Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
‘Perhaps I should shift my prediction to 23 July 2014,’ I wrote in April 2012. ‘That’s the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and we must all start thinking positively about it.’ I was talking about the moment when the nation would at last shake off its economic gloom, which I had previously pinned
I really wouldn’t want to be chief executive of Tesco, I wrote in January, because the ‘too big, too dull, too dominant’ supermarket giant, besieged by discounters, has become ‘a business-school case study of a brand that has lost all positive emotional connection to its customers’; the incumbent Philip Clarke, a Tesco lifer with scant hope of measuring up to his predecessor Sir
There isn’t a single item of Burberry in my wardrobe, I’m afraid, so I was unaware until this week of the fashion genius that is the firm’s chief executive Christopher Bailey, whose £20 million pay deal received a thumbs-down from 53 per cent of shareholders at last week’s AGM. The vote was not binding on
‘1914: Day by Day’, the Radio 4 series by the historian Margaret MacMillan, is a gripping reminder that significant global events often arrive not in a single eruption but in a series of lesser happenings that only afterwards form an obvious pattern. Let’s hope that’s not what we’re watching in the banking sector as anticipation
There are festivals of everything, everywhere. So why get excited about the Ryedale Festival (11–27 July) apart from the fact that it happens on my Yorkshire home ground — and I used to be its chairman? Every summer music festival proclaims the richness and variety of its menu. Ryedale, under the artistic directorship of Christopher
Here’s a question for a Guinness-sponsored pub quiz: who or what is a ‘jarvie’? The answer is the gypsy driver of a ‘jaunting car’ — or pony and trap — you can hire to drive you up the Gap of Dunloe between the Purple Mountain and Macgillicuddy’s Reeks just west of Killarney in south-west Ireland.
In a season obsessed with sport and personal misbehaviour — separately or in combination — the word ‘fixing’ immediately brings to mind ‘match-fixing’, as in ‘Two World Cup referees suspected’ of it, and ‘Former New Zealand cricketer banned for life’ for it, to pick at random from this week’s headlines. ‘Gold-fixing’, by contrast, is a
Is the housing market really starting to cool, or is the heat moving to unexpected places? The number of mortgage approvals in May was down almost a fifth from a peak at the beginning of the year — reflecting tougher affordability tests and slower processing as a result of the Mortgage Market Review in April,
It was at the Mansion House dinner last year that a City gent two seats away announced himself to be the custodian of one of London’s ‘dark pools’. The phrase sounded pleasingly Tolkienian but his first explanation — an electronic exchange in which large share transactions are completed in total privacy — dispelled the charm.
When John Prescott used to wax garrulous about a ‘superhighway’ from Hull to Liverpool, everyone assumed it was a wheeze to spray southern taxpayers’ money across the region he saw as his power base. When George Osborne decided to ‘start a conversation’ this week about a super-city along the same route, an English equivalent of
When John Prescott used to wax garrulous about a ‘superhighway’ from Hull to Liverpool, everyone assumed it was a wheeze to spray southern taxpayers’ money across the region he saw as his power base. When George Osborne decided to ‘start a conversation’ this week about a super-city along the same route, an English equivalent of
‘Iraq turmoil sends crude oil prices to nine-month high’ is the sort of headline that used to send shivers down economists’ spines, especially if it appeared on the same page as ‘Europe faces gas shortage as Russia cuts Ukraine supply’. How worried should we be at the current turn of events in the energy world?
‘The internet is broken,’ a corporate chieftain told me last week. It was an arresting remark, but he did not mean that his home Wi-Fi hub had gone down and required a jab with a paperclip, as mine frequently does. He meant that the entire web has become so insecure — so plagued by industrial-scale
It’s a constant theme of this column that today’s young need to stop whingeing about their prospects and get on with making their own future. But a quick north-of-the-border tour as official campaigning kicks off for the Scottish referendum persuades me that the pessimism of the generation about to enter the world of work is
The postman at the door is stooped by his burden like an allegorical statue of Labour Oppressed by Capital. His wearisome, low-waged task is to deliver a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century — or perhaps multiple copies all round the town, since this breezeblock of a thesis on the iniquities of
Readers in all sorts of places — at the club bar, over a birthday lunch, even along the church pew — had been telling me I was wrong not to subscribe to the ‘save AstraZeneca’ campaign, and too complacent about the future of British science when I wrote: ‘the game is Pfizer’s for the taking,
The Billionaires’ Diet Book would not be a bestseller — or so I judge from limited experience of lunching with the denizens of this week’s Sunday Times Super-Rich List. They’re just not happy eaters. Lord Bamford (£3.1 billion) described the elegant little salad served in his office as ‘rabbit food’. In 48 hours of partying across India with
Do we really mean to kill investment banking, or are we trampling it by accident in a fit of righteous zeal? By ‘we’ I mean politicians, regulators and public opinion, and by ‘kill’ I mean rendering it unattractive or unviable for any shareholder-owned financial business except on the most limited scale — and as uncertain
Miliband has also been busy ‘looking at options’ for renationalising Britain’s railways at the end of current franchise contracts. This is yet another of what I have called Labour’s ‘targeted tweets’ designed to please trade unions and pick off loose voters — in this case disgruntled south–eastern commuters. What it’s not is a credible, costed
Pfizer will almost certainly have to offer more than its second bid of £50 a share for rival drug giant AstraZeneca, but the American predator seems to be winning the game of spin so far. For a start, Pfizer chief Ian Read turns out to be a Scottish-born graduate of Imperial College London who has
