Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
I’m a huge fan of Game of Thrones, the epic television drama that has returned for a seventh season. This is a show that offers wisdom as well as bloody excitement — and parables for the Conservative leadership struggle, though I hope we’ll never have to watch Theresa May emulate Cersei Lannister’s naked walk of shame. It’s
Now here’s a tricky question. The world’s largest oil company, potentially worth six times as much as ExxonMobil and ten times as much as Royal Dutch Shell, wants to list its shares on a major stock exchange next year, and has indicated that the choice is between London and New York. The company’s initial public
Would a cashless world be a better place, morally or fiscally? Matthew Taylor, in his relatively uncontroversial review of work practices and the ‘gig economy’ published on Tuesday, proposed that the £6 billion ‘cash in hand’ economy of payment for window cleaning, gardening, leaflet distributing and similar simple tasks should be regularised and brought into
Would a cashless world be a better place, morally or fiscally? Matthew Taylor, in his relatively uncontroversial review of work practices and the ‘gig economy’ published on Tuesday, proposed that the £6 billion ‘cash in hand’ economy of payment for window cleaning, gardening, leaflet distributing and similar simple tasks should be regularised and brought into
I voted Remain last year for two reasons. First, however irritating I found some aspects of the EU, I could not vote for the chaos I believed would follow a Leave victory. From the accession of Theresa May to the night of the general election, that looked like an excess of pessimism; now it looks
I voted Remain last year for two reasons. First, however irritating I found some aspects of the EU, I could not vote for the chaos I believed would follow a Leave victory. From the accession of Theresa May to the night of the general election, that looked like an excess of pessimism; now it looks
There’s a passage in Philip Larkin’s All What Jazz, the collection of his writings as the Daily Telegraph’s jazz critic, that imagines his typical readers. Husbands of ‘ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine”’ who take comfort from collections of ‘scratched coverless 78s in the attic’, they are ‘men
Regular readers know I have an umbilical connection to Barclays, because my father spent his working life there, I was on the payroll myself for a decade, and I wrote a book about the bank’s modern history, called Falling Eagle. So I cannot react objectively to news that the Serious Fraud Office has brought charges
Take no notice of the resilience of the FTSE100 index, which, having reached record pre-election highs, shed barely 100 points at its opening last Friday and recovered most of them by Monday. Dominated by multinational companies, it is being sustained by global market sentiment and the relative weakness of the pound, which makes our blue
The last limp gambit of the Tory campaign was a promise to revive the Board of Trade. As a way of grabbing attention and diverting the ‘Corbyn’s not such a bad bloke’ tendency, you’d have to say it lacked oomph. But was it a good idea? First formally constituted in 1696, the Board itself ceased
The science of ‘disaster recovery planning’, together with the related art of ‘crisis PR’, is a core discipline of 21st-century management, both in the corporate world and for agencies of the state. Business schools teach it; consultants sell it; hospitals role play it; the Cabinet Office runs a college in Yorkshire devoted to it; every
‘Fred Goodwin off the hook again,’ declared the Scottish Daily Record. That neatly summed up one strand of sentiment behind the RBS Shareholder Action Group’s battle for compensation for losses incurred in the bank’s £12 billion rights issue in 2008 — preceding its £45 billion taxpayer bailout, in which any remaining shareholder value was largely
Who should be housing supremo in what we all assume will be Mrs May’s new administration? Brandon Lewis and Gavin Barwell, recent junior ministers with that brief, achieved nothing — if we also assume the brief was to procure an adequate supply of new homes, in the private sector or ‘social’ one, which the ‘just
As the election campaign goes into full swing, we hear surprisingly little about the state of the UK economy — because the Tories can’t (and probably don’t need to) promise that they can make it any better in the medium term than it is now, while almost no one takes seriously what Labour has to
‘Do you still hate bankers?’ asked an old friend whom I hadn’t seen for years, having himself made a good career in overseas banking. Not at all, I said, and I never did. It’s been my mission to shame bad ones, but there are many I have liked and admired. Among those was Julian Wathen,
Will executive pay pop up in Theresa May’s manifesto? An objective of her snap election is to secure a larger majority on the basis of a smaller burden of manifesto promises than she inherited from David Cameron. But in her only leadership campaign speech last July, her reference to ‘an irrational, unhealthy and growing gap
Will executive pay pop up in Theresa May’s manifesto? An objective of her snap election is to secure a larger majority on the basis of a smaller burden of manifesto promises than she inherited from David Cameron. But in her only leadership campaign speech last July, her reference to ‘an irrational, unhealthy and growing gap
One hundred days is way too short a time to assess a presidency. On this, if little else, there was unanimity among our stellar panel, facing a 1,000-strong audience in the dramatic arena of Westminster’s Emmanuel Centre. In summary, The Donald’s performance has been erratic and high-risk, but he isn’t all bad: panellist and self-proclaimed
Another election that catches my business eye is the one for mayor of Greater Manchester. The winner will have a powerbase with huge potential: a city-region of 2.7 million people, an enterprise culture that has evolved over two centuries, an outstanding university science base, strong flows of inward investment, Europe’s largest industrial estate at Trafford
Is capping domestic energy prices an equitable way to help the ‘just about managing’, or an electoral gimmick with a whiff of anti-free-market ideology? When it was Ed Miliband’s idea, it was certainly the latter. Now it’s likely to be included in Theresa May’s manifesto, offering a potential £100 saving for millions of homes on
