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Yesterday

Esther Walker

I’ll do anything to keep Zack Polanski out of Kentish Town

From our UK edition

On the morning of the 2005 general election, the young man who sat opposite me at work asked, ‘How did you vote?’ ‘That’s none of your business,’ I replied, in a silly, prim voice. A cruel look passed across his face. ‘You voted Tory, didn’t you?’ he crowed. ‘That’s why you won’t say!’ He started to point at me. ‘Tory voter! TORY SCUM!’ I was appalled. It was my first experience of tribal politics and I didn’t like it. I can’t remember what I said in reply, but I certainly didn’t reveal how I’d voted. If I had voted for Michael Howard’s Conservative party, I would have been too ashamed to admit it and if I had voted Labour, I wouldn’t have wanted to admit that, either – not if it meant I was now a kindred spirit to this maniac.

Martin Vander Weyer

Happy retirement to the wise and benign Warren Buffett

From our UK edition

‘Father Time always wins,’ 96-year-old Warren Buffett told shareholders as he retired last week from the chair of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment juggernaut he led for six decades. ‘He has, however, been generous with me.’ Buffett himself has been generous too, in the wisdom he dispensed and in the spectacular long-term return on capital he delivered. One hundred dollars invested with him in 1965 would have become $6 million today, at a compound annual growth rate close to 20 per cent; the same bet on the S&P 500 share index, compounding at 10.5 per cent, would have made just $45,500. Except of course that for Buffett, investment was never a bet.