Any other business

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning

Not hell, but drunkenness, is other people. This insight was vouchsafed me in the London Underground the other evening. I had just passed a notice from the Mayor of London warning passengers to be careful after a few drinks. In the previous year, it said, two people had been killed and hundreds injured after a few drinks. I myself had had what I would call a few drinks, but I do not think I was in much danger. What the Mayor meant by a few drinks, of course, was the appalling uncontrolled drunkenness of the shameless young adults of all classes who so disfigure our capital city, many of whom would have voted for him. We have come to expect dishonesty — of which this little lie was an example — at every level of society.

Paul Johnson

The young generation prefers to face life with their gloves off

I studied with interest the recent photo of Prince William and Prince Harry attending a military occasion in mufti. For officers in the Foot Guards and the Household Cavalry, the sartorial drill is, or used to be, strict. Here is my report on the two young men. Bowlers: all right but nothing spectacular. Harry’s better than William’s. Indeed, the latter’s, worn a bit fore and after, might have inspired his great-great-grandfather’s scathing comment: ‘Hello, William, goin’ rattin’?’ Dark suits: oh dear, and no weskits so far as I can see. Who’s your tailor, William? Oh yes? Change him. Tightly rolled umbrellas: just passable. Shoes: well, it’s a democratic age. But — no gloves. No gloves? I can hardly believe my eyes.

Matthew Lynn

How ‘Bid ’em Up Bruce’ became yesterday’s man

When Lazard presented its results at the start of May, you might have expected the investment bank’s smooth-talking chairman Bruce Wasserstein to have been in upbeat mood. After all, Wasserstein trades on his reputation as the greatest mergers and acquisitions banker of all time. Lazard likes to think of itself as the finest M&A house in the world. And we are, in case you hadn’t noticed, going through one of the greatest merger booms of recent times: so far this year deals worth $2 trillion have been struck globally, a 60 per cent advance on the same point last year. So was Lazard raking in money? Well, not quite. In truth, its results were disappointing: first-quarter profits up by a rather modest 4.

Elliot Wilson

What if it rains on Beijing’s Olympic parade?

No official visit to China’s capital is complete these days without paying homage at a large and rather shabby building in the sprawling northern suburb of Haidian. The Beijing Olympic Tower is the nerve-centre of a seven-year, $48 billion project that has the potential to define China’s rapid ascent to economic superpowerdom — or to turn into the greatest public relations disaster the world has ever seen. Dignitaries and politicians fly in from all over the world to be welcomed, and lectured, by mid-ranking Chinese officials. The chief executive of UK Sport popped in for a pot of green tea in May, as did minor dignitaries from Canada, Australia and Greece.

Saturday

Joanna Pitman

A paradise for bookworms

Imagine coming across a book that has lain untouched for 100 years, and making an unexpected historical discovery. Ed Maggs, an antiquarian bookseller, had just such a thrill recently. ‘I was reading the epistolary diaries of a rather eccentric Victorian called Cuthbert Bede. I became strangely fixated by the story of this man who was obsessed by an unnamed woman. He fell into a state of schizophrenia and was incarcerated in an asylum called Munster House in Fulham. But as I was reading, I was wondering who this woman could have been — and wouldn’t it be fascinating if it turned out to be Alice Liddell? In the end it did turn out to be her. It was a real hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment. We sold the book to the Bodleian.

Julia Hobsbawm

The joy of coaching

The Daily Telegraph estimated last month that roughly a third of the bosses of FTSE 100 companies use a personal coach — ‘and not the guy who tells them to do more press-ups in the company gym’. But you would be hard-pressed to find a newspaper feature anytime soon in which any of those business leaders recommended their coach, any more than they would their psychoanalyst. Despite its growing ubiquity, consulting  a coach is still regarded by senior businesspeople as private and absolutely not something to declare openly. Although good ‘executive coaching’ is something which devotees regard as potent and effective, it often earns a sniff of disapproval from the uninitiated because of the underlying macho assumption that coaching is for business wimps.

Simon Nixon

A very expensive drop of Scotch

Driving through the pretty towns of Speyside, as I did last week, it’s hard to believe you’re at the centre of a booming global industry. As the road follows the course of the river into the Highlands, you can spot the chimneys of the distilleries every few miles. But they’re mostly small-scale and they still retain the look and feel of a cottage industry. At the picturesque Strathisla near Keith, with its traditional pagoda-style malting towers, pretty girls in kilts greet you at the visitor centre. At Glenlivet, I was given a guided tour by a former excise man whose job it once was to police the distillery. There’s tartan everywhere, of course, and cheesy bagpipe CDs in the souvenir shops to go with all the whisky paraphernalia.

Martin Vander Weyer

Hot tips in the World Bank stakes: Blair, Bono, Clarkson …but not me

Shortly after the death of John Paul II in 2005, the wise and amiable Father Dominic Milroy, former prior of the Benedictine college in Rome, leant across a dinner table and said, ‘Martin, you’d make a good candidate for Pope.’ ‘But father,’ I protested, ‘I’m not even a Catholic.’ ‘Oh don’t worry,’ he responded, ‘We can soon see about that.’ Likewise I’m glad to discover that not holding a US passport does not rule me out as a candidate to succeed Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank when he departs next month, so long as I’m prepared to convert: his predecessor, Australian-born James Wolfensohn, took American citizenship in order to secure nomination by Bill Clinton in 1995.

Paul Johnson

Why we don’t know who killed Cock Robin

That fierce neighbouring cat, which has killed or scared off our mice, has not yet destroyed our robin. Cats do not enjoy eating robins. If they do so by mistake, they vomit. But that does not stop them attacking the birds for sport. We think of robins as very tame, and they are — in England. In the past we killed them for various purposes. In the 17th century robins (and sparrows) were eaten to break up kidney stones, for which a surgical operation, in those days, was dangerous if not impossible. If the surgeon was not swift and skilful enough to get the stone out within 20 minutes, the pain was so intense that the patient died on the table. People justified eating robins accordingly.

Saturday

Richard Orange

London’s diamond trade may not be forever

Richard Orange says London’s traditional dominance of global dealing in uncut stones is under threat from new players based in India, China and Dubai ‘How does it feel to hold $9 million in the palm of your hand?’ One of the world’s leading diamond buyers, Rajiv Mehta, watches intently for my reaction to this question: the sachet of dull glassy pebbles I am gently weighing, if I could somehow get them out of this building and into the hands of some Antwerp middleman, would buy me one of London’s most prestigious addresses, my own island in the Bahamas, or a country-sized swath of the Argentinean pampas.

Matthew Vincent

How cyber-vetting catches job liars

‘Interests: travel, cinema, country walks, volleyball, volunteering at the pet-rescue centre...’ Why do CVs make job applicants sound like contestants in the Miss Cleethorpes beauty pageant, or desperate divorcees on dating websites? It’s possibly because job hunters now believe ‘personality’ is what wins over potential employers, and many applicants are prepared to lie about themselves to make the right impression.

Robert Cottrell

You’d be a brave man to bet against Rupert Murdoch or Michael Bloomberg

Call me a sentimentalist, but when Rupert Murdoch gave a speech here last week telling News Corporation to go carbon-neutral, and to inspire its many millions of viewers and readers to do likewise, I couldn’t help thinking that he must have been affected by the spectacle of human frailty revealed to him in his current efforts to take over Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal. To bring the Journal into his portfolio, Mr Murdoch needs to win over the extended Bancroft family, descendants of a swash-buckling newspaperman called Clarence Barron who bought control of Dow Jones in 1902.

Paul Johnson

Cultural revolutions come from below, not above

Active young men, going to work, now sport a new kind of uniform, part oik, part kiddy: trainers with upturned toes, baggy pseudo-patch trousers of the kind worn by dustmen, short zip-jackets, a child’s rucksack and a baseball cap. In the Sainsbury’s queue the other morning, a man thus attired addressed me in a marked Wykehamist accent. He was on his way to the City. This is the latest example of what I called prolerise, the way in which culture springs from the depths. If those at the top hit upon a really useful gadget, like the French table fork, brought to England by Richard II, then it will gradually catch on lower down the scale of class and wealth. But the process usually works the other way, since poverty is a spur to utilitarianism.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Maytime and ‘Some wet, bird-haunted English lawn’

The best thing this country has ever produced is a fine-sown, closely mown and weedless lawn. You really relish it this sunny time of year, when it becomes a work of art, or as Wordsworth put it, ‘a carpet all alive/ With shadows flung from leaves’. I have been thinking about lawns because ours, in London, the green punctuation mark between the steps leading down from my library, and my beloved cedar studio, had become hopelessly overgrown with moss. So a friendly lorry, controlled by a gruff-jovial man and his hard-working daughter, delivered an immense number of sausage-rolls of new turf.

Matthew Lynn

The real driving force in the battle for ABN

Most of the young men working on ‘hedge fund alley’, the narrow streets leading away from Berkeley Square in Mayfair, have expensive but unsinister ambitions. They’d like a new Aston Martin DB7, preferably convertible. They’d like a swanky new penthouse overlooking the Thames, plus a girlfriend who might have stepped out of the pages of Vogue. They certainly aren’t setting out to re-draw the industrial map of Europe; but the law of unintended consequences applies as much to business as to any other field of human endeavour, and that is what they appear to be doing. Over the last few weeks, the City and the business press have been held in thrall by the battle for control of the Dutch bank ABN Amro.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Sell Madrid, buy Berlin

For some years now it has been fashionable for fund managers investing in Europe to consider the entire Eurozone as one great big market divided up not by national boundaries but by industry. They see the choice not as between investing in Spain or in Switzerland but between, say, pharmaceuticals and retail. And when asked if Europe is expensive or cheap they won’t tell you that one country is cheaper than another; they’ll tell you the price-earnings ratio for the zone as a whole. This all sounds very modern and clever but I wonder if it really makes sense. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that they might actually be better to look at investing in Europe the old-fashioned way, country by country.

Judi Bevan

‘It’s a feeding frenzy. There’s so much money’

Judi Bevan meets a top estate agent who thinks only a terrorist bomb can stop the capital’s house prices soaring Peter Rollings is one of those glowingly fit and forceful people who emit an unrelenting positive energy into the air around them. ‘Yes, energy is my big thing,’ he says, enthusiastically. ‘I don’t see the point of being down. Energy is infectious but so is negativity.’ He’s instantly friendly, the sort of chap who can strike up a rapport with anyone from a secretary looking for her first flat to a Russian oligarch wanting a Regency stucco pile in Belgravia. Yet behind the smile, his brown eyes are as hard as marbles. Rollings is an estate agent; in fact he’s probably the luckiest estate agent in Britain.

Martin Vander Weyer

The party’s almost over — but not in the land of the weeping camel

The Dow Jones Industrial Average of leading US stocks passed 13200 for the first time last week, after its strongest run (23 rises in 26 sessions) since 1955. The S&P 500, a broader indicator, stood at just over 1500, a fraction below the record high set in the final spurt of the dotcom boom. London’s FTSE-100 index, at 6600, is not far behind. Both markets are being driven by a fever of takeover activity and rumour in the ‘digital media’ sector, including talks between Microsoft and Yahoo and an approach to Reuters from the Thomson empire of Canada — all ominously reminiscent of the AOL-Time Warner deal, announced in January 2000, that was subsequently judged one of the most value-destroying mergers of all time.

Saturday

Judi Bevan

The elder statesman of open skies

In his measured, softly spoken way, Sir Michael Bishop is furious with the Conservative party for its plans to ration air travel. ‘There are few things less edifying than watching politicians jumping on a passing bandwagon,’ says the proprietor chairman of BMI British Midland, which holds the second largest number of take-off and landing slots at London Heathrow. Bishop is a Conservative and he sees proposals by David Cameron and George Osborne to curb air travel through punitive taxation as betrayal. ‘I felt it was a crass and clumsy response and against all Conservative principles,’ he says. Bishop is the quietly flamboyant elder statesman of the British airline industry; gracious, but with the self-contained air so often found in only children.

Martin Vander Weyer

Make a date at the destination station

If you have a long-lost Continental lover, you have a little under six months to arrange the perfect reunion under the clock at St Pancras on 14 November. That is the date when Eurostar will commence its new service along the full length of what is now called High Speed 1, the much-troubled fast link to the Channel Tunnel. Most importantly, it’s the day Eurostar trains will cease to arrive at Waterloo, and instead make their way from Ebbsfleet under the Thames and across east London to Stratford, and at last to the refurbished Victorian terminus on Euston Road.