Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
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
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
The pattern of the global pharmaceutical industry has long been towards cross-border mergers that combine research strength, market access and the capital needed to sustain new drugs through multinational approval processes.The UK has done well in this game, with excellent laboratory work and two giants still headquartered here, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca. The latter is part-Swedish
A bouquet to Alison Kennedy, ‘governance and stewardship director’ at the Edinburgh-based pensions provider Standard Life, for leading the rebellion of Barclays shareholders against the bank’s decision to pay increased bonuses of £2.4 billion, far outstripping dividends to shareholders and despite a fall in profits. At last week’s AGM, 34 per cent of shareholders refused
The popular pastime for financial commentators this season is sticking pins in George Osborne. To those on the left who hate everything about him, to those on the right who think he should have used the fiscal crisis as an opportunity to slash state spending far more than he did, to those in the middle
‘Care, respect, clarity and reassurance’ are what the Co-operative funeral service says it offers the bereaved, and the parent Co-op Group may soon find itself in need of just such support to help it come to terms with the resolution of the Co-op Bank. ‘Resolution’ is modern banking jargon for an orderly burial, involving powers
‘Care, respect, clarity and reassurance’ are what the Co-operative funeral service says it offers the bereaved, and the parent Co-op Group may soon find itself in need of just such support to help it come to terms with the resolution of the Co-op Bank. ‘Resolution’ is modern banking jargon for an orderly burial, involving powers
Vince Cable and Michael Fallon, ministers responsible for the Royal Mail sell-off, have been summoned for another select committee grilling after Easter. Meanwhile, Labour’s irritatingly smug business spokesman Chuka Umunna continues to score points by claiming that last October’s flotation was ‘botched’, costing taxpayers a notional £750 million as the shares leapt from the issue
Vince Cable and Michael Fallon, ministers responsible for the Royal Mail sell-off, have been summoned for another select committee grilling after Easter. Meanwhile, Labour’s irritatingly smug business spokesman Chuka Umunna continues to score points by claiming that last October’s flotation was ‘botched’, costing taxpayers a notional £750 million as the shares leapt from the issue
‘Full employment’ usually means the lowest achievable rate of unemployment — somewhere south of 5 per cent compared with 7.2 per cent today, or to put it in numbers, fewer than 1.5 million compared with 2.3 million last month. You might think it ought to be a target of every Chancellor of the Exchequer. Only Norman
The Budget contained eye-catching measures to stimulate business investment, which has been lagging badly behind the current recovery, and to encourage exporters, whose performance has trailed off after a promising mid-recession uptick when the pound weakened. But there was little to address the scandalous unfairness of business rates about which I regularly hold forth. These
At the beginning of the last decade, a young man who claimed to be my ‘premier banker’ paid me a visit. He was accompanied by his boss, evidently there to assess the junior’s performance. Once upon a time — at least in popular imagination — bank managers were kindly, cautious, long-term advisers, but by the
Malaysian Airlines, whose flight MH370 has strangely disappeared, is a national flag-carrier in the broadest sense — a symbol, along with the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and the Proton car, of its home nation’s aspirations as an Asian Tiger. Hived off in the early 1970s from the former Malaysia-Singapore Airlines, it became, in 1984,
I’m sure HS2 chairman Sir David Higgins is right to argue that if we’re serious about building a new north-south rail network, we should get on with it. The greater the number of general elections between conception and completion of any infrastructure scheme, the less likely it is to happen. Lord Mandelson revealed last year
Last Saturday was International Women’s Day, but we celebrated early in Helmsley when my Yorkshire home town was featured in national news last month as a beacon of recession-beating female entrepreneurship: 60 per cent of our new ventures have female owners. This is shaping up to be a good year for women in business generally,
Strange goings-on at the crippled Co-op, where chief executive Euan Sutherland was reported to have tendered his resignation in anger at a leak of plans to pay him £3.6 million for his first year’s work — vastly more than his predecessor, and despite group losses of £2 billion resulting from a black hole in its