. Here, surveys say roughly four out of ten new businesses live to celebrate their fifth birthday. Some sectors have higher survival rates

If you want £10k at 25, you should have to compete for it

Would it really be fairer, in an inter-generational sense, to whack an ‘NHS levy’ on pensioners while giving every 25-year-old £10,000 to help them buy a first home or start a business? These are recommendations by the Resolution Foundation, chaired by former Tory minister Lord Willetts, to address what it sees as a breakdown in

Martin Vander Weyer

A hot weekend for takeover deals and cycle racing

The bank holiday turned out to be a hot one, not least in the takeover arena. First, Shire Pharmaceutical accepted a £46 billion offer from Takeda of Japan — though the stock market did not seem wholly convinced that the deal will proceed. If it does, should we care? Shire is a FTSE100 company that

The UK economy isn’t all doom and gloom

This is an extract from this week’s ‘Any Other Business’ column.  The UK economy grew just 0.1 per cent in the first quarter, says the ONS, reflecting low construction activity, sluggish manufacturing, squeezed consumers, Brexit uncertainties and bitter weather. That’s the worst quarter since 2012 — so no wonder I had such a feeble response

Can WPP’s model survive without Martin Sorrell in charge?

I said last week that WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell was in ‘a very exposed position’. Sure enough on Saturday he resigned from the global advertising giant he created and had run for more than 32 years. ‘But he didn’t “create” it,’ one ex-employee told me, illustrating the internal resentments that seem to have