Martin Vander Weyer

When BAE Systems sold its one-fifth stake in the European Airbus project to EADS in 2006, declaring its intention to focus instead on defence sales in the US, I predicted that ‘the best bits of BAE’ would end up under American ownership while the rest would ‘go the way of the Comet’, the 1950s British airliner that was knocked out of the competitive skies by the Boeing 707. Since then, BAE has worked assiduously to reinforce its position as one of the few foreign-owned suppliers to the Pentagon: it has 40,000 employees over there under a feisty female American boss, generates 40 per cent of revenues from US sales, and like BP does its best to pretend not to be British.

In my list of things to do before I die, going up in a hot-air balloon with Sir Richard Branson ranks pretty low. But still I admire his fighting spirit: he hates to lose, or to let his enemies and critics get the better of him. He saw off British Airways’ dirty tricks over the Atlantic 20 years ago. He successfully bid for the rump of Northern Rock despite long being sniffed at by the City as an unsuitable person to run a bank. Joint venture partners who have crossed swords with him over the years have found him as merciless as he is litigious. And he’s not going to step aside gracefully to allow First Group to take over Virgin Trains’ West Coast main line franchise.

I’ve had a picture on my wall of the newly appointed Barclays chairman, Sir David Walker, for about 25 years. If that sounds creepy, I should explain that it’s a photograph of a 1986 meeting of the Court of the Bank of England, of which my father was a member. Walker, then an up-and-coming forty-something, was an executive director of the Bank and chairman of Johnson Matthey Bankers, which the Bank had bailed out two years earlier to avert a domino collapse across the City.

A ‘triple dip’ sounds like a move that might defeat a drug-pumped Olympic gymnast, but it’s what some City pundits now expect the UK economy to perform. After a 0.7 per cent drop in GDP between April and June — the third consecutive quarter of the double-dip recession — a ‘technical bounce’ should make the rest of the year look relatively healthy. But continuing chaos in the eurozone combined with a stalled US recovery, a slowdown in China and whatever happens next in the vicinity of Iran and Syria could make everything go pear-shaped again in 2013.

Hail to the Co-operative Bank, which has snapped up the 632 branches that Lloyds was under orders from Brussels to shed by next year. The price looks like a buy-one-get-one-free sofa sale: £350 million down with £400 million to pay over 15 years ‘if targets are met’, against Lloyds’ initial expectation of £1.5 billion-plus. That’s hardly a joy for taxpayers who own 40 per cent of Lloyds, but it triples the size of the Co-op branch network — a boost to banking biodiversity that must surely be positive for the high-street economy. One good thing about the Co-op is that it is based in Manchester, far from the taint and corruption of the City of London.

The biggest mis-selling scandal to break this month was not the one which involved banks forcing small business borrowers to buy expensive interest-rate hedging contracts, under threat of not lending to them at all if they refused. The FSA hasn’t got to the bottom of that one yet: in terms of identifiable victims it could be at least as damaging to the reputation of the banks as the Libor scam. But it is dwarfed by goings-on in the pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, which has been fined $3 billion by the US Department of Justice for a set of offences that deserved much bigger headlines than they got in a week which was unusually good for burying bad news.

The great NatWest-RBS computer cock-up has upstaged my personal campaign to expose the lamentable standards of service offered by high-street banks. I was relieved not to find 12 million emails in my inbox from all those whose wages have not been paid or whose house purchases have been held up, and now have to chase compensation through the same dysfunctional maze that was at fault in the first place. RBS chief Stephen Hester’s lame attempt to compare the continuing chaos to a stack of planes waiting to land safely after a spot of bother in the airport, inadvertently conjuring up the mayhem of Die Hard 2, was the last straw. Where’s Bruce Willis with a machine-gun when you need him?  Meanwhile, readers have kept the anecdotes of incompetence flowing.

‘Greeks choose austerity over chaos,’ said a typical headline on Monday morning. But in truth the argument for austerity is pretty much lost, and we might as well move on to the argument about in­equality — and related arguments about volatility, more of which below. While anti-austerity socialists secured a majority in the French parliament, the pro-austerity New Democracy party limped home in the re-run Greek general election — but with less than 30 per cent of the poll.

‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,’ wrote Geoffrey Chaucer, long before scientists realised that wind turbines cause climate change by raising night air temperatures. If Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales gave us pungent insights into late 14th-century English life, then its modern equivalent is surely the 2011 annual report of Anglian Water, whose operatives are currently busy replacing all those hosepipe-ban warning posters that have been washed away by torrential rain. I note, for example, that on turnover of £1.

If we are happy to venerate a Palestinian patron saint — it occurred to me, as I composed these thoughts on St George’s Day — then we can’t really object to a foreign governor of the Bank of England. The idea may offend the self-esteem of indigenous bankers, but that’s the way the betting has moved since last week’s revelation in the Financial Times that ‘an informal approach by a member of the Bank of England’s Court’ had been made to Bank of Canada governor and former Goldman Sachs executive Mark Carney as a potential candidate to succeed Sir Mervyn King next June.

You wouldn’t thank me for filling this column with arithmetic, but the way in which the government has sought to defend George Osborne’s proposed tax-relief cap for charity donations, and the way most broadcasters have tried to challenge it, has displayed woeful if not wilful ignorance of the tax maths involved. It’s as though ministers have been instructed by Downing Street on no account to consult the easy-to-follow section of the HMRC website headed ‘Giving to Charity: Individuals’ lest it deter them from parroting the line about the iniquity of the super-rich minimising their tax rates by exploiting reliefs.