Martin Vander Weyer

Why the Governor is in the soup — and how I got the soup into the Governor I’m no WikiLeaker, but I am prepared to reveal that I have, on two occasions, lunched à deux with Professor Mervyn King in his private dining room at the Bank of England. Not a single word of what

What Ireland lacks now are statesmen who can make the case that recovery is possible The screen at Manchester airport tells me I’m about to board an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, but there’s a Lufthansa plane at the gate. ‘Blimey,’ I mutter, ‘this bailout’s moving fast.’ I’m looking at the wrong gate, however, and

My tip for enterprise tsar from Cameron’s list of loads-of-money peers: Lord Fellowes of Downton Who, I wonder, will advise David Cameron on entrepreneurship now that Lord Young of Graffham has been fed to the sharks by the Downing Street crew for his unguarded remark that in this ‘so-called recession… most people have never had

Caught between EU politicking and market sharks, the Irish deserve sympathy not scorn My sympathies are with the Irish as they find themselves being shoved towards an EU bailout which they regard as a loss of hard-won sovereignty — and it’s pointless to go on scoffing at their earlier eagerness to enjoy the low euro

Disappointed, discouraged – but American optimism will soon start to return Philadelphia ‘We should always love America, not for its leaders — who generally turn out as disappointing as our own — but for its vitality, its collective belief in the possibility of renewal.’ That’s what I wrote from Los Angeles, exactly two years ago,

Change is coming to the City – but let’s notget excited about a tacky shopping centre One New Change sounds like an unambitious and probably tautologous political slogan, but it’s actually a postal address. New Change is a cut-through from Cheapside to Cannon Street, ‘Change’ in this context being an old version of Exchange, as

I was acting and directing at Helmsley Arts Centre last week, in a little piece of ‘café theatre’ performed in the bar to an audience of only 50. But it was a sell-out every night and, I hope, a light-hearted distraction for the citizens of my Yorkshire town from all that gloomy talk about cuts,

If I hear one more clunking metaphor about how we’re trapped in the debt mine but there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I think I’ll bury myself in the garden. If I hear one more clunking metaphor about how we’re trapped in the debt mine but there’s light at the end of the

‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days when captains of industry and City grandees treated its Grill as their canteen — and my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who

‘HSBC shareholders should remember that slavish adherence to corporate fashion is usually what gets banks into trouble,’ I wrote in May, in response to whispers that executive chairman Stephen Green was under pressure to make way for a conventionally non-executive outsider. ‘HSBC shareholders should remember that slavish adherence to corporate fashion is usually what gets

Another time,’ began the Gospel reading last Sunday, ‘the tax gatherers and other bad characters were all crowding in to listen…’ Bible scholars will have spotted that our curate chose the New English version of the parable of the lost sheep, and that ‘tax gatherers and other bad characters’ is the modern rendering of ‘publicans

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business If life was a Doctor Who series and I was the scriptwriter, I would have the courageous Chilean miners tele-ported instantaneously to the surface — and replaced at the bottom of the collapsed shaft by 33 gloomy economists and market commentators. They would range from New York Times columnist

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business ‘If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to give their employees better wages… and working conditions; to use production methods that don’t kill or maim or damage the environment…’ That was Peter

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business It’s nonsense to accuse high street banks of failing to lend to businesses because the money they might have lent has been siphoned off for bonuses — that just isn’t how it works — and it’s good news that they have been announcing restored or increased profits this week.