Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
The day Margaret Thatcher died was also the day Britain nearly ran out of gas. In late March, it was reported that stored reserves were down to just two days’ supply. As the cold spell continued, the BBC even reported the names of ships bringing liquefied natural gas from Qatar, each cargo representing six hours’
Unless you bet your life savings on gold some time in the past three years — after its price had passed on the way up the level to which it has now fallen back — there’s no need to be distressed by headlines about a ‘gold rout’, nor even the prospect of a ‘bear embrace’.
‘Margaret had no love for the banks,’ Nigel Lawson wrote in The View from No. 11. The idea that the amoral greed of the City and the banking crisis it fuelled should be blamed on Margaret Thatcher has been much bandied about this week. Let me try to put it in -perspective. In her early
A short stroll from Poultry to the Mansion House offers vistas of the old and new City. The fortress of the Bank of England awaits its new Governor while the Royal Exchange earns its keep, like much of the modern Square Mile, as an upmarket nest of boutiques and eateries. The Lutyens-designed headquarters of the
In their second attempt to clean the Augean stables of Cyprus’s banking system without jeopardising the integrity of the euro, bailout negotiators seem to have heeded most of my advice from last week. After the 36-0 rejection by the Cypriot parliament of a first set of terms that included a levy on all bank deposits,
The Cypriots are the authors of their own misfortune, having turned their banking system into a rackety offshore haven for Russian loot and lent most of the proceeds to Greece. But it was madness on the part of bailout negotiators to shake confidence in banks across the eurozone by trying to impose a levy on
‘We have written to David Cameron to applaud his decision to stick to the UK’s commitment to overseas aid to the developing world, despite the tough economic times,’ begins a letter to the Financial Times from the bosses of major companies from BP to Vodafone, with PR maestro Alan Parker of Brunswick at the top
‘Possibly the most deluded measure to come from Europe since Diocletian tried to fix the price of groceries across the Roman Empire,’ was Boris Johnson’s assessment of the proposal to cap bankers’ bonuses at 100 per cent of base salary, or 200 per cent with shareholders’ approval. This blunt exercise in market interference was tabled
An unfamiliar noise floats over the town; an insistent, one-note metallic drone. Tracked to its source, it turns out to come from a sawmill in a hidden wooded valley a quarter of a mile from my house. Abandoned for the past year, the mill has suddenly come back to life. It is emitting great plumes
‘There are two superpowers in the world today,’ said the American columnist Thomas Friedman in 1996. ‘There’s the United States and there’s Moody’s bond rating service. The US can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody’s can destroy you by downgrading your bonds.’ Well, not any more. Last Friday’s removal of triple-A status from British
We have had a very high failure rate in deliveries of the catalogues for Emily Patrick’s exhibition,’ says an email from the painter’s husband. ‘Over 50 per cent have been lost in the post or inexplicably delayed.’ Come to think of it, my own most recent Amazon order, allegedly dispatched a fortnight ago, hasn’t reached
Antony Jenkins, the new-broom chief executive of Barclays, has the tone of a junior minister, not long in parliament, who finds himself promoted to high office after the big beast who preceded him was toppled by scandal. In fact he’s been in the bank 30 years, climbing the ladder so quietly that none of my
Funny how little phrases go viral. Suddenly everyone’s talking about ‘fasting diets’, ‘zombie companies’ and ‘leadership plots’. As to the first, the idea of the ‘5:2 intermittent fasting diet’, I gather, is to eat as little as you can for two days a week. It’s all over the media, and any moment now someone will
Investing £33 billion in HS2 — £46 billion if you accept the Taxpayers’ Alliance’s calculation — won’t boost us out of this triple dip, but it might ease the one after next, early in the reign of hugely popular, three-times-married King Harry, in whose favour his elder brother will abdicate, Dutch-style, after his 50th birthday.
‘Hong Kong is the most Chinese city on earth,’ says my old friend Jo McBride, who has lived there for more than 30 years. That may come as a surprise to those who knew the place as a resolutely British enclave of colonial officers, traders and bankers — of whom, long ago, I was one
It’s only fair to warn you — especially if you’re Greek, Irish or Chinese — that this week’s column contains negative stereotyping. I’ll leave the transsexuals to Rod Liddle, but I’m still bracing for the Twitter storm. My propensity to commit this category of thought crime was first pointed out to me by Giorgos Papaconstantinou,
My item last week about brighter prospects for car makers looked forlorn by Friday lunchtime, when news bulletins were leading with a quote from one Tony Murphy of the Unite union to the effect that an announcement of 800 job cuts at Honda’s Swindon plant was ‘a hammer blow to UK manufacturing’. This was followed
So farewell, Wegelin & Co, the oldest bank in Switzerland and the one with the simplest strategy for growth — which was to offer secret accounts to American tax-evaders who could no longer obtain that valuable service from bigger Swiss banks such as UBS. Founded by a linen merchant in 1741, which makes it half
The sun shines warmly in south-west France, and rabbit bouillabaisse is the pièce de résistance of a New Year lunch at which Nigel Lawson is a fellow guest. The former chancellor and Spectator editor divides his time between his home in the Gers, the Global Warming Policy Foundation which he chairs, and the Parliamentary Commission
In a recent Spectator panel debate titled ‘Review 2012, Preview 2013’, Matthew Parris startled an expectant audience by observing that in his view nothing very interesting had happened in the past 12 months, and not much excitement lies in wait for next year. Prediction, we know, is a mug’s game — those ancient Mayans who