Any other business

Saturday

Frank Johnson

Hugo Chavez: a man with the perfect name to be a Cameroon MP

Two weeks ago I mentioned here the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez; I think he is the international Left’s best hope at present: anti-American without being bin Laden. He causes trouble for the United States, but in the old-fashioned Cold War way for a Latin American: delivering two-hour speeches about gringo imperialism to various mobs, attributing Latin American poverty to American corporations, being lauded by the former Mrs Jagger, and being written up by the evergreen Richard Gott in the Guardian, who did the same for Che Guevara so many years ago. All Camden could rally to such a leader. Soon he will receive the greatest honour which the British Left can at present bestow — dinner here with London’s Chavez: Mr Livingstone.

James Kynge

China’s brand image problem: it’s a country full of counterfeits

Augustus the Strong, the 18th-century king of Saxony and Poland, is an unlikely but fitting metaphor for a rising China. Fitting because Augustus was as weak as he was strong. A bear of a man, he is said to have fathered 356 children, commanded large standing armies and ruled his dominions with uncompromising resolve. But his weaknesses, like those of China, grew out of his strengths. The passion he felt for his lands and his women sprang from a devotion to beauty, and that devotion also sired a sickness that Augustus called his ‘maladie de la porcelain’. He was bewitched by Chinese ‘blue and white’.

Simon Nixon

Jumping on the low-fat bandwagon

Simon Nixon says food companies will make money out of the government’s obsession with obesity – and consumers will pay Sometimes life really does imitate art. It’s less than 10 years since the satirist Chris Morris made his infamous episode of Brass Eye in which he persuaded a host of self-important politicians and celebrities to stand in front of the camera and utter lurid warnings about the risks of ‘cake’. This dangerous substance was said to be having a devastating effect on children. ‘One girl threw up her own pubic bone,’ claimed a Tory MP who went on to ask questions about ‘cake’ in Parliament.Well, cake is now firmly back on the agenda.

Matthew Vincent

Other people’s debts

‘A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination,’ claimed Arthur Wing Pinero in his 1893 play The Second Mrs Tanqueray. ‘A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination,’ claimed Arthur Wing Pinero in his 1893 play The Second Mrs Tanqueray. His work may be rarely seen in the West End these days, but his words are enjoying a revival in the City. Earlier this week financiers found the imagination to invest £49 million in the flotation of a modern-day pawnbroker. Where once the Square Mile mantra was to profit from ‘other people’s money’, it is now about profiting from their lack of it. Debt is a growth sector of the UK stock market, in line with the growth in consumer borrowing. Since 1997 personal debt has more than doubled to almost £1.

Rupert Steiner

How to keep the oil flowing in a dangerous world

Rupert Steiner talks to Britain’s most admired businessman, BP chief executive Lord Browne, about Middle East conflict and management philosophy Click, click, click, but no amount of clicking brings to life the silver and gold lighter in Lord Browne of Madingley’s hand. The chief executive of BP, Europe’s largest oil company, has run out of fuel and the irony is not lost on him. But colleagues rush to bring the lighter to life; one more click, and Browne is billowing smoke. ‘You’d better not write about that,’ he says, a huge grin emerging from the fog. John Browne is Britain’s most admired businessman, and has catapulted BP from a market value of £20 billion in 1995 to a global supertanker worth £139 billion today.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Galbraith versus Friedman: the great debate is not over yet

I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy in New Delhi in March 1963 when Milton Friedman, champion of laissez-faire, came to lunch with J.K. Galbraith, high priest of higher welfare spending and at that time President Kennedy’s ambassador to India. Not only were the two economists lifelong intellectual opponents who found each other’s core beliefs morally reprehensible, but the magisterial Galbraith stood some 20 inches taller than the bantam-cock Friedman.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Thatcherism saved Ryton but globalisation killed it — and striking won’t help

The demise of Peugeot’s Ryton factory came and went as a news story The demise of Peugeot’s Ryton factory came and went as a news story in little more than 48 hours, mutating swiftly from ‘shock closure’ to more measured explanations of inevitability. Though Peugeot is accused of welshing on promises that the plant would keep working until 2010, its French bosses never suggested that it would make a new model after the Peugeot 206, and the fact that cars can now be built cheaper in Slovakia than in Coventry comes as no news at all.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

A noble lady who showed that virtue is its own reward

Truly good people have always been rarities, and ours is not an age which nourishes them by attention and respect. When a good person dies, it is not headline news but, rather, a private tragedy for friends, who thereby lose a beacon in their own confused and muddled lives, someone they could regard as a mentor and who could be relied on to tell them gently but truthfully where they had lost direction. That was how I, and I think many others, saw Christian, Lady Hesketh, always known as Kisty: someone to turn to in time of trouble, for counsel and comfort. Her death earlier this month, swift and peaceful, was not unexpected, for she had long been ill and bore the signs of increasing frailty.

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 22 April 2006

I was about to write ‘Everyone knows the story of James Lind, the Scottish naval surgeon, who conducted the first controlled trial in the history of medicine to prove the curative value of citrus fruits in scurvy’ when I realised that it would have been a silly and, worse still, a snobbish thing to say. After all, my clinical experience suggests that a good, or should I say a bad, percentage of British youth does not know the date of a single great historical event, such as the Battle of Hastings or David Beckham’s marriage, let alone has any familiarity with medical history which, however glorious and uplifting, must always remain a minority interest even in the best-educated households.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

The age of stout hearts, sharp swords — and fun

It is exactly 100 years since F.E. Smith made the most famous maiden speech in history. Do MPs still make maidens? One never hears of them. Indeed one never hears of any speeches in the Commons these days; as a theatre of oratory it is dead. But it was a different matter in 1906. The January election was among the most disastrous in Conservative history. From having a majority of 134, they found themselves with barely 150 seats, and the Liberal majority was 356. This nadir of Tory fortune gave Smith a fine opportunity to make his name at a stroke by restoring their morale in his first speech (he was the newly elected MP for Walton, Liverpool), delivered on 11 March at 10 p.m., then regarded as the best slot of the day.

Martin Vander Weyer

Weep not for Britain’s stake in Airbus, but watch what happens to BAE

Let’s not come over all emotional about the sale of BAE Systems’s one fifth stake in Airbus to EADS, the Franco–German group that already owns the rest of it. For a start, the sale does not portend the death of a once-great industry, because Britain has not had much to be proud of in civil aircraft manufacture since before the second world war. The last all-British commercial aircraft any of us flew in was probably a modest BAe 125, but the division of the then British Aerospace that made it was sold to Raytheon of the US in 1993, and its successors are built in Wichita, Kansas.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Knock, knock! A toast to the City’s peerless chronicler and jokesmith

Christopher Fildes’s City and Suburban column first appeared in June 1984 and notched up over a thousand appearances; before that, he served as business editor under Nigel Lawson in the late 1960s. As a chronicle of modern City life, the Fildes oeuvre has only one equal and that comes in the weighty form of A Club No More, the last volume of David Kynaston’s magisterial history of the Square Mile. In the lighter field of daily and weekly journalism, Christopher has been peerless in his combination of wit, learning, firmness of judgment, appetite for gossip and enthusiasm for lunch — preferably at the Savoy Grill before its tragic refurbishment.

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 8 April 2006

The most beautiful book to come out of South Africa, at least that is known to me, is Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo. It was published in 1925, when the racial question (as it was then called) concerned the relations of Boer to Briton. The blacks in those days were considered to have mere walk-on parts in the drama of history. Pauline Smith was a timid soul who became a protégée of Arnold Bennett. Self-advertisement had not yet become the greatest literary virtue, and her collection of eight tragic stories about the inhabitants of the Little Karoo, a sparsely populated arid area of Cape Province inhabited by simple Boers with Old Testament ways, was widely praised. The emotions of her characters were, of course, all the deeper for not being openly expressed.

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

Lovely girls on the townhouse’s staircase —it’s how The Spectator works best

A health warning greeted me: ‘LIBEL. Mr Christopher Fildes and Mr Auberon Waugh have today joined the staff of The Spectator. As from today, The Spectator is no longer insured against libel. Gatley’s Libel and Slander (sixth and seventh edition) may be consulted in my office. Nigel Lawson, Editor.’ Times were hard. I had come to write a City Notebook and found myself in the attic of a tall, narrow, messy townhouse. The bicycle in the hall was Jock Bruce-Gardyne’s. Lovely girls climbed the stairs in short skirts. Writing was done at the last frantic minute. This still seems to be how The Spectator works best. Bron Waugh and I managed not to libel anybody, although he tinkered with the contents page and varied George Gale’s name to Lunchtime O’Gale.

Frank Johnson

Be as bad as you like, but be sure to call an inquiry

By the weekend, the Conservatives had achieved the feat of making their own funding become just as much ‘the issue’ as Labour’s. The papers were full of sharp-looking loans which the Tories, as much as Labour, had received from the capitalist class. The Prime Minister and his allies had succeeded in making any scandal appear bipartisan. So much so that Mr Blair felt safe enough to set up an ‘independent inquiry’ not into how he and Lord Levy had financed New Labour, but into how all parties were financed. His friends were able to put it about that it was time to ‘move on’ and to have a ‘serious debate’. It was a brilliant stratagem. It also told us much about the times in which we live.

Paul Johnson

Well, and what have you been giving up for Lent?

Who keeps Lent now? Lenctentid was the Anglo-Saxon name for March, meaning spring tide, and as the 40-day fast fell almost entirely in March, it was called Lent, though in other Christian countries it had quite different names. The odd thing about Lent is that though it is a period of gloom and sorrow, commemorating Christ’s sojourn in the wilderness when he prepared himself to sacrifice his life, the days are lengthening all the time as the grip of winter is relaxed, so we ought to feel a lightness of heart. But this Lent the icy east wind has been so persistent that we have not felt the warm breath of spring at all. When I was a child Lent was taken very seriously indeed. On Wednesdays and Fridays there was no meat or even fish, as a rule, and only one frugal meal.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Don’t put your daughter on the train, Mrs Worthington

This month I spent a weekend in Bruges, travelling most of the way by Eurostar, which for this kind of trip easily beats air travel for speed and is, of course, incomparably more comfortable. I love trains. All my early childhood in north Staffordshire, from four to 12, I travelled every day to school on a funny little LMS puffer on the so-called Loop Line, which went through the various Potteries towns and deposited me at Stoke, where it rejoined the main line. Historically, rail was the most efficient, cheap, safe and customer-charming form of travel devised for ordinary people. Like the 19th century which gave it birth, it promoted civilisation, manners and prosperity. Our Loop Line ran from six in the morning to midnight, every 20 minutes.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Hedge funds, like cash gifts from Italy, carry a whiff of dangerous sophistication

‘Pushing money into offshore hedge funds is not the Labour way,’ a left-wing MP commented last week on the savings habits of Tessa Jowell’s estranged husband, David Mills. Since this issue includes an Investment section, readers may be anxious to know whether putting money into hedge funds is or is not the Spectator way. But I think I must pass that buck to your financial advisers, and offer nothing more than words of caution. Hedge funds have had something of the night about their reputation ever since George Soros’s Quantum Fund harvested £1 billion from the speculative attack which drove the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

Paul Johnson

Bottle-beauties and the globalised blond beast

The hair colour gene MCI-R has seven European variants, one of them blond. It is rare and becoming rarer. A WHO survey calculates that the last true blond will be born in Finland in 2202. Do you believe this? Nor do I. A different lot of scientists argue that this gene emerged over a comparatively short period about 10,000 years ago, with food shortages — and shortages of men — speeding up the natural selection process to the advantage of blonds. A touch of old-style Hollywood here? Certainly not the present dump — which Betty Grable would find unrecognisable, Marilyn Monroe chilly and Mae West distinctly hostile — making bad movies to advance its agenda: to them, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a racist insult.

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

Sayonara, Pilks — we’re short of owners with their hearts in the business

A sprig of the Pilkington family was saying goodbye to his hosts. ‘I’ve an early start,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got to be at the bloody glassworks in the morning.’ When he arrived, he found that the chairman, Sir Harry Pilkington, was there before him and had left a note on his desk: ‘My boy, it seems to me that your heart is not in the business...’. Family businesses need enough sprigs to allow for such pruning, and this one was a model. Then some stray aunts and cousins wanted a price for their shares. Now Pilkington is just another public company, and in Sir Harry’s place sits Sir Nigel Rudd, a serial non-executive chairman, Pilks is on the receiving end of a bid from Nippon Glass, and Sir Nigel’s board is recommending it.