Any other business

Saturday

Allister Heath

Multinationals bring festive cheer

Here’s a provocative thought for Christmas. Instead of buying your nearest and dearest one of those charity goat-for-Africa cards, it would make far more economic sense to buy them a few shares in a multinational corporation which is going to help boost the African economy. It may be deeply unfashionable to say so, but the much-demonised multinationals do far more for the poor than all the world’s charities put together. Charity workers should not take this personally. They are doing their best in appalling conditions, and have saved or improved millions of lives. But however hard they work, and however many goats they provide, there is a limit to what they can do.

Joanna Pitman

Plafonniers and station platforms

Christmas is almost upon us and you still haven’t sorted out that significant present for the woman in your life who has everything. And there’s the rub. She already has the jewels, the houses, the horses, the cars, the shoes and furs and more cashmere dressing gowns than she could possibly ever want. Knowing the way she’s capable of burning through your money, you’d like to give her something under the tree that will at least hold its value, and perhaps become a family heirloom. So does she have, I ask you, any Lalique plafonniers? My first thought was that a plafonnier was something to do with platform shoes, although admittedly platform shoes made from antique French glass would be pretty outrageously special.

Judi Bevan

High-risk investing: the Christian defence

Philip Richards is an extreme investor. His willingness to bet against the crowd has turned his initial £150,000 investment in his hedge fund company RAB Capital into £150 million since 1999. In particular, his Special Situations Fund, which he manages personally with the credo ‘to maximise returns with minimal restrictions’, has performed spectacularly. Since he started the fund in January 2003, with a big bet on an obscure Russian gold mine, it has made the handful of investors who were in at the beginning almost 40 times their money. ‘I believe it’s the best performing fund in the world,’ says Richards, an avowed Christian not averse to preaching his own book.

Martin Vander Weyer

A seasonal mission to Istanbul’s faithful, including those who worship Tony Blair

Think of this as a two-for-one Christmas special, a City Life column gift-wrapped inside Any Other Business. The city is Istanbul, where I am on a mission — in the steps of Pope Benedict, as it were — to salute loyal expatriate Spectator readers. And what a life this city offers. ‘Very cosmopolitic!’ exclaimed Mustafa the driver, forcing his way through impossible jams. Force your own way through the evening throng in Istiklâl Caddesi, Istanbul’s Oxford Street, and you might be in Milan or Barcelona; watch Bosphorus ferries at night from a penthouse restaurant, and you might be in Hong Kong; talk to businessmen about the booming real-estate market, and you could be in any new-rich city on the planet.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

What happens when you inherit your uncle’s underclothes

Just as the English have inspired supreme artistry in male dress, symbolised by Savile Row and Beau Brummell, so they have also contributed a dissenting movement of genteel shabbiness or grand nonconformity. It is not dictated by lack of cash but by sup-erior indifference, meanness and what I call the Robinson Crusoe syndrome, a delight in creating do-it-yourself clothes. Men like, and women do not like, reading Crusoe for that reason. The propensity to take pleasure in wearing old and worn, second-hand and even inherited clothes is strongest in wartime but persists into peace. The fictional archetype of this kind of gentleman is Sunny Farebrother in Anthony Powell’s Music of Time.

Neil Collins

I’ve seen the future of food retailing — and it works

It’s simple, this internet grocery shopping. Log on, pick what you want, pay with your credit card and get on with your life while you wait for the doorbell to ring. No need to schlep to the supermarket, fight your way to the checkout, lug all those overloaded plastic bags into the car and out again, to discover that you’ve carefully placed the bananas at the bottom of the heap. We spend £120 billion a year on groceries, so buying them on the net is such an obvious new market that it’s no wonder lots of people tried to get into it. For some, it has been a miserable, expensive lesson that doing the weekly shop is nothing like as simple as it looks. Webvan, an American pioneer of internet grocery, pledged to go from cow to steak for customers but went bust instead.

Richard Orange

‘This is not an industry for pussycats’

If you built a composite portrait of Leigh Clifford from the handful of newspaper profiles ever written about him, you would be presented with an archetypal Aussie miner, as tough as the rocks his company digs from the earth. Shortly before taking up, six years ago, the post of chief executive of Rio Tinto — the London-based international mining giant — Clifford famously brandished a clenched fist at a group of environmental activists who stormed the stage at a shareholder meeting. He quickly withdrew when he realised how the picture might look in the papers, but one mining analyst still describes him as ‘a hairy-arsed mining man rather than a polished suit’.

Ross Clark

Enough, says Blair — but is anyone listening?

Given that the government’s lust for setting targets has done so much to increase bureaucracy in public services Given that the government’s lust for setting targets has done so much to increase bureaucracy in public services, one could be forgiven for a little scepticism regarding the Prime Minister’s latest target: to reduce red tape by 25 per cent. Presumably a new quango will be set up to measure the exact length of red tape which binds the country, so that Blair will be able to pronounce victory once precisely a quarter of it has been chopped off. I don’t hold out a great deal of hope that this latest initiative will achieve anything. We’ve heard it all before.

Jonathan Davis

The perils of insouciance

Jonathan Davis says investors’ disregard for risk has paid off handsomely in 2006 — but it may not in 2007 A good general rule for investors is to take no notice of consensus predictions about what is going to happen in the next 12 months. The track record of year-end investment punditry is consistently poor. That makes the Christmas and New Year period particularly hazardous for the unwary investor, as the demand for forecasts is at its peak, and the capacity for misdirection consequently also high. This is especially so for those who are not aware of J.K. Galbraith’s adage that economists forecast ‘not because they know, but because they are asked’. One professional investor of my acquaintance has turned forecasting folly into a source of insight.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

When a leading statesman is also a model of decorum

Good manners are an outward sign of inward grace, a harbinger of nicely judged moral actions, warmly reflecting decency in thought. And by good manners I do not mean Osric-like flourishes or Chesterfield’s polished insincerity. Good manners involve taking trouble, a degree, however slight, of self-sacrifice and unselfishness. They are the trade goods of civilisation and, as Yeats observed, civilisation is an exercise in self-restraint. Lockwood wrote of Sir Walter Scott, ‘He was a gentleman even to his dogs.’ I have often puzzled over this remark, for it is sometimes difficult to be good-mannered to dogs, with their bottomless servility. Cats are a different matter, having a super-fine dignity which a dog can never attain.

Matthew Lynn

Why Porsche would be mad to bid for Volkswagen

Matthew Lynn says Porsche is supremely successful in its own niche, but that does not qualify it to run Europe’s largest mass-market car maker There are only three hard and fast rules in the motor industry, if you want to make money. Never build an orange car; steer clear of Formula 1; and never bet against Porsche. For the last decade the Stuttgart-based manufacturer of high-performance sports cars has existed in its own parallel universe. While the rest of the European industry battles with intransigent unions, soaring costs and vicious global competition, Porsche just taps the accelerator and flashes away into the distance. But now the moment of hubris seems to have arrived.

Matthew Vincent

Think outside the jargon box

‘Dinosaurs ... think inside the box. Dolphins ... occupy the space outside the box. ‘Dinosaurs ... think inside the box. Dolphins ... occupy the space outside the box. The dinosaurs’ negative headset creates a lose-lose situation, whereas the dolphins’ can-do headset enables them to score a try!’ ‘Set out to leave the first vapour trail in the blue-sky scenario!’ Readers of the Financial Times, and viewers of The Office, will probably recognise these words of wisdom imparted by corporate thought-leader Martin Lukes and branch manager David Brent. But even if you’ve never encountered the fictional creations of, respectively, Lucy Kellaway and Ricky Gervais, you may well recognise their language from your own working life.

Richard Northedge

The myth of affordable housing

The latest non-job in Britain’s town halls is the affordable housing officer The latest non-job in Britain’s town halls is the affordable housing officer, a bureaucrat with the brief of bringing down the price of property. What local and central government mean by ‘affordable housing’ is, of course, housing that is more affordable, but the fact is that all housing is affordable, otherwise it would not sell or let. Not all housing is affordable to everyone, however — but then it never was. Affordable housing (lack of) is nevertheless one of the causes of the day for the something-must-be-down-about-it campaigners. There is a National Affordable Housing Programme.

John Andrews

The streets are alive with hip-hop — but there’s still plenty of gold beneath them

In the mountains south of Zurich, as winter approaches, the farmers bring their cows down. The snowbound higher pastures will soon be empty, and the precious cattle walk down in traditional processions, some decorated with small flowers, the streets of the villages echoing with the sound of the famous cowbells. It’s a time-honoured tradition, and no one is ancient enough to remember when it began. Switzerland, the world’s oldest democracy, has existed as a recognisable country for over 700 years, and that’s enough time to build up more than a few traditions.

Saturday

Judi Bevan

The kitchen table tycoons

Judi Bevan says that new technology has at last created real liberation for women — by enabling them to run successful businesses from home Kitchen table tycoons — the new buzz phrase to describe women who set up their own businesses from home — now account for £4.4 billion of sales a year, according to Professor Tim Leunig at the London School of Economics. Their numbers are rising rapidly; research by Barclays Bank showed that women started a fifth of all new businesses this year compared with just 13 per cent in 1996. Technology has done for women what Germaine Greer’s rhetoric never could — delivered them genuine autonomy over their own livelihoods.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Ignore your conscience: big oil still beats green power

If you are the kind of person who believes the things the City says, you might by now be almost convinced that we don’t really need oil any more. If you are the kind of person who believes the things the City says, you might by now be almost convinced that we don’t really need oil any more. Within seconds of the publication of the Stern report every analyst in town had become an expert on green energy, and investors were being advised to put their money in everything from wind, solar and wave power to fuel cells and biomass electricity plants, all of which were being put about as perfectly viable alternatives to fossil fuels. The problem is that, at present at least, they aren’t. Wind power is famously inefficient. Wave power is a very nascent technology.

Martin Vander Weyer

Boston’s in a hole and still digging. Will London’s Olympics go the same way?

On the way into Boston from Logan Airport, you pass a cavernous, closed-off tunnel entrance, full of construction vehicles, looking at night like an avant garde set for Siegfried. This is one end of the ‘Big Dig’, America’s greatest civil engineering fiasco, and it offers a useful corrective for the British inferiority complex about competence in large-scale public projects. The news that the facilities for the 2012 London Olympics look set to cost at least £6 billion, rather than the £2.

Paul Johnson

A writer plays hookey with a magic paintbox

At a time when I should be writing my book on human monsters — goaded on by the many ingenious suggestions from readers of this column — I have actually been painting. There are many reasons for this disgraceful irresponsibility. First, the delicious autumn weather and the tremendous rainbow of colours it has coaxed out of the generous earth. The greenies who accuse us of destroying our planet are too young to remember the Novembers of my youth, when blankets of fog, greenish-grey and poisonous, descended in early November and often clung to southeast England for weeks at a time, stretching from Berkshire to Essex, and particularly virulent in London itself. Its fumes killed off the very young and the elderly and made life a misery to all.

Saturday

Simon Nixon

The City’s new boom market: philanthropy

As we approach the festive season, spare a thought for the children of billionaires. These are joyless times for those holding out for an inheritance. As they climb aboard the private jet that will whisk them off to the yacht where a team of chefs will prepare their Christmas dinner, many will be wondering if Daddy has already cooked their goose. The super-rich are slaves to fashion. And the latest fashion is giving it away. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the world’s wealthiest men, started the trend by pledging to give away around $30 billion each. Now multi-millionaires everywhere are desperate to offload their excess zillions before it has time to damage the kids. The buzz in the City is that philanthropy is back, after a gap of about 100 years.

George Kerevan

It’s surprising what you can buy from an ice-cream van in Scotland’s Manhattan

Glaswegians are secretly proud of their new, four-lane bridge across the River Clyde, the first crossing to be built in over 30 years. Seen from either end, it looks like half of a McDonald’s ‘Golden Arches’ sign. The city’s spin-doctors insist on calling it the ‘Clyde Arc’ but locals have christened it the ‘Squinty Bridge’, because of the dizzying way the steel support crosses from one side of the road to the other. The Squinty Bridge is important because it marks a return to the city’s Clydeside roots. ‘The Clyde made Glasgow and Glasgow made the Clyde’, runs the old saying. But the city turned its back on the Clyde 50 years ago.