Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
From our UK edition
I’m fresh out of advice for those now leaving university and wondering how on earth they’re going to make a living and live their dreams. This week’s bad news (from the job search website Adzuna) was that graduate and other entry-level vacancies have fallen almost a third since the launch of the AI chatbot. Should
From our UK edition
One peril of a sudden adverse turn of global events is that it provides cover for bad domestic government. If confidence is knocked by fear of war, if inflation blips because the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, if demand for defence spending sends budgets awry, voters may easily be persuaded that Middle East conflict, rather
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Well, would you look at Mark Carney. Just three months ago I described the incoming prime minister of Canada and former governor of the Bank of England as ‘a fish-out-of-water technocrat’ who made little public impact over here and was swiftly forgotten after he left in 2020. When I once came across him hunched and
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The Chancellor’s promise of £14 billion for the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk is hardly news. The project has been talked about for 15 years while the existing UK nuclear estate has gradually been shut down and the only other new station, Hinkley Point in Somerset, has stumbled to a decade-long delay and
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NatWest has returned to full private-sector ownership 17 years after the £46 billion bailout that took it into state hands – and five years after the name swap which reduced the once globally trumpeted Royal Bank of Scotland to a humble north-of-the-border branch network, while promoting its English subsidiary NatWest to become the parent brand.
From our UK edition
By spooky coincidence, on Saturday night I watched an old episode of Slow Horses in which a passenger died mysteriously on a replacement bus between High Wycombe and Oxford Parkway – and on Sunday I woke to reports that the first service of the new era of rail renationalisation, the 5.36 from Woking to Waterloo,
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Here’s a takeover tale that captures the zeitgeist. It involves two FTSE 250 companies and some deep-pocketed US investors – and I’ll explain it as simply as I can. In essence, how would you feel if your GP surgery fell into the hands of American investors associated with the book title Barbarians at the Gate?
From our UK edition
An awkward delay in the unveiling of the Mansion House Accord was, we’re told, nothing more than a Downing Street ‘timetabling issue’. It was perhaps a tenterhooks issue too, as Donald Trump’s Sharpie hovered over the UK-US trade deal which was clearly going to make bigger headlines. But the Accord also had to contend with
From our UK edition
The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards 2025 are open for entries. We’re excited to hear from high-growth businesses in every sector and every corner of the UK that are leading their markets and making positive contributions to society. And we’re delighted to be working with our sponsor Rathbones, one of the UK’s leading
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A hangar full of analysts and investment bankers must have spent the long weekend formulating advice for Shell chief executive Wael Sawan for and against a takeover of BP. On the plus side, Shell’s strong share performance, reflecting its undiluted focus on oil and gas and boosting its market value to £150 billion, makes a
From our UK edition
There’s nothing new about bringing maverick businesspeople into government to give the bureaucratic blob what an unnamed ‘Trump adviser’ was recently quoted as calling ‘a swift kick in the ass’. After all, it was David Cameron who in 2010 hired the now all but unmentionable retail buccaneer Sir Philip Green to find ways to cut
From our UK edition
Donald Trump’s Soprano-like threat that the ‘termination’ of Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell ‘cannot come fast enough’ has been headlined as one of his wildest thrusts to date, but is actually one of his most conventional. Prickly politicians always resent unelected central bankers, though they also see them as useful scapegoats for economic trouble. Liz
From our UK edition
The weekend’s Scunthorpe drama was a distraction from endless chatter about Donald Trump and his tariffs. Perhaps Downing Street’s spinners stage-managed it with that in mind. Or perhaps the heroic tale of shop stewards confronting villainous Chinese managers while rescue teams scoured the horizon for emergency shipments of iron ore and coking coal was a
From our UK edition
It gives me no pleasure to say I told you so. ‘If [Donald Trump] is prepared to cause mayhem in global trade as his first move, he’s even more dangerous than his detractors thought,’ I wrote in February. ‘British commentators of the “Why can’t we have visionary maverick musclemen like Trump?” persuasion should be careful
From our UK edition
The City’s self-styled ‘cheerleader in chief’, Lord Mayor Alastair King, on a recent visit to Beijing and Shanghai found leading Chinese banks keen to expand in London. What with Chinese diplomats also keen to establish a fortress-embassy at Royal Mint Court on the City’s eastern edge, that may ring alarm bells with those who regard
From our UK edition
The Digital Services Tax (DST) is a relatively easy bargaining chip to give away in a last-ditch bid to appease Donald Trump, whose final menu of tariffs on UK exports to the US is expected imminently. First tabled by Philip Hammond as chancellor in 2018 and enacted by his successor, Sajid Javid, two years later,
Inflation and scarcity afflicting America’s favorite breakfast have become a major political issue
From our UK edition
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ is a maxim attributed to leaders on both sides of the French Revolution. ‘Move fast and break things’ is today’s equivalent, emanating from Silicon Valley and amply demonstrated by Donald Trump and Elon Musk in their approach to government and geopolitics. ‘You can’t make omelettes at all
On the platform of global affairs he’s wrongheaded, misanthropic and extremely dangerous
From our UK edition
‘Don’t stress over short-term stock market swings’ is a maxim on which Donald Trump and I might agree, even if he is keen to take credit for upward rallies. The shakedown of the past few days is a natural reaction to the wild six-week ride of Trump’s tariff and foreign policy gambits and the realisation
