Ryanair

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: The £1 bet that built a 1,000-strong company

At a charity lunch in Manchester, I meet a cheerful ‘engagement manager’ from AO.com, formerly Appliances Online, a fast-growing internet seller of fridges and washing machines headquartered at Horwich near Bolton. The job title is new to me: it turns out to mean engaging the company’s workforce in ways that help them enjoy their jobs and feel valued. Their employment package features a £4-a-month ‘healthcare cash plan’ including dentistry, days off for charity work, gym memberships and a 50 per cent subsidy for ‘any social activity our staff fancy, so long as it develops their skills and is done by more than four people’. The emphasis on well-being and fun

Thursday

Ross Clark

Welcome to Ryanair Britain

Which businessman is the most influential in the making of government policy? The answer came to me when I received a letter fining me £80 for forgetting to renew my car insurance by the correct date. But it could also have come to me had I forgotten to fill out of council tax enquiry form (fine £70), missed getting in my tax return by one day (£100), or got caught in a box junction in the King’s Road which has two sets of traffic lights in quick succession (£130). It is, I have come to believe, Michael O’Leary. The Ryanair boss has mastered a business model whereby you lure in

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor Why can’t we have more public toilets and fewer wheelie-bins?

After a carefree month at my wife’s house in Tuscany — the longest summer holiday I have spent there for maybe 30 years — the return to England this week has proven especially irksome. It is depressing enough to land at any British airport, but Stansted takes the cake. Arriving there after a Ryanair flight from Pisa (in itself a dispiriting experience), I found myself at the end of an enormous queue, so long that its front was indiscernible, and took 40 minutes to reach the desk of an immigration officer. There were literally thousands of people in front of me. Why so many? Why is England so much more

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

No one liked Mervyn King – but history could yet be on his side

Sir Mervyn King was his own man to the end: professorial, downbeat, against the tide. At last week’s Mansion House dinner — as in his final vote in favour of more QE, on which his Monetary Policy Committee colleagues bade him farewell by defeating him six to three — he was still worrying about a potential reversal of the fragile recovery. Even as he packs his collection of Aston Villa programmes and MPC minutes into plastic crates, the prospect of collateral damage from another euro-storm will be furrowing his brow. So his last speech as Governor was short on jokes and long on warnings: about ‘unfinished business’ and lessons unlearned,