Dominic Midgley

Monday

Dominic Midgley

Republished: the business article that someone wants you not to read

Note from the editor. The Spectator has been informed that, due to an EU Court ruling, the below article will now longer show up under Google search results. Here's the rather creepy email:- So someone, somewhere, doesn't want this article to show up when you Google for a certain name, or company, or somesuch. We had received no complaint about the article, and have no idea why someone went to the lengths of applying for the original URL to be struck off. It is now The Spectator's policy, on receiving such notifications, to republish automatically under a new URL (this one), so the article will never disappear from Google. We have left the original headline on, just in case. Is political correctness good for business?

Saturday

Dominic Midgley

Poor prospects in the sell-us-your-gold rush

The permatanned television ‘entertainer’ Dale Winton is hosting an unintentionally hilarious series of commercials on daytime television these days. Using the same format as The Antiques Roadshow, the ads for something called CashMyGold show members of the public sitting round a table with Winton and an ‘expert’ who values their gold trinkets. They beam in delight when the jeweller informs them what he thinks the bling is worth. One of them even says: ‘That’s a lot more than I thought.’ On the face of it, these ads are very convincing. After all, the gold price at the moment is indeed higher than it has been for years. At the beginning of this month, gold reached new record highs of more than £750 an ounce.

Saturday

Dominic Midgley

Billions more mouths to feed

Food security is the new energy security. So says Susan Payne, chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, a Surrey-based company which claims to run the biggest agricultural fund in Africa following the launch of its first fund less than 18 months ago. Payne, a Canadian who cut her teeth as an emerging-markets expert first at JPMorgan and then at Goldman Sachs, attracts investors by conjuring up the Malthusian devil. The world’s population is set to grow by 2 billion to 9.1 billion over the next 40 years; feeding the children of tomorrow will require a 50 per cent increase in farm output by 2025 and a doubling by 2050. Meanwhile, the price of staple crops has risen by more than 80 per cent since 2005, pushing 100 million people into poverty, according to the World Bank.

Wednesday

Dominic Midgley

Last orders for the British pub

Dominic Midgley says a great institution of national life is under threat from the credit crunch, the smoking ban and cheap supermarket booze — but there are signs of hope The sounds of merry-making could be heard from the street as 300 journalists, suppliers and associated hangers-on gathered at The Northcote pub in Clapham last month to toast the opening of Geronimo Inns’ latest outlet. Geronimo’s founder Rupert Clevely, the amiable former marketing director of Veuve Clicquot champagne, was on hand to dole out wine and press the flesh as he celebrated his sixth opening of the year. All in all, it was like a scene from a film set in a happier world before the term ‘credit crunch’ had been invented.

Wednesday

Dominic Midgley

Murdoch’s right: the BBC will destroy its news rivals

A Guardian survey published last Friday showed that eight out of ten members of the public backed the BBC against its detractors. The opinion poll was commissioned in response to a wide-ranging attack on the corporation by James Murdoch, son of Rupert and chief executive of News Corporation for Europe and Asia. In his MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh television festival at the end of last month, he had accused the BBC of a ‘land grab’, adding: ‘The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling.’ Now, I hold no brief for Mr Murdoch. And he holds no brief for me, as he effectively fired me last month when he approved the closure of thelondonpaper, the free newspaper on which I have worked for the past three years or so.

Wednesday

Dominic Midgley

He’s the voice of the crash, but the words are all his own

Financial crisis has transformed Robert Peston from egghead to celebrity, says Dominic Midgley, but the BBC business editor indignantly denies he’s a government mouthpiece The cover of the hardback version of Who Runs Britain?, Robert Peston’s masterly dissection of how the global economy got into the mess it’s in today, features an abstract version of the Union Jack. On the front of the paperback version published last week, however, we are treated to a portrait of the man himself. And we all know why the publishers made that change. In the past six months or so Robert Peston has gone from being the highly respected but faintly obscure business editor of the BBC to something of a celebrity.

Saturday

Dominic Midgley

Bag a McNab

From our US edition

Porsche and Aston Martin haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the recent boom in City bonuses. There’s a new generation of customers at Holland and Holland, Barbour and Land Rover — stockbrokers, traders and lawyers who are swapping their pinstripes for plus-fours of a weekend, and heading to the country for a spot of shooting. Hunting with foxes may be in abeyance but when the roe deer stalking season begins on the first of next month, there will be more takers than ever, and all the big banks have started organising shooting days at venues like Bisley and the Royal Berkshire Shooting Ground. The Holy Grail for this new breed of young, competitive hunters is something called the ‘McNab’.

Saturday

Dominic Midgley

The new faces of motor-racing: the sheikh and the African trader

Think Formula 1 and it’s not long before a short man with a terrible haircut and an unfeasibly tall wife comes to mind. But while Bernie Ecclestone is very much the face of the world’s premier motor-racing series, it’s a different story with A1 Grand Prix. This weekend the upstart rival to Formula 1 will be staging demonstration races in Manchester to promote the alternative high-octane racing series it holds in the Formula 1 off-season, the northern hemisphere winter. A1 has a short but intriguing history. It was inaugurated last year by one of the younger members of Dubai’s ruling family and a controversial South African entrepreneur who made a small fortune from a transport company in the post-apartheid era.

Wednesday

Dominic Midgley

Is that a bug under your boardroom table?

The news that Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative party, is to become the European chairman of Diligence, a US-based corporate intelligence company, is the latest sign of gentrification in a sector that was once seen as the preserve of shifty types who rifle through bins under cover of darkness. There is still a role for that sort of operator, but as the commercial investigation game gets serious, a growing number of private investigators have a background in investment banking or the law. Indeed, one security industry analyst, Equitable Services, has predicted that the global private security market could be worth £150 billion by 2010, fuelled by mushrooming demand for high-quality commercial intelligence.

Wednesday

Dominic Midgley

Is political correctness good for business?

Herbert Smith, a firm of City solicitors, last month announced that it had hired its first ‘inclusivity manager’. There were chortles all round, and the Times ran a short piece about the appointment under the headline ‘Political correctness seems to have broken out at one of London’s top legal firms’. The caravan swiftly moved on, but the recruitment of Carolyn Lee by one of the ‘Magic Circle’ of leading law partnerships is the latest sign that the City is coming to terms with the realities of modern life. While the number of women in the professional workforce has mushroomed in recent years and a tolerance of male chauvinist piggery has correspondingly diminished, the City has remained a male-dominated bastion where old habits die hard.

Saturday

Dominic Midgley

Oiling up to the oligarchs

Dominic Midgley on how Britain’s service industries are busy separating London’s free-spending New Russians from their cash A senior member of the Chamber of Commerce in Moscow once said that any mention of the word ‘oligarch’ had the average Russian reaching for a gun. That’s because much of the population is furious at the way the national wealth was passed to a handful of hustlers in a series of sweetheart deals with Boris Yeltsin. In London, however, the word ‘oligarch’ produces a very different reaction, inspiring an enterprising collection of opportunists to reach for the telephone.