Martin Vander Weyer

All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz, the 24-mile-wide choke point between Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, through which moves, in normal times, around a fifth of the global supply of liquified natural gas and a quarter of all seaborne oil. But with Iran threatening to set fire to any ship in the strait, LNG production halted in Qatar after missile attacks, and gas stocks in user countries low at the end of winter, prices are soaring as they did at the outbreak of the Ukraine war. You may hear it said that the UK is relatively well placed for this supply crunch because we import only a small portion of LNG from the Gulf and much more from the US and Norway; and because almost half of UK electricity now comes from renewables, with wind to the fore.

There are elements of economic life, such as the impact of President Donald Trump’s ever-changing tariffs, that are far beyond national control; others, including the supply of most consumer goods, that are best left to free markets; and others which naturally benefit from state intervention. New housing, wholly dependent on planning and building regulations, clearly falls into the last category. So we might well ask how the Labour government plans to solve a homebuilding crisis so extreme that its target of 1.5 million new homes within this parliament is likely to be undershot by 50 per cent or worse.

‘Nostalgia is not a strategy,’ declared Schroders chief executive Richard Oldfield after announcing that the investment firm, descended from a City banking house founded in 1804, is to be sold for £9.9 billion to Nuveen – which sounds like a brand of cooking oil but turns out to be a Chicago-based manager of retirement savings. The two together will hold £1.8 trillion of assets, placing them tenth in a global league headed by the giant American ‘passive’ investors BlackRock and Vanguard. Oldfield is right that there’s no point looking backwards in a tech-driven sector that’s rapidly consolidating to keep pace with those leaders.

It’s a relief not to have been pressganged into joining the Prime Minister’s plane-load of business chiefs and reporters bound for Beijing this week. With Sir Keir Starmer are leaders of the likes of Astra-Zeneca, BP, HSBC, JLR and Rolls-Royce, and some billion-pound deals will no doubt be announced while they’re there – agreed in advance on the condition that Downing Street gave the green light for China’s Royal Mint Court mega-embassy-cum-listening-post on the edge of the City. The Chancellor is on the trip too, perhaps carrying a nice set of hunting prints as a housewarming gift for London ambassador Zheng Zeguang’s new office.

My Davos spy disguised as an Uber Eats driver sent word that this year’s World Economic Forum was rammed ahead of Donald Trump’s arrival. The Alpine resort was heaving with Saudis, Emiratis, AI snake-oil salesmen and US tech titans strongarmed into sponsoring USA House, the official showcase of America’s ‘unity, ingenuity and leadership’ that has its main venue in the town’s English church – ideal for Trump veneration. Attendance was so competitive that the market in fake VIP passes was hotter than precious metals and one African statesman was seen parting with €25,000 in cash for a rented apartment.

The phrase ‘trumped-up charges’ dates from the 18th century, I learn, and derives from the Old French tromper, to deceive. It has certainly acquired new resonance with the threat of criminal indictment against US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, somehow relating to the cost of Fed building renovations. The President says this Department of Justice action has nowt to do with him, but it’s plainly another exercise of what some commentators are calling ‘the Maduro option’: sod constitutional niceties, just drag your opponent into the dock. For all his foreign-policy fireworks, Donald Trump knows November’s US midterm elections will largely be driven by domestic cost-of-living concerns.

Of all the heavyweight books I’ve ever been asked to review, one that most influenced my view of how the world works was Why Nations Fail (2012) by two American academics, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Their theory, drawn from a broad sweep of history, is that all state regimes fit patterns that are either ‘extractive’ or ‘inclusive’. To be inclusive is to be egalitarian in access to resources and rewards, and responsive to the will of the people. To be extractive is to rule despotically in the interest of corrupt elites, often profiting from ruthless extraction of natural resources. Inclusive economies are prone to occasional crisis but capable of self-renewal;extractive economies are destined to fail.

Forecasting is a mug’s game, as the Bank of England governor Mervyn King once said. But I’ll sketch a few trends for 2026 nevertheless, starting on a positive note in the stock market before moving on to some of the many choices on an à la carte menu of gloom. The FTSE 100 index will have ended 2025 almost 20 per cent higher than it started – slightly better than the US S&P 500 index – and the consensus of fund managers is that (having closed for Christmas at 9,870) it will carry on upwards, perhaps even towards 11,000. Why? In short because many UK blue-chips in traditional sectors such as banking, housebuilding and mining have been undervalued for too long, because interest-rate cuts will help, and because stock markets have a mind of their own.

God bless Netflix: I’ve just watched all 28 episodes of Foyle’s War, the 1940s detective series set in Hastings and London that first aired on ITV more than 20 years ago. Pedants may have spotted minor anachronisms or been irritated by London scenes filmed in Dublin, presumably for tax breaks. But for me, the whole oeuvre – Spitfires, ration books, moustaches and all – stands as a monument of meticulous and compelling period drama. And as an amateur actor who always struggles to keep a straight face on stage, I’m in awe of Michael Kitchen’s gift of expressing Detective Chief Inspector Foyle’s moral outrage and inner pain by the tiniest twitch of a cheek muscle.

‘Banks don’t vote and citizens don’t love them, so they’ll always be the Chancellor’s target of choice,’ I wrote in September when one of this autumn’s many false Budget trails pointed towards a left-pleasing extra surcharge on bank profits. But it didn’t happen: partly because Rachel Reeves was love-bombed by Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon and JPMorgan chairman Jamie Dimon, promising new investment in the UK if she held off; partly because she had evidently figured out that a raid on banks that already pay higher tax rates than in any other major financial centre – many of whose bosses are already packing to move to Dubai – would make them even less eager to help boost growth by lending more to British businesses.

When I first joined The Spectator under the proprietorship of Conrad Black, we operated in sisterhood with the Telegraph titles which he also owned, and no one objected to the Daily Mail ringing the Spectator house in Doughty Street most Fridays to buy the best of the week’s articles for re-publication or to commission the authors to rewrite them in humourless Mail house style. In short, there were frequent meetings of minds in our grove of the media forest.

How, I wonder, did a shortlist of candidates to succeed Sir Mark Tucker as chairman of HSBC come into the public domain? The three names ‘exclusively’ revealed by Sky News, if they really are the final contenders, ought to be a secret kept between a board committee led by senior independent director Ann Godbehere and the headhunters on the job, named as MWM Consulting. Two of the three – Kevin Sneader from Goldman Sachs and Naguib Kheraj, formerly of Barclays and Standard Chartered – might feature in a round-up of usual suspects. But the third is the former chancellor George Osborne, who has no public-­company chairmanship experience and is, to say the least, a Marmite figure.

The softening of the Bank of England’s stance on ‘stablecoins’ looks like another tugging of the British forelock towards the Trump regime. Stablecoins are virtual money akin to cryptocurrency, but theoretically safer because their value is pegged to the dollar or other conventional currencies. Often used by investors to buy into crypto, they’re claimed to offer a more efficient future for international payments – but also accused of facilitating crime. Two years ago, Governor Andrew Bailey decreed that stablecoins did not ‘meet the standards we expect of safe money’; other non-US regulators largely agreed. That well-known crypto player Donald Trump, however, called them ‘perhaps the greatest revolution in financial technology since the birth of the internet’.

Call me hard-hearted, but I doubt even a magic mushroom-induced tantric visualisation of a harmonious universe could transport me into a state of sympathy for Rachel Reeves. Her content-free but don’t-blame-me speech on Tuesday morning did nothing to make me feel more benign. Yes, it’s not entirely her fault that a Labour cabinet can’t deliver welfare cuts, that defence spending must rise and that the UK has a chronic productivity deficit; and yes, the Tories left a mess behind. But in every other respect she’s in a trap of her own making, in which the only Budget move that might restrain out-of-control public borrowing, namely raising income tax, is also the one that should surely guillotine her disaster-strewn chancellorship.

In a radio discussion of the Renters’ Rights Act which passed into law this week, I heard ‘Britain’s housing emergency’ referred to as a given fact. If that’s so, then the housebuilders who create supply and feed home-owning aspirations ought to be public, political and stock-market heroes. But they’re not – and it’s worth asking why such an essential sector has fallen so far out of favour. Think back to Sir Lawrie Barratt, who built 300,000 houses and achieved fame with 1980s television ads featuring a strong-jawed actor as Barratt himself arriving by helicopter to inspect the latest show house.

Who knows what Rachel Reeves reads in bed. Perhaps she dips into her own debut book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics (2023), and dreams of those carefree pre-government days when serious people, Mark Carney for one, thought she might make a decent Chancellor. But if she’s also burning midnight oil over drafts of her Autumn Statement, I hope her boxes are packed with granular data on the state of the UK job market. September normally sees a recruitment surge, but not this year. A summary of recent stats in IFA Magazine shows vacancies down by 119,000 from a year ago and entry-level graduate jobs down by as much as a third, as diminished hiring focuses on ‘skills-based’ selection rather than useless degrees.