Any other business

Saturday

Jonathan Davis

The perma-bear who sees the ice melting

We’re barely ten seconds into our interview when Jeremy Grantham, one-time bedpan salesman from Doncaster, now hugely successful US money manager, is off on a favourite tack — mixing it with his competitors in the investment world. In this case what has drawn his ire are some reported comments from a well-known American fund manager whose views I have alluded to in a recent newspaper column. ‘I’m going to start with an ad hominem remark,’ he announces down the line from Boston, his adopted home, where he has built from scratch a global fund management business that looks after more than $140 billion of other people’s money. The pundit in question, he says, ‘is the biggest historical revisionist around.

Martin Vander Weyer

The benefits of privatising BA seem to have worn off — so why not do it again?

It is exactly 20 years next week since British Airways was privatised. Arguably, it was the most successful of all the Thatcher-era privatisations. Under the redoubtable Lord King and his marketing-wizard sidekick Colin (now also Lord) Marshall, a demoralised, loss-making state enterprise had been turned by five years of vigorous, not to say brutal, leadership into ‘the world’s favourite airline’. The share offer in February 1987 was 32 times oversubscribed, and almost 10 per cent of it was set aside for the airline’s staff, many of whom became proud owners of a stake in a business which seemed to have been miraculously transformed. But that was then, and this is now.

Saturday

Stephen Vines

Secrets of survival in the Noble House

The novelist James Clavell must have purchased a job lot of clichés when he wrote his two fictional blockbusters based on the history of the Hong Kong-based Jardine Matheson business empire. Noble House is set in the modern era, but it is Taipan, set in the 19th century, that is the more notorious of the two, filled with tales of intrigue in the opium trade and a smattering of sex. But in some respects Clavell’s imagination fell short of reality: the most extraordinary part of the story is the resilience and adaptability of this conglomerate as it marches towards its third century (it was founded in 1832) under firm family control. Jardine Matheson’s accounts for 2006 are likely to show the group in better shape than it has been for some time.

Allister Heath

Mugged by inflation — again

It was Ronald Reagan who warned that ‘inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man’. Having just worked out that my personal rate of inflation is running at a scary 6.6 per cent, I know exactly what he meant. A few months ago Britain’s official statisticians began to panic. They had realised that nobody believed their figures any more. With school fees, gas bills and the cost of car insurance soaring, many people — especially pensioners and middle-class consumers — laughed through gritted teeth when told that inflation remained at rock-bottom.

Richard Orange

Invasion of nerds leaves India’s high-tech capital yearning for its old identity

‘This is a celebration of the nerd in each of us,’ declared Partha, the pony-tailed co-founder of Mindtree, an information technology consulting firm, flashing a nervous grin at thousands of young software engineers ranged in a marquee in front of him and going on to read out a dictionary definition: ‘an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person, slavishly devoted to intellectual pursuits’. He might well have been welcoming Gordon Brown, whose recent visit to India’s IT capital, Bangalore, made more headlines than it might otherwise have done because of the hullabaloo about Celebrity Big Brother.

Saturday

Judi Bevan

The struggle to make Sainsbury’s great again

Justin King feels underappreciated. Dubbed ‘Tigger’ by his staff shortly after arriving as chief executive of a crisis-ridden J Sainsbury Plc in March 2004, the 45-year-old’s normal bounce is notably absent when we meet at the grocery chain’s Holborn Circus headquarters to discuss his progress in ‘making Sainsbury’s great again’. Sales over the 12-week Christmas trading period were a laudable 5 per cent up on a same-store basis, but he struggles to conceal his irritation with City analysts who, instead of praising this achievement, are already muttering about ‘a profitless recovery’ and the difficulties of improving margins.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

A slow dawn but not a false one

For fund managers who specialised in Japan, 2005 was a fantastic year. After more than a decade of dealing with a market in the doldrums they suddenly found themselves in the middle of a boom: stocks were rising fast, gurus around the world were tipping Japan as their favourite market and Japanese-themed hedge funds were springing up everywhere. Money poured in and the managers — who had looked resentfully at the fortunes being made in US and UK markets for many years — started to live the dream: they opened offices in St James and rushed to buy the cars, boats and houses that the City thinks go with making real money. By the end of the year the benchmark index was up around  40 per cent and they were all rolling in cash.

Martin Vander Weyer

Who’s new in 2007 — and how are things in Sakhalin, Comrade Lobachov?

An entry in the new edition of Who’s Who isn’t quite like a knighthood — you can’t buy one, for a start — but it is nevertheless a distinction. It’s also a useful indicator of trends. Business leaders appearing in the big red book for the first time this year illustrate the march of international corporate life: a big hello to Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo of Nokia, the Finnish mobile-phone giant, and Pierre-Henri Gourgeon of Air France-KLM. But the names that particularly caught my eye are Britons who have expanded the horizons of consumer technology.

Paul Johnson

Time raises Longfellow, like Lazarus, from the dead

It is good news that Longfellow is at last enjoying a revival, happily coinciding this year with the 200th anniversary of his birth. He is far and away America’s greatest poet. In his own time this was the general verdict on both sides of the Atlantic, and critical approval joined with popular success. His narrative poem ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’ (1858) sold 15,000 copies on its first day of publication, in Boston and London. His home, Craigie House, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a place of pilgrimage.

Saturday

Matthew Lynn

Why we need no-frills, low-cost private schools

If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here’s a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market share at the same time? The answer is the one you’re in: private education. In the last two decades, the British private schools industry has pulled off a trick that most business-school textbooks would tell you is impossible: attracting more business while becoming more and more expensive. Schools have broken out of what is usually the most rigid of all the dismal science’s iron laws: that as prices rise, demand declines.

Stephanie Grace

Open for business again — thanks to mom-and-pop stores and voluntourists

New Orleans always had a split personality. There was the picture-postcard city that visitors enjoyed: lovely, languid, funky, obsessed with food and music and bon temps, in the local parlance. Then there was workaday New Orleans, home to poverty that would have shocked the rest of America and the developed world if they had seen it. On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed that other side for all to see. Residents who filled the Superdome, who lined the streets around the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center waiting for days for food, water, help, were in many cases the same people who filled the low-wage service jobs that made the tourist economy tick. Local leaders were left with a conundrum. Without tourism, which pre-Katrina employed 75,000 people, there could be no recovery.

Edie G-Lush

The real 3G phone boom: it’s about girls, girls, girls

Suppose you have 15 minutes to while away waiting for the train. Why not pull out your mobile phone, punch in your pin number and download a Playboy movie for as little as £5? Not interested? Of course you’re not; you’re a Spectator reader, for heaven’s sake. But there are plenty of people out there who are, and they’re not only bringing in revenue for the niche market of mobile porn, they’re actually driving the development of mobile technology. Three years ago, when third-generation mobile phones were first launched in Britain, the joke was that 3G stood for ‘girls, gambling and games’. That has proved substantially correct, though it could equally well be ‘girls, girls, girls’.

Paul Johnson

The best thing ever written about music in our language

If I had a teenage child with a passion for serious music, I would not hesitate to give him or her Essays in Musical Analysis by Donald Francis Tovey. This is a formidable work. The first volume is on symphonies, the second on symphonies, variations and orchestral polyphony, the third on concertos, the fourth on illustrative music and the final volume on vocal music. There is also an index volume which includes a valuable glossary, and the general introduction provides a dazzlingly clear explanation of such basic concepts as key, tonic, dominant, tonality and sonata form. There are copious musical illustrations throughout. You say a teenager is not going to wade through six volumes of uncompromising gravity. Not true.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Don’t laugh too loud — this theatre of the world is unsafe

We smile, naturally, sometimes on our first day of life. But we have to learn to laugh — that is, we imitate the mouth motions, facial contortions and, above all, the laugh noises of our elders. This is why the way we laugh is part of our breeding. I notice every year at the Christmas season a lot of loud, infuriating and ill-bred laughter in restaurants, from people who have had a few, chiefly from shaven-headed men but also from a growing number of women. Jane Austen deplored loud laughter, believing that a fine-tuned control of the vocal cords was a sure sign of a gentleman. Her Emma was convinced that the young farmer Robert Martin, whom she considered a demeaning suitor for Harriet Smith, would laugh in an unseemly manner.

Martin Vander Weyer

Snouts still in the trough — and now bosses want 20 per cent of every profit

I like to think I helped start the national debate about fairness and executive pay with an article here in May 1993 headlined ‘Snouts in the Trough’, illustrated by Garland with pin-striped porkers helping themselves to huge portions of gravy. Since then, bosses’ pay packets have ballooned — the heat in 1993 was caused by £140,000 salaries for water company chairmen, whereas this year more than 4,000 City bankers are set to receive million-plus bonuses, and one, Driss Ben-Brahim of Goldman Sachs, is said to be collecting (presumably in an armoured truck) £50 million.

Saturday

Simon Nixon

The Irishman, the Dutchwoman and the Indian who put the home team to shame

It says something about how cosmopolitan the City has become that, for my money, the three winners of my personal ‘people of the year’ awards are an Irishman, a Dutchwoman and an Indian. The latter is Lakshmi Mittal, who had the audacity to take on the French establishment with his bid for Arcelor and win. In doing so, the steel magnate struck a magnificent blow for shareholder rights in the heart of Old Europe — which is still where the City’s future will be determined, regardless of its current love affair with Russian oil groups and Kazakh mining businesses.

Paul Johnson

Vel

The Velázquez show at the National Gallery has reminded me that art history is not only about what was, and what is, but what might have been. This Andalusian from Seville (his father was Portuguese) was a lifelong snob and social climber and later maintained his family were of gentry, if not noble, stock. We do not know and it seems unlikely. What matters about this single-minded and pushy southerner is that he was perhaps the most naturally gifted painter who has ever lived. His training is obscure and was unimportant. Who can teach a genius of the top rank? The way in which he put on the paint, with infinite exactitude and matchless daring, swiftly, surely and with total confidence, has never been equalled. This kind of skill cannot be learned. It comes by the grace of God.

Saturday

Peter Jones

Natale Christi hilare et faustum annum novum!

Journalists are paid to be thought-provoking, but something very odd comes over them when they unfold their thoughts on the subject of Latin. Neal Ascherson, for example, once argued in the Independent on Sunday that he had been taught Latin at Eton as ‘a rite of exclusion for those outside, a ceremony of submission for those inside’, with a view to ‘subordinating the will on a mental barrack-square’ and producing people subservient to authority. Further, it prevented him learning Slavic languages. He concluded that Latin was ‘part of England’s fake heritage, part of that pseudo-ancient landscape which I call Druidic. And it should be left to fall down.

Paul Johnson

The significance of the order: ‘All hands on deck!’

A friend of mine recently sustained terrible injuries to his hand when his shotgun blew up. Such accidents fill me with horror, not least because they remind me how important our hands are to us, and how easily — in scores of different ways — they can be damaged. Hands are miraculous things, and one of the delights of observing children is to see how quickly they make use of them — pointing, turning knobs, pressing buttons, above all using a pencil. I have just received a delightful photo of my transatlantic granddaughter drawing. It is a Vermeer-like study in intense concentration. Though she is only 20 months old, she holds the pencil firmly and correctly. This is very important.

Richard Northedge

Will 2007 repeat the madness of 1987?

If you remember 1987 at all, it is probably for the October hurricane and the stock market crash. Because they coincided, they are inextricably linked as though one caused the other. In fact, despite falling 23 per cent, the market was back on its feet before the debris of the storm had been cleared. Share prices ended 1987 higher than they began, making the crash a downward blip on a rising graph — unlike the turn-of-the-21st-century meltdown that has left prices well below their dotcom levels after six years. As the 20th anniversary of 1987 looms, rather than remember the October storms we should look back to the preceding months of market madness — and the subsequent era of corporate disasters.