Martin Vander Weyer

We’re pleased to announce the regional finalists for The Spectator's Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer. We were delighted to receive some 50 per cent more entries this year — including many more from the regions outside London and the South. Business sectors represented range from fintech to funerals, and from ‘big data’ to dating. The full set of entries illuminates how entrepreneurs are addressing today’s pressing social and environmental issues, whether that be food waste and sustainable packaging, or the decline of town centres and the shortage of affordable housing, or the need for greater efficiencies in the NHS.

How surprising to read one former Tesco chief, 82-year-old Lord MacLaurin, badmouthing another, Sir Terry Leahy. The surprise is because both were titans of their trade and Leahy has always been seen as Ian MacLaurin’s protégé: it was MacLaurin who took Tesco to the top of the UK supermarket league in the mid-1990s, then Leahy who quadrupled its sales, profits and share price between 1997 and 2011 to make it the monster we know. But Leahy also took Tesco into a disastrous US grocery venture and — according to MacLaurin, talking to the Sunday Times — started ‘the rot’ that brought the company low by 2014, leaving the blame to be taken by his own successor, Philip Clarke.

Hounds are baying for the blood of former star investment manager Neil Woodford, whose shrinking funds have closed for withdrawals. His promoters such as the broker Hargreaves Lansdown have also been taking media flak, as has the Financial Conduct Authority, whose critics say it should have spotted the problem early and intervened. There are suggestions that Woodford and his associates have made ‘a huge pile of money’ (to quote Merryn Somerset Webb in the FT) out of an over-puffed venture in which small investors are now stuck — and that all those responsible should queue up for a public lashing from the Treasury select committee. So it goes: as a parable of financial hubris, this looks like an open-and-shut case.

We don’t hear enough about Network Rail these days. By that I mean that the entity recently described by the Sunday Times as ‘synonymous with incompetence and delays’ doesn’t receive anything like the abuse it deserves for failing to provide the infrastructure essential for a 21st-century railway. I refer you to the Crossrail project, in which the inability of new trains to connect with old Network Rail signalling systems is one reason for the delayed opening that has become a major national embarrassment. I invite you to observe LNER’s expensive new fleet of Azuma bullet trains that were due to launch in December but delayed by incompatibility with Network Rail signals.

This column has long been a fan of the concept of ‘challenger banks’ offering alternatives for personal and small business customers who were mistreated or underserved by the big banks before and after the 2008 crash. Most challengers were internet-based, but Metro Bank — founded in 2010 by US entrepreneur Vernon Hill, whose early career was spent developing sites for McDonald’s — was different. Its model was predicated on an expensive chain of bricks-and--mortar branches (referred to as ‘stores’, open seven days a week, and with 200 planned by 2020) at a time when the likes of NatWest and HSBC were withdrawing from the high street as fast as they could.

Sainsbury’s chief executive Mike Coupe faces a fight for his job after the Competition and Markets Authority ruled against his proposed £12 billion merger with Asda that would have created a supermarket giant bigger than Tesco and supposedly better equipped to face down the discounters Aldi and Lidl. The CMA said the deal would have harmed competition and pushed up prices, ignoring Coupe’s claims to the contrary. Investors were also unconvinced, having endured limp profits and a downward–drifting share price during Coupe’s five-year tenure.

It’s not much comfort, if you like pubs, that the rate at which they’re closing across the UK has fallen from 138 per month for the past several years to 76 per month in 2018; small consolation too that this is partly the result of a rare example of government policy working — in the form of business-rate reliefs designed to help pubs survive as hubs of community life. But the truth is that having lost more than 11,000 of them since the turn of the century, we’ve also largely lost the habit of spending our spare cash in them.

If you know my personal history with Barclays, you may be wondering whether I’m for or against Edward Bramson. To recap, I’m a former second-generation employee of the bank as well as the custodian of a family shareholding that’s never likely to be sold — and nowadays, rather miraculously given everything that’s happened to me and the bank since I left 27 years ago, a recipient of its pension largesse. Bramson, by contrast, is a Johnny-come-lately: a New York-based ‘activist investor’ whose firm Sherborne has become Barclays’ third largest shareholder by building a 5.5 per cent stake, and who is seeking a seat on the bank’s board at next week’s annual meeting.

‘Virgin trains could be gone from the UK in November,’ blogged Sir Richard Branson from his billionaire hideaway after the Department for Transport barred Stagecoach, Virgin’s 49 per cent joint-venture partner, from bidding for new passenger rail franchises. This followed a row over Stagecoach’s reluctance to help fill a £6 billion black hole in the Railways Pension Scheme – and affects Stagecoach’s bids for the East Midlands and South Eastern franchises as well as the renewal of Virgin’s West Coast Main Line service. Branson is always a sore loser on the rare occasions the dice don’t roll his way, but I doubt many travellers will mourn the passing of his trains.