Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
In the sixth form, I sat next to Adair Turner, now Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, the pensions prophet whom the Chancellor has left crying in the wilderness. Turner was cleverer than the rest of us, deeply serious and dedicated to his studies; a gifted loner who sat apart from the brutish cut and thrust of
The laptop on which I’m working tells me that it has sent 7,392 email messages to date, and if I knew how to reach its innermost parts it would probably provide a rather embarrassing list of every website it has ever visited on my behalf as well. Like most internet users, I have absolutely no
A funny thing happened to me on the way to The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch. The early crowd in the foyer of Claridge’s ballroom was largely made up of City guests invited by our excellent sponsor, Threadneedle Investments, while less well-mannered parliamentary and media guests arrived late or not at all. I recognised
Rivers of fudge are to be expected from corporate PR people, but the Cadbury factory at Bourneville has an unusually impressive one — an endless six-feet-wide flow of the soft, brown confection, about to be sliced into ribbons, then chopped into tiny rectangles, coated in chocolate and popped into Milk Tray boxes. Even more seductive
It was a man in my club who first enthused to me about the special attractions of Skype. Given the normal boundaries of clubland conversation, this might suggest to those unfamiliar with the name that Skype is either a shooting estate in the Highlands or a dominatrix in Bayswater. But mine is an enlightened sort
Everyone seems to be talking about bicycles. This week’s eye-catching initiative from the Department for Transport is a scheme to turn Brighton, Aylesbury, Derby and Darlington into cyclists’ utopias, at a cost of £1 million per town. Meanwhile, more and more people have taken to cycling in London since the July bombings — an observation
If you want to discombobulate a Eurocrat, try calling him a Thatcherite. Gert-Jan Koopman, the European Commission’s otherwise articulate director of industrial policy and economic reform, threw up his hands in silent horror when I lobbed the epithet at him, though I meant it as a compliment. The game in Brussels these days — so
I have mixed memories of New Orleans. The hospitality was gracious and the cuisine was fine, but there was a pervasive whiff of something rotten which must have a bearing on the city’s lack of preparedness for the present disaster. I once spent an afternoon in the police headquarters hearing about efforts to eliminate corruption
Martin Vander Weyer on the British idea that businessmen are by nature greedy, heartless, incompetent or dishonest — or all four Our local arts festival this summer included a community opera with a large cast of children and teenagers, playing to a capacity audience of their families and friends. The show was so full of
Banff, Alberta, Canada I’ve been invited to address the annual meeting of the Canadian Investment Dealers Association on the subject of ‘why China isn’t going to be a global superpower’ — a theme I explored here in January, in contradiction of eminent pundits whose New Year essays had gone large on the coming ‘Chinese century’.
Philip Augar has found a snappy title for this forensic examination of the sins of the investment banking fraternity, and a startling figure: $180 billion. That is the amount he reckons the big hitters of Wall Street and the City harvested in the 1980s and ’90s in the form of excessive profits for their firms
All sorts of revealing things have been said in recent days about the survival chances of the euro. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, declared that talk of disintegration was ‘complete nonsense’, as crazy as the suggestion that California might break away from the dollar. EU economics commissioner Joaquin Almunia reached for a
What with Jamie Oliver dictating government policy last month, and Lady Isabella Hervey flaunting her tanned bod for the lads on Celebrity Love Island, you could be forgiven for thinking that social mobility in Britain, both upwards and downwards, has attained what scientists might call inertia-free perfection. Daily observation suggests that the game of snakes
Recent research tells us that the average British shopper is destined to spend two years of his or her life inside a supermarket. Ever since ‘Mr Alan’ Sainsbury, third-generation head of the grocery dynasty, converted his Croydon branch to self-service in 1950 — and despite the fact that one of the first customers threw her
There is a new kind of class distinction in the dining car from King’s Cross to York. Most of us — hoi polloi, relatively speaking — observe the convention that once the fishcake starters are served, it is polite to talk to the strangers with whom we happen to be sharing a table; and there
Many years ago, Chris Gent tried to explain to me how computers worked. I was a trainee banker; he was a systems manager in the same firm; his explanation had something to do with ferrite rods and magnetic poles. It was a very fluent explanation, but I never quite got the hang of it. That
China has no exportable culture, she is militarily overrated and her economy is not as successful as it is cracked up to be. Martin Vander Weyer says it’s time we abandoned our superstitious dread of Beijing Mr Zhang Yuchen, a Communist party member and former official of Beijing’s municipal construction bureau, has just built himself
If John Prescott needed an easy-to-read précis of the Electoral Commission’s findings on all-postal ballots, published last week, a brave civil servant could have given it to him in four words on a Post-it note: ‘Whoops, not enough fraud.’ The Commission was expected to report widespread hanky-panky in June’s pilot all-postal Euro-elections — especially among
As in warfare and international relations, the Brits punch above their weight in the debate about globalisation and the onward march of the transnational market economy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in The Age of Consent (Flamingo 2003), was the first anti-globalisation campaigner to offer a coherent manifesto for a movement which until then had
Here are four connected facts. First, on Monday, Standard Life – one of Britain’s most respected investment institutions – cut the value of its payouts to 2.3 million pension savers by 15 per cent. Second, some 30,000 people have lost their jobs in the City of London this winter – including Alex, the cartoon archetype