Any other business

Saturday

Edie Lush

Channel 4 heads closer to the edge

How much do you hate Big Brother? A lot perhaps; but enough to welcome the demise of Channel 4? This is a real possibility: an Ofcom report due in a few days time will detail just how precarious Channel 4’s finances are becoming. While the report’s contents are still unknown, the challenges C4 faces are not. C4 has produced some of the nation’s favourite programming, including Channel 4 News and Film4 hits such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Trainspotting. It has also produced programmes such as Celebrity Big Brother, which have grabbed headlines but horrified the chattering classes. In a bid to avoid more of the same, C4 recently cancelled a series celebrating ‘wank week’ and featuring last year’s ‘London Masturbate-a-thon’.

Allister Heath

A radical, reforming Budget? No – it was tax-and-spin as usual

Gordon Brown’s 11th and final Budget was a masterpiece of spin and obfuscation, with his headline-grabbing reductions in the basic rate of income tax and corporation tax more than made up for by a series of stealth tax raids. On that point, my friends and I are in complete agreement. But for the first time since I began writing about the British economy, some of the economists and think-tankers I most respect have broken ranks with the rest of the Chancellor’s critics. To many free-market policy wonks, the fact that Brown has dared to break a central taboo of modern British politics by cutting direct tax rates easily makes up for the odd stealth tax. They also applaud what they see as a move towards flatter and simpler taxes.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Not so dark continent

In Bond Street tube station an ad catches my eye every morning: ‘140 million people, 9th largest market in the world, 42 billion tonnes of bitumen, 3rd largest movie industry in the world, Africa’s fastest growing telecommunications market. Nigeria ...it’s more than what you think it is.’ The effect is slightly ruined by the grammar of that final slogan, but the message gets across: anyone in the business or investment world who has written Nigeria off as nothing more than a no-hope nation of clever but fraudulent letter-writers is making a mistake. The same could be said of much of the rest of Africa.

Saturday

Joanna Pitman

Auctioneer by appointment to the world’s new rich

In 1987, shortly after joining Christie’s auction house in London as a 23-year-old English Literature graduate from Oxford, Jussi Pylkkanen nervously approached the head of the Impressionists department, James Roundell, and asked if he could transfer to his team. ‘He was a kind of god in the company. He’d just sold Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to a Japanese insurance company for almost $40 million. He was the most important man in Christie’s,’ recalls Pylkkanen. A year later, Pylkkanen joined the Impressionists department; 20 years on, he has replaced Roundell as the colossus of Christie’s European operations. Pylkkanen is the president of Christie’s Europe and the company’s top-flight auctioneer this side of the Atlantic.

Matthew Vincent

A duvet day’s as good as a pay rise

Ever wanted to kill your boss? Well, now you can — and, as long as it doesn’t become a regular occurrence, you won’t even have to pay tax on the cost of the exercise. Welcome to the wacky world of employee benefits and workplace incentives. Here, of course, the corporate regicide is imaginary — the scene is played out by characters called Seymour Deals and Lord Fred Bare at a ‘team-building murder mystery event’ for bank and insurance staff, staged by a consultancy firm called Progressive Resources. As its managing director James Coakes explains: ‘The financial industry ... is renowned for its staff development programmes.’ And  these programmes are part of a growing trend.

Judi Bevan

High-street icons are safe in private hands

Those who fear that private-equity bidders, if they secure control, will destroy national icons such as Boots and Sainsbury’s, might consider that J. Sainsbury fared pretty well as a private company for 104 years before it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1973. Family control with its paternalistic overtones may appear different from highly incentivised professional management backed by private equity, but in both cases the people at the top are motivated by the same goal. To make money for the com-pany is to make money for themselves. Private ownership enables managers to get on with this task without interference from the battalions of busybodies who besiege public companies.

Tim Heald

There’ll be dancing on the Hoe again as Drake’s port begins to punch its weight

The Luftwaffe blitzed Plymouth for two months in 1941 and destroyed 20,000 houses, 100 pubs, 42 churches, 24 schools, eight cinemas and six hotels. In a symbolic act of defiance many of the survivors formed up behind the lady mayoress and danced on the Hoe, where Sir Francis Drake had played his similarly symbolic game of bowls almost 400 years earlier. The Germans exultantly claimed that Plymouth could never be rebuilt. The city’s next response was to produce a blueprint for a New Plymouth — the Abercrombie Plan, Sir Patrick Abercrombie being the foremost town-planner of the day. Ironically, his plan’s partial implementation meant the destruction of more historic buildings than were lost to Hitler.

Paul Johnson

The grace and glory, the exultant euphoria of successful flower painting

Art is not going to the dogs in every field. Take flower painting. The Ancient Egyptians were depicting garden scenes from about 2000 bc, especially in private tombs, painting with delight and verisimilitude plants such as the mandrake, the red poppy, cornflowers and (a favourite) the blue and white lotus. In Europe, mediaeval and Renaissance art was intensely floriated, and German artists, especially Dürer, painted flowers with almost religious passion, accuracy and grace. But it was in the Netherlands that flower painting evolved into a special art form.

Saturday

John Andrews

Tips from Jamie’s Kitchen

Jamie Oliver would make an excellent investment manager. Not because he’s moonlighting as a private-equity mogul — although his rival influencer of public opinion, the rockstar/philanthropist  Bono, is doing exactly that — but because Jamie knows that in putting together a good dinner, or even a single dish, two aspects are vitally important. All the ingredients must be of the highest quality, and they must complement each other perfectly. If the white wine is too warm and the lollo rosso too limp, Jamie will see his friends stampeding for McDonald’s. Investment management is similar, though unlike celebrity cooking it hasn’t yet entered popular culture. No television programmes called Ready, Steady, Trade!

Richard Northedge

Gordon will hang on to his nice little earner

Before every Budget, for as long as memories extend, stock-brokers and fund managers have written to the Chancellor telling him that unless stamp duty on share purchases is abolished, the Square Mile will shrivel to nothing. Nowadays, the pre-Budget report gives lobbyists a second annual opportunity to make these special pleadings, while word-processors have made it easier to regurgitate the submissions. But with the same regularity that the City dispatches them, chancellors routinely reject them. The arguments have changed over time, from a straightforward appeal about boosting City business, through claims that the tax would inhibit Britain’s euro entry, to suggestions that abolition might solve the pension crisis. The phrase ‘level playing field’ is much used.

Jonathan Davis

The risk of cataclysm has not gone away

Even before the world’s stock markets had their latest wobble two weeks ago, an interesting debate was gaining currency at some lunch tables in the City. As always, the debate in the moneyed classes is primarily about risk. It’s only those without money who spend their time worrying about beating the market and making the most out of any investment opportunity they can find. For those who have, discretion has always been the better part of value. The debate stems from the fact that risk, in its conventional financial sense, appears to have gone walkabout. The way most investment assets are priced these days, there appears to be barely a risk in the sky. Just about everything has been going up in price, and may well be going higher.

Elliot Wilson

How to avoid the Shanghai surprise

When China sneezed on 27 February, the whole world caught cold. Within a few hours the Shanghai composite index plunged 8.8 per cent, its biggest one-day fall since February 1997, causing Hong Kong’s markets to shiver. The contagion quickly spread to Japan, Korea, Australia and India. Before the day was out, leading stocks in Europe and then in the United States had joined the sick list. Shanghai’s unwelcome surprise was a new development in global markets more commonly shaken by American ailments — and it has served only to raise the level of unease many investors already felt about buying Chinese stocks directly.

Martin Vander Weyer

The real credit crisis: the nation refuses to give any to Gordon Brown

By far the stickiest moment of my journalistic career was the time I interviewed a foul-tempered Michael Howard on his battlebus between Bristol and Cardiff during the 2004 European elections. But I’m sure I would have fared worse, much worse, if I had ever attempted to cross-question Gordon Brown. As it is, I’ve never even stood close to him: the only time he invited me to Downing Street — for a charity reception of which he was the nominal host — I accepted promptly, only to receive a photocopied letter telling me the event was oversubscribed and my invitation withdrawn. I’m sure this curt snub had nothing to do with Brown himself, but it seemed somehow in character.

Paul Johnson

Technological warfare against mice won’t work. Try cats

Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted as saying: ‘If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.’ I don’t know about the first two commodities. There are too many authors churning out words, and who cares for a sermon these days, let alone the preacher? But mousetraps that work, that actually catch mice! Now you’re talking, Waldo! I hear nothing, these days, but complaints about mice. What’s the word? Infestation? Epiphytic? Zymosis? Pandemia?

Saturday

Ross Clark

The OFT’s recipe for fecklessness

Next month the Office of Fair Trading will produce its long-awaited report into parking fines. It is expected to rule that charging motorists £60 for overstaying their welcome at a parking meter is unfair, and that in future councils must charge motorists only what it costs to issue the parking ticket. Actually, that’s not quite right: hell will freeze over before councils stop raising revenue through parking fines. What the OFT is really going to produce is a report on what it considers to be the ‘unreasonable’ practice of banks charging customers up to £39 for going into unauthorised overdraft.

Richard Orange

Pipeline politics is the new Great Game

‘We’re always told that Russia is using its economic resources to achieve foreign policy aims,’ President Putin told journalists recently. But, he went on, it is ‘ill-wishers’ in the Western press who paint Russia as a threat to European energy security. ‘That is not the case.’ Yet within minutes of this assurance, Putin issued a bald threat to one of the EU’s newest members that was a textbook example of how Russia has bullied its way to energy dominance. If Bulgaria did not accept Russia’s terms for the planned pipeline from its Black Sea port of Bourgas to the Greek port of Alexandroupolis, Putin warned, it risked losing decades of revenues from shipping supplies of Russian oil.

Matthew Lynn

The shipwreck of the last buccaneer

Before the number-crunchers of private equity and the hedge-fund world took control, the City was dominated by a pretty rough gang. Predatory tycoons such as Lords Hanson and White, Tiny Rowland of Lonrho and Sir Nigel Broakes of Trafalgar House were the big beasts of the stock market. They created conglomerates to match their  egos, and made themselves fortunes in the process. Yet either time or shareholders caught up with them, one by one, and their empires disintegrated. Except, until recently, for one. James B. Sherwood, baron of the Orient-Express hotel chain, Great North Eastern Railways, cross-Channel ferries, container-leasing and dozens of other businesses, somehow managed to cling on. He, too, now appears to be on the way out.

Paul Johnson

The little Spaniard and the bearded lady of the Abruzzi

Sir Flinders Petrie, who did more than any other scholar to bring Ancient Egypt and Palestine alive for us, once remarked that the perpetual joy of being a historian is that, whereas most of mankind are confined to one plane, the present, those who study the past have the freedom to sample life on all. It is like being in possession of a time machine, without any of its dangers. Many times and places thus beckon me, but today I am setting its controls to ‘Naples in the 17th century’. It was an amazing place, probably the most populous city on earth, with nearly half a million inhabitants, and certainly the most crowded.

Saturday

Judi Bevan

Barclays’ new head gardener

Marcus Agius was strolling round his Hampshire garden last summer when a headhunter rang to inquire if he would consider becoming chairman of Barclays Bank. ‘It took me a nanosecond to say yes,’ says Agius. ‘Barclays is a great brand and I love great brands; it’s 300 years old; it’s huge and it’s going through a period of enormous change.’ He took up the job in January after more than three decades as an investment banker at Lazard Brothers. We are taking tea in his vast corner office on the 31st floor of Barclays’ tower in Canary Wharf.

Allister Heath

America’s Goldilocks economy

When Goldilocks broke into the three bears’ house and stole their breakfast, she found Baby Bear’s porridge to be just right — neither too hot nor too cold. The same is true of today’s ‘Goldilocks’ American economy: it is growing neither too fast nor too slowly but just right, to the great surprise of its many critics. In fact, America’s resilience in the face of intense economic headwinds has been one of the great surprises of the past 18 months. Wall Street pundits were convinced the US economy would grind to a halt in the second half of last year, and would by now be mired in rising unemployment, low growth and rising inflation. This would have been a disaster for the British economy too, since we are linked more than ever to US markets.