Any other business

Saturday

Edie G-Lush

It’s dotcom boom-time again — but can Soho really be the new Silicon Valley?

The heady days of 1999 are back. Once again it’s fashionable to work for an internet start-up, even more so if you’re a part of the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ bonanza. (For those who may worry that they’ve missed some kind of software update, Web 2.0 refers to second-generation internet developments based around user-generated content and social networks, such as YouTube and Wikipedia.) Hopeful entrepreneurs are chasing venture capital money with the dream of becoming the next Skype or Google. There are differences, however. Europe — and specifically London — seems to have a more pronounced buzz than in the first boom, yet there’s also a definite recognition that another bubble may be in the making.

Saturday

Jonathan Davis

Oxbridge investors fail to win glittering prizes

Jonathan Davis says that if Britain’s ancient universities want to remain world-class, they should take tutorials from Harvard and Yale in how to invest their endowments Devotees of the diaries of Harold Nicolson and Alan Clark will feel that they know the cramped apartments at the Albany in Piccadilly as a vicarious second home. It was there that both men would repair after dining and gossiping in clubland; there also, the reader is led to assume, that their extramarital assignations would be consummated. But how many of the millions who pass the Piccadilly entrance to the Albany have ever stopped to wonder who owns the elegant building in which these famous bachelor sets are located? The answer, it turns out, is Peterhouse, the oldest Cambridge college.

Richard Northedge

Aux armes, actionnaires!

French democracy is in full swing, but the spirit of Revolution is alive and well sous la Manche. Eurotunnel’s small shareholders, having seized control of the company, are prepared to go down — and determined to go down fighting. Their weapon is the private investors’ right to be irrational, voting on prejudice and putting the questions at shareholders’ meetings that pension funds are too polite to utter. In other companies, their holdings add up to little, leaving sober institutions to impose reason — but at Eurotunnel the big funds sold out long ago to cut their losses. The small fry are in charge. Mostly French, they own 94 per cent of the shares and are fighting a debt-for-equity swap that would hand their company to the banks.

Elliot Wilson

Why come to Kazakhstan?

Russia may have set the bar pretty high, but Kazakhstan still has to be one of the most extraordinarily business-unfriendly places on the planet. A visit to this vast Central Asian state is like a modern reworking of Malcolm Bradbury’s satire Why Come to Slaka?, which catalogued the dubious attractions of a fictional East European state in the Cold War. On the surface, this giant, underpopulated nation is doing remarkably well. From being virtually bankrupt a decade ago, the two main cities — Almaty in the south, and the northerly capital of Astana — now brim with confidence and cash. Mercedes and Bentleys jostle for road space with Ladas and Moskvitches; octogenarian babushkas take out loans with HSBC and Citibank to refurbish their plush inner-city apartments.

Lucy Beresford

Shoppers think fresh – and think less of products endorsed by World Cup losers

Middle-class Delhi-ites have fallen in love — with supermarkets. The ‘Organised Retail’ concept has exploded here, as mini-chains such as Big Apple, Food Bazaar and Reliance Fresh seek to get a head-start over the likes of global brands such as Wal-Mart and Tesco — both rumoured to be looking for sites in the capital. Big Apple (slogan: ‘Think Fresh’) consisted in 2005 of just one store employing 30 people; by August 2007, the group hopes to have opened 300 stores. Analysts say the market is growing at over 25 per cent annually.

Paul Johnson

It is the imagination which links man to God

We are imprisoned in space and time and there appears to be no obvious way of escaping from them. Indeed if, like Richard Dawkins and other neanderthals, you do not believe in a non-material world, there is no escape at all. You, as an individual, have no more significance, no more meaningful past, present or future than a piece of rock or a puff of dust. Nobody else is significant either, and nothing matters. When we die, darkness closes in and we go out like the light on a switched-off television set, dwindling and then vanishing utterly, for ever. But what does it mean ‘When we die’? What is death? How do you define it? It can be defined medically and legally. But not philosophically.

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning

This week Theodore Dalrymple begins a new column — on globalisation, moronic technology and modernity in general.Whenever I read the French newspapers I come to a strange conclusion: that I hate anti-globalisation as much as I hate globalisation. What, then, do I stand for? I don’t know, really. But it seems to me clear that, just as the globalisers are the party of the triumphant corporatists, so the anti-globalisers are the party of the French train drivers who want to retire at the age of 50 at the expense of all the people unfortunate or foolish enough not to be French train drivers. I think I must be what a consultant doing his ward round called the illness that his lymphoma patient had — neither cancer nor leukaemia, but something in between the two.

Saturday

Matthew Lynn

The brothers are back — and they’re setting the agenda

Even allowing for retro-chic, there were some things from the 1970s that most of us assumed were never coming back: cheese-and-wine parties, lime-green bathroom suites, and trade unions setting industrial policy. The little cubes of cheese and the green baths look safely forgotten. But the brothers? They’re back. In the past few months, trade unions have been making the running on issues ranging from the role of private equity to the responsibility of manufacturers to keep their factories in Britain. Led mainly by the GMB and the Transport & General Workers, the unions have developed a stunt-happy, web-friendly, celebrity-savvy campaigning style that has left the overpaid suits of City PR looking tired and lazy by comparison.

Joanna Pitman

A frenzy for Chinese art

The great China investment boom has many facets. A fortnight ago at a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong of Chinese works of art, wealthy mainland collectors and their representatives became so excitable during the bidding that along with the rest of the audience they ended up splurging almost £30 million. Historical works of art from the Qianlong Reign attracted particular attention: one of the highlights of the sale was an ‘Extraordinary Group of Seven Jade Imperial Archer’s Rings’ along with its original cinnabar box and cover, which sold for just over £3 million. ‘The Qianlong emperor (1736–1795) was something of a Renaissance man,’ says Henry Howard-Sneyd, managing director of Sotheby’s Asia.

Jules Evans

The only Western oligarch in Moscow

Stephen Jennings is very tall — about six feet seven. He wraps his body into contortions to fit his limbs into his chair in his central Moscow office. He would certainly suffer in Aeroflot’s economy class —  but luckily he has his own jet. He’s also a towering figure in Russian business. His investment bank, Renaissance Capital, is worth up to £3 billion, and he owns roughly 80 per cent of it. He is, says another Moscow banker, ‘the only foreign oligarch in Russia’. This 47-year-old Kiwi hasn’t just had a front-row seat in the turbulent changes of the last 15 years of Russian business and politics. He’s played a key role in those changes.

Martin Vander Weyer

The house may be a bargain — but how about the Chippendale to go with it?

Spring sunshine encourages us all to browse estate agents’ windows. This week’s featured property, Dumfries House, looks at first glance like a rare example of value for money in an overheated market. This exquisite mid-18th-century mansion designed by Robert and John Adam comes with 1,940 acres — yet for the same price, £6.75 million, from the same agent, Savills, you could buy nothing more than a five-bedroomed townhouse with a 30ft garden in Pelham Crescent, South Kensington. There are, however, some drawbacks to Dumfries House, leaving aside the obvious one that it’s nowhere near Dumfries, so your removal van may never find it.

Saturday

George Kerevan

Banking on victory for the Scottish Nationalists

These days the Scots feel as proud of their banks as they once did of the Clyde shipyards — a macho symbol of economic prowess. This explains why the future of Scotland’s financial sector under a possible SNP government has become a hot issue in the forthcoming Scottish Parliament elections on 3 May. The Scottish Nationalists, led by ex-Royal Bank economist Alex Salmond, have maintained a lead in the opinion polls for over five months and are currently on course to displace Labour as the largest party at Holyrood. Top of the agenda if the SNP forms the next Scottish Executive is a referendum on quitting the United Kingdom in order to (in nationalist parlance) ‘rejoin the world’.

Allister Heath

Can Sarko halt France’s decline?

When I first moved to Britain in 1995, after a misspent youth in France, there were few Gallic accents to be heard outside the tourist hotspots. The long-established community in South Kensington had been joined by a growing number of French students at institutions such as the London School of Economics, but that was about it.  These days the French are everywhere. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurial, ambitious young graduates have moved to London and the south-east of England, fleeing sky-high levels of youth unemployment and a society obsessed with the preservation of the status quo. It’s not just that the 35-hour working week combined with huge social security costs means that it makes little sense for companies to give young, inexperienced workers a try.

Saturday

The Duke-Of-Buccleuch

Senator Duke?

How disappointing it is that our legislators spend so much of their time arguing about reform of the House of Lords when the whole of Parliament is crying out for reform. The House of Commons just carries on as though nothing has happened in the way of a European Parliament with 78 MEPs, or a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly with 128 and 60 members respectively — 266 altogether. It is even worse than that. There are now even more MPs than when I left the House of Commons in 1973. With declining interest at elections, one suspects there are declining mailbags from constituents. In the 1970s one had to pay for one’s secretary, often sharing with two or three other MPs; one shared an office with two or three others.

Paul Johnson

Tales of ‘Stuffing it’ Austen, ‘Eye-opener’ Dickens and ‘Banana’ Waugh

I suspect gluttony, the excessive consumption of food and drink, was the first of the deadly sins to be committed. The least glamorous of them too. It is universal today, to judge by the number of fatties and the stomach-heaving coverage of food, restaurants, chefs and booze in the media. Ugh! It was always thus. The Bible devotes a lot of space to gulosity in general, let alone the excesses of Lot, Belchezzar, Herod and other esurient characters, killing fatted calves, selling birthright for pottage and glaring examples of edacity. Gluttony is particularly objectionable in women, both in the act and the consequences. Queen Mary, wife of William III, was a notable chowhound and was said to be able to toss down a quart-pot of beer without pausing for breath.

Neil Collins

French trains: faster, cheaper, greener, sexier

Guillaume Pepy doesn’t look like a man in a hurry. An elegant 47-year-old Frenchman with impeccable manners, he doesn’t look like an archetypal railwayman either, which may be because he isn’t. It’s true that he’s an énarque, a graduate of France’s elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, but he’s also been both a judge and a market-research expert with Taylor Nelson Sofres in France and America, which hardly sounds like suitable qualifications to run La Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer. Yet as chief executive of SNCF, which runs France’s pride and joy, Les Trains à Grande Vitesse, he can claim to be Europe’s most powerful and successful rail boss.

Ross Clark

A way out of this Kafkaesque world

The regulator of premium-rate telephone services, ICSTIC, is investigating television companies which dangle prizes before viewers’ eyes and then make it extremely difficult to claim them. When it has finished with that, perhaps the watchdog might turn its attention to a similar scam: Gordon Brown’s tax credits. In last month’s Budget, the Chancellor held out the promise that 5.3 million people who will be left worse off by the abolition of the 10 pence starting rate for income tax will be able to offset some of their losses by claiming enhanced tax credits. What he didn’t say was that tax credits are so fiendishly complicated that millions fail to claim the money to which they are entitled.

Margareta Pagano

Market-leading eco-warriors

It’s bleak, cold and nearly dusk at Kingspan’s industrial estate at Holywell in north Wales. Gene Murtagh runs up a ladder to show off a roof garden made with Kingspan’s insulated panels, which are being tested to see how much soil they can take. Roof gardens are a must-have for all self-respecting eco-warriors — like bobble hats. ‘Buildings are like your body — 70 per cent of heat is lost from the roof,’ explains the young Irish entrepreneur. He runs off again, across to the 20-kilowatt turbine to check the wind strength: lousy today, because of the cold. But the turbine, together with the solar panels on the roof of Kingspan’s visitors’ centre, is generating enough electricity to run the offices.

Martin Vander Weyer

In business since 1537, the City companythat’s acquiring targets in Basra

To Armoury House, headquarters of the Honourable Artillery Company, for lunch with the recruiting officer — not with a view to joining up, though the PT would do me good, but to inspect the morale of this ancient City institution and inquire how it is adjusting to the pressures of the modern world, military and financial. The HAC is both a serious territorial regiment, specialising in ‘surveillance and target acquisition’, and a rather good club with a beautiful cricket pitch — an oasis of the old City, walled in on three sides by anonymous new blocks.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Noah and his ark are perennial, and now fashionable too

Noah was the first believer in climate change. He saw it coming and acted in time. So it’s odd he is not the hero of the greens. But then they are all atheists. The two things go together, for being green, a secular form of pantheism, is a substitute for religion. Hence the fanaticism, so typical of primitive beliefs. Certain green scientists even want denial of climate change made into a criminal offence, as Holocaust denial is in some Continental countries. Another reason Noah is unsatisfactory to the greens is that he believed that climate change would be temporary: hence the ark and its passengers, to be saved ‘that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply’.