Business

When we were hit by Britain’s biggest crisis since the war, some people behaved like heroes, laying their lives down to fight coronavirus. Others made their excuses, put their feet up and had a good long six-month snooze. My favourite Covid excuse came from Eurostar, which declared in August that, ‘As a result of coronavirus, we are only able to offer wifi in our Standard Premier and Business Premier carriages’. Wireless broadband was duly disabled in its standard-class coaches — until, besieged by complaints, the company conducted a full reverse--ferret operation and turned the wifi back on. Again and again since the virus struck, companies and institutions, big and small, have pounced on Covid as a wonderful excuse to be lazy — or ruthless.

The recent high-profile departures at the New York Times of editorial page editor James Bennet and opinion writer Bari Weiss have left some on the business side of the news industry scratching their heads. Both exited amid ideological turmoil that Weiss detailed in a letter of resignation to the Times’s publisher A.G. Sulzberger, describing the 'hostile work environment' she endured at the hands of fellow editors and staffers. They were wholly intolerant, she said, of her role as a ‘centrist' at the paper. Bennet, said Weiss, had led the effort after President Trump’s election in 2016 to bring in 'voices that would not otherwise appear' in the Times.