Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
For the grand finale of the second year of our Economic Disruptor Awards, sponsored by Julius Baer, we returned to the same atmospheric science-fiction venue: London’s Postal Museum at Mountpleasant, with its still-working Mail Rail miniature underground train that, until 2003, shuttled sacks of letters between the capital’s major sorting offices. Imagine it as a
Readers of my weekly ‘Any Other Business’ column know I occasionally find reason or excuse to slip a restaurant tip in amongst the financial commentary. In that spirit, let me start by saluting the venue for our encounter with North-West & Wales finalists for The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019. This was
Another fine lunch and a particularly fine Edinburgh venue for our encounter with finalists for the Scotland & Northern Ireland region of The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor Awards 2019. We’re in the Register Club, inside the Edinburgh Grand Hotel on St Andrew’s Square – a building which happens to have been the headquarters of Royal Bank
From our US edition
Bent big-company bosses, who might once have been role models for their industries, seem to get off lighter than large-scale fraudsters who fly solo
I first wrote about the risks and rumours around Huawei — and made bad jokes about its name — in September 2012. That was seven years after BT started ordering cheap equipment from the Chinese telecoms giant without, apparently, delving into stories about its military-connected origins. But 2012 was the year when Huawei was reported
Seven years ago, when HS2 was still officially costed at £33 billion, I wrote that I was looking forward to using my pensioner’s rail pass on it ‘early in the reign of hugely popular, three-times-married King Harry, in whose favour his elder brother will abdicate after his 50th birthday’. Now HS2’s upper cost estimate has
Asked to name British institutions they’d rather not see shaken to the foundations, many consumers would list the John Lewis Partnership and its Waitrose supermarket subsidiary just behind the House of Windsor. Indeed some might rank the employee-owned retail group ahead, on the grounds that Her Majesty’s family doesn’t sell Egyptian cotton sheets and organic
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Oil price spikes are not the economic threat they once were
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… Late last year, a range of forecasts suggested that the likelihood of recession in the US, with knock-on effects for the rest of the developed world, had significantly diminished. Last summer, many economists were putting the chance of a substantial downturn at
‘Flamenco, lambada/ But hip hop is harder/ We moonwalk the foxtrot/ Then polka the salsa…’ I’m sure you know those lines from the Spice Girls’ anthem ‘Spice Up Your Life’, which happens to be the biggest song-and-dance number in this year’s Jack and the Beanstalk pantomime at Helmsley Arts Centre in North Yorkshire. It’s also
It’s the season for kindness and conviviality. In that spirit — and recognising that business, like personal life, rarely follows an easy or predictable path — here’s a list of corporate heroes and anti-heroes who deserve your sympathy and a place at my fantasy Christmas table. First, those who are moving on. Bob Dudley put
You’ll have had enough of politics and punditry, so let me introduce a non-political City debate (even if rather a technical one) around the M&G Property Portfolio. Founded in 1931, M&G is a trusted brand in collective investment products for middle-class savers but appears to have done what we might nowadays call ‘a bit of a
It’s unusual for a Governor of the Bank of England to announce his next job before Downing Street has named his successor. In Mark Carney’s case, the new role turns out to be an unpaid, part-time one as the UN’s special envoy for climate action and finance, so no protocol has been breached — though
Early experiences of Uber in London did not encourage me to become a regular user. My first driver thought I wanted to go to Birmingham when the ride had been booked from Clapham to Mayfair. The next was a furious driver who would have seen off Lewis Hamilton at Hyde Park Corner. Call me old-fashioned,
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Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer the pottering black cab
Having been awarded the title of business editor of this paper by Boris Johnson in his former incarnation, I know more than most people about the extent of his interest in how businesses succeed or fail, what motivates those who run them and what they want from government. The answer is that his attention span
For the grand finale of the second year of our Economic Disruptor Awards, sponsored by Julius Baer, we returned to the same atmospheric science-fiction venue: London’s Postal Museum at Mountpleasant, with its still-working Mail Rail miniature underground train that, until 2003, shuttled sacks of letters between the capital’s major sorting offices. Imagine it as
It cannot be other than good news that a rescuer has been found for the bankrupt remains of British Steel, and in particular for its ‘long products’ plant at Scunthorpe — even if the buyer, at a token £50 million but with a promise of £1.2 billion of investment, is a little-known Chinese group, Jingye,
Five years ago this week, George Osborne as chancellor announced a scheme to place tax revenues from shale gas fracking in Lancashire and Cheshire into a ‘sovereign wealth fund for the north of England’. Soon after that, a leaked memo revealed him urging fellow ministers to intervene with planning authorities to fast-track fracking proposals and
Mario Draghi, who retired as president of the European Central Bank this week, was arguably the first holder of that office to win international respect for himself and his institution. The ECB’s founding chief, the downbeat Dutchman Wim Duisenberg, was undermined on all sides but especially by the French — who eventually succeeded in replacing