Any other business

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 at the weekend by a rather less emphatic response to a press release from Jaguar Land Rover which included news of 800 extra jobs at Solihull, continuing a sustained expansion of its workforce that began two years ago. I was hoping Murphy might declare himself ‘over the moon’, but he left it to his assistant general secretary Tony Burke to issue a pious welcome making play of the fact that JLR is only offering one-year contracts.

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 on Banking Standards on which he has been sitting alongside the new Archbishop, Justin Welby — who he calls ‘my new friend, an excellent man’. We agree that the argument on banking reform is moving Lawson’s way. As banks continue to rack up huge fines — £2.

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 said the world was going to end last week must be feeling more sheepish than a flock of Treasury growth forecasters. Even predicting ‘not much excitement’ is to risk being horribly wrong if our banks turn out to be as under-capitalised as the doomsters suggest, and it all kicks off again like September 2008.

The most stylish fellow passenger in Delta Air Lines’ business class cabin from Atlanta to Heathrow last week was a chap in shades and a hoodie with a couple of kilos of bling round his neck. Inquiries in the galley identified him as ‘2 Chainz’, a Georgia-born rapper whose real name is Tauheed Epps. I gathered he had invited the flight crew to call him Tad — and naturally I was keen to befriend him myself, but the Dracula’s-coffin configuration of Delta’s flatbeds made conversation all but impossible. So I was left trying to guess his thoughts on the issue of the ‘fiscal cliff’. That is the impending crisis in which the expiry of George W.

Never say this column doesn’t offer global perspectives. OK, sometimes it comes in folksy Yorkshire parables — but a fortnight ago I was up close with Branson in Mumbai and today I’m speaking to you from the Louisiana Superdome. Yes, I’m standing right on the plastic turf of one of America’s most hallowed football fields, watching the New Orleans Saints warm up for a crunch game against the Atlanta Falcons. You might get weightier economic theories on the op-ed page of the FT, but you don’t get opening lines like that. The proper name of this glitzy concrete bubble, by the way, is a parable of globalisation in itself: the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.

So here I am on a morning flight from Delhi to Mumbai, sitting next to an Englishman in his early sixties with bright blonde hair and a heavy cold. He has his feet up on the bulkhead and I’m distracted by his sensible black lace-ups: his wife packs for him, an aide whispers later. He’s Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire entrepreneur about whom I’ve written so much over the years, most of it sceptical and unflattering, but never previously met. Between visits to Warsaw, Cairo and Moscow he’s in India for 48 hours to relaunch Virgin Atlantic’s Mumbai route, which closed four years ago when too many carriers got in on the act and passenger demand dropped after the financial crisis. I’m a guest for the jamboree and this is my one-to-one slot.

Twenty-five years ago this week, I became managing director of BZW (predecessor of Barclays Capital) in Hong Kong. The office was unstable after a summer of firings, and I had been dispatched from Tokyo to steady the ship. On Friday afternoon, a man called Reggie from Warburgs shouted ‘Heard the news from home?’ across the lobby: the ‘great hurricane’ was battering BZW’s Thames-side headquarters and reducing its trading desks to a chaos of sodden paper and broken glass. On Monday markets crashed everywhere and I flew overnight to London to find panic turning to stoic resignation as our firm, barely a year old, sustained losses of £70 million.

George Osborne knows how to stick pins in his enemies. Using the phrase ‘Workers of the world unite’ to introduce a wheeze that will allow employees to swap employment rights for shares in their employer got well up the noses of the left. ‘There are so many holes in this it deserves to sink without a trace,’ said Mark -Serwotka of the Public and Commercial Services Union, no doubt hoping to restore his good name after his calls for public-sector workers to use the Olympics as an opportunity to strike. ‘Remember this lot were quite content to put small boys up chimneys,’ typed one Guardianista with a loose recollection of the last Conservative manifesto.

You might think it redundant to say that the world’s biggest manufacturer of telecoms equipment is a name to watch. But Huawei — which isn’t quite pronounced ‘Who are we?’ but perhaps ought to be — really does deserve scrutiny. This beacon of Chinese enterprise overtook its main rival, Ericsson of Sweden, in the first half of this year with more than $16 billion of sales. It has just announced an expansion of its UK activities, which include a research facility in Ipswich and a ‘cyber-security evaluation centre’ in Banbury, promising to create 700 jobs and winning applause from David Cameron.

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.