Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
Ask any group of consumers to name the UK’s most enduringly successful mutual enterprise and they will probably point to the Co-op or the Nationwide building society. But there’s a cognoscenti who will come up with a different answer: a business that operates from giant sheds beside a railway track at Stevenage. It is the
St James’s Place is a posh London cul-de-sac that will forever be associated with the late Jacob Rothschild, who based his financial empire there and restored the stately Spencer House across the road. One of his enterprises, J. Rothschild Assurance, was renamed St James’s Place Capital in 1997 and ended up majority owned by Lloyds
We must be bolder in seizing frozen Russian assets, writes the Prime Minister in a Sunday newspaper. ‘That starts with taking the billions in interest these assets are collecting and sending it to Ukraine.’ Can that really be done? Having consulted international legal opinion, here’s my summary. The principle of ‘sovereign state immunity’ doesn’t prevent
When I read news of a fresh strategic plan for Barclays, I seem to hear a ghostly rustling from the corner cupboard in the living room. Could it be a forlorn protest from the dusty bundle of share certificates that are the last vestiges of my late father’s lifelong service to Barclays from junior clerk
The future trajectory of the Chinese economy is a subject for doctoral theses rather than casual column items. But the advent of the Year of the Dragon, at last weekend’s Lunar New Year, was greeted with such pessimistic commentaries that the natural contrarian should ask whether the consensualists are getting it wrong: maybe the dragon
I’ve been reading – so you don’t have to – speeches recently addressed to a hot-ticket gathering of business leaders at the Oval cricket ground by Sir Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. The nub is a promise to hold corporation tax at the current rate of 25 per cent for the duration of
Angry farmers offer a theme for the week – starting with the French at close quarters. Leaving the Eurotunnel at Calais en route to a wedding in the Alps, my car party encounters agricultural rage in the form of convoys of stationary trucks at all the port’s major exit points, as tractors blockade the autoroutes
I worry that my Burlington Bertie life in London’s West End offers a misleading picture of the real economy. Yes, boutiques and brasseries are busy, but what’s it like in outer boroughs and distant provinces? To take a single morning’s headlines, on the plus side there’s upbeat trading news from ABF, the grocery and Primark
Marks & Spencer was a 20th-century paradigm of better business: a trusted brand and a benign employer that built strong relationships with suppliers and generated handsome returns for shareholders. Then its performance began to fade, as one management team after another failed to keep pace with retail trends in-store and online. By August 2020, when
Let’s talk about Fujitsu. In particular, let’s ask why the Japanese multinational IT supplier has not been taken to court, or heavily fined, or barred from bidding for new public-sector contracts, for the faults of its Horizon sub-post-office system and the mishandling of pleas for help from hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters who were wrongfully convicted.
A giveaway Budget in March preceding a general election in May against an improving economic backdrop: that, we’re told, is Downing Street’s favoured scenario. But still the election is Keir Starmer’s to lose, so here’s my start-the-year advice to him. Don’t bang on about Rishi Sunak being too rich; don’t make immigration the issue, because
It’s 10 o’clock on a Friday evening in early December. My crowded northbound train departed King’s Cross two hours late and has lost two more between Newark and Retford. Overhead line trouble, we’re told; engineers on the line. I’ve read this week’s Spectator from cover to cover. I’ve exchanged emails with friends in Los Angeles,
What position should the distant observer take on the COP28 conference in Dubai? That the sight of 70,000 delegates flying into a desert oil state from around the world to discuss human impacts on climate change is beyond satire and that its proceedings are never likely to rise above Greta Thunberg’s encapsulation of all such
My eye was caught by a passage of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement last week that other pundits, intent on analysing tax impacts, largely skipped past. As part of ‘progressing further capital market reforms to boost the attractiveness of our markets and the UK as one of the most attractive places to start, grow and list
Even the best-run companies have occasional leadership crises. But if you asked ChatGPT to come up with a blockbuster boardroom-bloodbath movie scenario, I doubt it would propose anything as extreme as this week’s events in its own San Francisco-based parent company, OpenAI. Chief executive and co-founder Sam Altman was fired last week for failing to
‘Place nose on dot.’ That’s what my screen is telling me to do as the first step in a ‘liveness’ test I must complete to be accepted as a signatory on a club bank account. But if I align the image of my face with the dot, nothing happens. If I press my nose to
In the New York trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange, there was never a moment when he looked like talking his way to freedom: he was found guilty on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy and now awaits what’s likely to be a very long sentence. Justice has been swift
When I wrote in July that Dame Alison Rose’s forced exit as chief executive of NatWest in the wake of the Nigel Farage scandal was ‘unnecessary’, many readers vehemently disagreed with me. Out she went, Treasury ministers having steamrollered the NatWest board’s brief attempt to hold her in post – and a subsequent Information Commissioner’s
Imagine you’re Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, drafting your Autumn Statement for delivery in three weeks’ time. Bookies’ odds for a Tory general election win have moved out to six-to-one (against Labour’s dead-cert one-to-seven) following by-election wipe-outs. The Lib Dems look set to nab your South West Surrey seat if you don’t stand down anyway. And you
A 10 per cent increase in oil prices translates to a 0.15 per cent loss of global GDP and a rise of 0.4 per cent in global inflation, says Gita Gopinath, deputy managing director of the IMF. Before Hamas launched its assault on Israel on 7 October, the Brent Crude barrel price had already moved 20
