Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes to one. A waft of gravy in the air indicated that Christmas lunch awaited in an adjacent room. One agenda item to go: Colin the company secretary made a throat-cutting gesture to Kevin from health and
The Department for Transport announced yesterday that the final verdict on airport expansion will be put off until summer 2016. Back in October, The Spectator’s Martin Vander Weyer predicted in his ‘Any Other Business‘ column that the decision would be delayed until after the mayoral election in May: The Great British Runway final between Heathrow and
I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes to one. A waft of gravy in the air indicated that Christmas lunch awaited in an adjacent room. One agenda item to go: Colin the company secretary made a throat-cutting gesture to Kevin from health
The high street flopperoo that was ‘Black Friday’ may have something to do with terrorism fears, or even the downturn of the Chinese economy: in last year’s ugly scenes of bargain-hunters wrestling over televisions, Chinese tiger–shoppers seemed to win most of the spoils. But this year you could have held a picnic in the entrance
‘Everyone remembers the names of Applegarth of Northern Rock and Goodwin of RBS, but history may judge the HBOS men to have been the worst of the lot,’ I wrote four years ago. Judgment has arrived at last in a Bank of England report on the 2008 HBOS collapse — plus a second report, by
At Stormont on Saturday, we observed a minute’s silence for the dead of Paris. Our conference group of Brits and Americans had convened two days earlier to discuss conflict resolution, the idea that nationalism and tribalism are the enemies of peace and prosperity, and how all this might relate to the migration crisis; so the
Like the Christmas pudding sampled by Hercule Poirot at Kings Lacey — but six weeks early — our Spectator Money supplement contains a little treasure in every portion, and perhaps even a priceless gem. I particularly commend the essays by Warwick Lightfoot and Subitha Subramaniam on interest rates, and why central banks have become so
I confess to being an out-and-out Luddite when it comes to bitcoin and other so-called crypto-currencies. To the extent that I think about them at all, I think that they are an ephemeral by-product of those creepy ‘virtual worlds’ in which obsessed gamers eventually go mad; that only such lost souls could seriously believe unregulated
I’m not a customer of TalkTalk, the phone company which revealed last week that a hacker had potentially compromised the personal data of four million users. But I feel I’m on the front line of the cyberwar nevertheless. In August, someone unknown to me tried to spend £1,200 at House of Fraser on my credit
Governor Mark Carney is no orator, and whoever puts the fancy metaphors into his speech drafts really ought to desist. In his Mansion House address in June, it was about the legacy of the Great Fire and subsequent rebuilding — just like the great financial crisis, obviously. In last night¹s Cairncross Lecture at Oxford, it was the construction of
The Great British Runway final between Heathrow and Gatwick is beginning to look like a game of two halves. The visit of China’s President Xi Jinping is a bonus for the west London team, who can claim that Chinese investors with bulging wallets are more likely to be impressed by landing at an urban mega-airport
Rather more attention was paid last week to the strange position of George Osborne’s feet than to the dark shape lurking behind him. My own theory about his stance on the conference platform is that he was imagining himself as a operatic tenor, belting out an aria in praise the magic elixir he has administered
This column has repeatedly cried that something must be done about business rates. Yes, it’s fair to ask businesses, as well as individual citizens, to contribute to local public-sector provision — even though businesses can’t vote. But it was far from fair during the recession to go on collecting £26 billion a year from hard-pressed
Denis Healey and my father Deryk Vander Weyer — a big cheese at Barclays and spokesman for the high-street banks during Healey’s chancellorship — had a lot in common. Both were clever, cultured, iconoclastic products of good Yorkshire grammar schools; both wartime majors and post-war socialists (my father finally turned right when he began to
Not that I was much of a boy racer, but the sexiest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco with the lines of a paper dart and the cornering of a cheetah. I once drove it overnight from the City to Tuscany with a blind date who barely uttered a word, en route
Not that I was much of a boy racer, but the sexiest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco with the lines of a paper dart and the cornering of a cheetah. I once drove it overnight from the City to Tuscany with a blind date who barely uttered a word, en route
When news broke last Thursday evening that the US Federal Reserve had decided to keep interest rates on hold, I happened to be surrounded by serious economists representing a range of viewpoints and nationalities. None seemed surprised by the decision, though the media had declared it to be on a knife edge. But I did
What is George Osborne’s Living Wage? Is it a ploy to shift cost from the taxpayer to the employer by reducing in-work benefit claims; or a sop to Tory MPs who were bombarded with angry questions about earnings inequality during the election, as well as a neat way of turning one of Labour’s few effective
Sir Adrian Cadbury, who has died aged 86, is remembered as the author in 1992 of a first stab at a corporate governance code for public companies — which thereafter were expected to show ‘Cadbuarial correctness’ in the separation of chief executive and chairman and the powers of non-executive directors. Cadbury’s work was taken forward
One person who has never shown much interest in corporate correctness is Her Majesty the Queen — but if you had been able to buy shares in 1952 in the royal ‘firm’ of which she has been executive chairman these past 63 and a half years, you would have made out like Warren Buffett. When
