Martin Vander Weyer

The Greek drama took a turn few of us expected last week, when the world thought compromise was imminent. What happens after Sunday’s referendum is anyone’s guess — but recrimination is already flying, much of it aimed at IMF managing director Christine Lagarde. Having inherited the Greek headache from her predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn after his resignation in 2011, she has always talked tough — but now stands accused of setting aside IMF rules, as well as long-established blueprints for debt relief and the views of many of the Fund’s own economists, in order to stay aligned with the European Commission and the European Central Bank in the ‘troika’ of bailout negotiators.

Last week’s deadline did not allow me to report from ringside at the Mansion House dinner, but there was so much to observe that I hope you’ll forgive a late dispatch. What a vivid guide to City psychology and precedence it offered. In the anteroom, Lord (Jim) O’Neill, the Treasury’s new Northern Powerhouse minister, could be seen chatting to ex-BP chief Tony Hayward, now chairman of mining giant Glencore Xstrata. At the top table, HSBC chairman Douglas Flint was carefully separated (by António Horta-Osório of Lloyds) from Governor Carney, so they could avoid discussing HSBC’s plans to move back to Hong Kong.

‘In matters of criminal justice,’ said NatWest Three defendant David Bermingham after a London court extradited him and his co-defendants to face Enron-related US fraud charges even though nothing they were accused of looked like a crime under UK law, Britain was becoming ‘the 51st state of America’. Many Swiss citizens must have felt they were living in the 52nd when Department of Justice agents decided, as I put it in 2013, to ‘topple a whole bowling alley of gnomes of Zurich’ in an assault on Swiss banking secrecy that forced the closure of the country’s oldest bank, Wegelin.

Which is worse, morally and reputationally — to be Thomas Cook, shamed by its refusal to show proper human concern, for fear of being taken to admit responsibility, over the death of two children by carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty boiler while on holiday in Corfu; or to be Barclays, fined almost $2.4 billion (heading a list of banks fined more than $9 billion between them for similar offences) for conspiring to manipulate the foreign exchange market over a five-year period? Ethicists could agonise over that one for weeks.

‘Two million jobs have been created since 2010 — but there will not be a moment of rest until we have reached our goal,’ said David Cameron in a Telegraph article a fortnight before the election: ‘Two million more jobs; or full employment in Britain.’ It was a bold statement. Indeed you might think, given unemployment at 1.84 million in the winter quarter, that the target for new jobs was actually an error on the part of who-ever drafts the Prime Minister’s prose. Either way, it drew little attention amid the smoke of battle.

After the heat of battle: the accolades, the recriminations, the telling of history by the victors. It’s six months early for our Parliamentarian of the Year shortlist, but my nominee for this year’s top award is… the honourable member (or one of them) for the constituency of Athens B, Yanis Varoufakis. Last week, the grandstanding Greek finance minister was declared to have been ‘sidelined’ from his nation’s on-the-brink debt negotiations, following a more than usually stormy meeting with fellow European finance ministers in Riga. ‘They are unanimous in their hate for me; and I welcome their hatred,’ he tweeted, quoting Franklin Roosevelt.

If Ikea were a constituency, it would be a three-way marginal. That was my thought one morning last week as I walked a mile and a half round the Batley branch of the great Swedish retailer behind two keen shoppers (one wearing a pedometer) whom I had driven there as a birthday treat. Here are middle-aged parents buying nursery stuff for pregnant daughters, engaged couples fitting out first flats, Polish families bickering over bargain kitchenware, Muslim housewives chattering behind niqab facemasks, and even what I thought might be a transsexual under a blond beehive. There’s a Scandinavian sense of equality: no fast track through the labyrinth, no exclusive luxury floor. The customers all seem to belong to that floating-voter category now labelled ‘hard-working families’.

The interesting thing about Labour’s pledge to abolish non-dom tax status — a squib designed to trap Tories into expressing sympathy for the rich, in the knowledge on the part of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls that it might cause loss of tax revenues and inward investment — is that it has been welcomed by influential voices in the City. The Eds must be astonished to find Sir Roger Carr, chairman of BAE Systems and former deputy chairman of the Bank of England, bang on message: he told the FT that non-dom rules are ‘a relic of the past that unfairly favours the few at the expense of the many’.

Bored with the election? Switch over to the Greek debt drama. In this week’s cliffhanger, silver-tongued finance minister Yanis Varoufakis visited IMF chief Christine Lagarde on Sunday, promised to meet his country’s obligations ‘ad infinitum’, and was expected to meet a €450 million repayment to the IMF on Thursday. But more troublesome members of the ruling Syriza party denounced the IMF and Brussels for treating Greece as ‘a colony’, threatening a snap election ‘if creditors insist on an inflexible line’, and warning that public-sector salaries and social security payments must rank ahead of debt as cash runs out. Which it will before August.

Easter is a good time to talk about airports — or perhaps a bad time, if you bought your Spectator in the shopping labyrinth that impedes your path to the departure gate after a maddening wait in the security queue, where only a quarter of the scanners are working. I’m with you, and not just in spirit: in fact, that’s me being led away by men with machine guns, after an altercation over the contents of my wash-bag. It’s a curious fact that no one has ever succeeded in imbuing airport terminals with the romance, dignity and passenger satisfaction quotient of 19th-century railway stations. At best they are soulless, at worst a stress-filled vision of hell.

The FTSE100 index has at last breached 7,000, surpassing its peak of 30 December 1999 and provoking moderate celebration among investors who have enjoyed such poor returns all these years. A thousand pounds invested in FTSE100 stocks on Millennium Eve, with dividends reinvested, was worth £1,670 by last month, an annual return of 3.4 per cent compared to inflation over the period of around 2.9 per cent. The same sum invested in a London house would have been worth £3,200, nearly twice the return on shares if we ignore running costs and the leverage effect of mortgage borrowing; invested on the rollercoaster of gold bullion, it would have been worth £4,500.

Of all the measures talked up ahead of the Budget, the reannouncement of a ‘radical’ review of the business rates was the least concrete in content but the most important in potential impact on the domestic economy, and especially on business investment. This column has banged on for years about the iniquity of a system that imposes the highest local taxes on businesses of any EU country, based on pre-crash rental assessments and bearing no relation to the value of diminishing local authority services. It’s a system that, on top of other economic woes, has brought devastation to town centres — and gets away with all this because it has no democratic accountability, since businesses have no votes.

Of all the measures talked up ahead of the Budget, the reannouncement of a ‘radical’ review of the business rates was the least concrete in content but the most important in potential impact on the domestic economy, and especially on business investment. This column has banged on for years about the iniquity of a system that imposes the highest local taxes on businesses of any EU country, based on pre-crash rental assessments and bearing no relation to the value of diminishing local authority services. It’s a system that, on top of other economic woes, has brought devastation to town centres — and gets away with all this because it has no democratic accountability, since businesses have no votes.