Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
From our UK edition
I blamed the pheasant casserole, but I did it an injustice. Its only contribution to the drama behind my disappearance in mid-December was a residue of lead shot in the small intestine that briefly confused the radiologist. The real villain revealed by the scan was my appendix, which had taken on the raging, bull-necked, bug-eyed
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Call me a trencherman or worse, but I tend to think of the Dordogne as a giant restaurant-cum-farm shop, set in a wooded riverside picnic park. And I have a feeling that’s how its native residents think of it too, so central is the well-filled table to their traditional way of life. ‘Dordogne’ of course
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Top of my Christmas reading pile is Saving the City by Richard Roberts, a new account of the largely forgotten crisis which afflicted global markets at the outbreak of the first world war, forcing the London Stock Exchange to close on Friday 31 July 1914 and stay dark for six months. It’s a reminder of
From our UK edition
‘If I can’t see a factory from up here,’ I mutter to myself, throwing the car round an uphill bend of the B5032 south of Ashbourne, ‘I must be in the wrong county.’ But no, I’m not lost; there below me is a long pale slab of a building that announces itself as JCB World
From our UK edition
Do you love Amazon? I have to admit that I do, and that I buy books from it far more often than I buy them anywhere else — or bought them in the pre-internet era — and sometimes music, and occasionally kitchen items, and even bedding. I particularly like the ‘1-Click’ payment system, and the
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The naughty Reverend Flowers will be a comic footnote in the history of the financial crisis — but no more than that. In terms of making ministry relevant to modern congregations, you’ve got to take your hat off to a man of the cloth who knows his ‘Charlie’ from his ‘ket’ (for the uninitiated that’s
From our UK edition
The naughty Reverend Flowers will be a comic footnote in the history of the financial crisis — but no more than that. In terms of making ministry relevant to modern congregations, you’ve got to take your hat off to a man of the cloth who knows his ‘Charlie’ from his ‘ket’ (for the uninitiated that’s
From our UK edition
My man in Dublin calls with joy in his voice to tell me ‘the Troika’ — the combined powers of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF — have signed off Ireland as fit to leave their bailout programme and return to economic self-determination. This is a remarkable turnaround in just three years
From our UK edition
My man in Dublin calls with joy in his voice to tell me ‘the Troika’ — the combined powers of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF — have signed off Ireland as fit to leave their bailout programme and return to economic self-determination. This is a remarkable turnaround in just three years
From our UK edition
‘Satan seizes control of saintly bank’ would be a fair summary of much of the coverage of the deal that has rescued the crippled Co-operative Bank from oblivion, or ‘resolution’ as it is technically called. In order to avoid that fate, the parent Co-op Group has had to inject £462 million into the bank while
From our UK edition
You know my theory that Unite leader ‘Red Len’ McCluskey is a Conservative secret agent? Well, having watched events at Grangemouth last week, I’m convinced his Scottish comrades Pat Rafferty, Unite’s Scottish secretary, and Stevie Deans, chair of Falkirk Labour as well as Unite’s Grangemouth convenor, are part of the same subversive cell. Having called
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My Any Other Business item this week on who’s in the frame to succeed Robert Peston as BBC business editor seems to have caused a bit of a stir. The strong rumour is that the appointment must go to a female candidate, and there’s clearly support for the delightful Laura Kuenssberg, who came to fame
From our UK edition
Prediction, as Mervyn King once observed, is ‘a stab in the dark’. Who can say with confidence where the wholesale price of electricity will be in ten years’ time, let alone 45 years hence at the end of the contract struck by Energy Secretary Ed Davey with EDF of France for the building of the
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There’s a myth in the Spectator office, which I’ve never discouraged, that I’m Yorkshire’s answer to Franz Klammer — a veteran ski ace who likes nothing better than to have himself helicoptered to remote peaks in search of deep, virgin powder. But myth it is, I’m afraid: your business columnist is fat, 58 and was
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Some say it’s natural optimism that makes the Americans so different from the British, and some say it’s a lack of cynicism. Either way, our cousins over there have long had difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction, and are forever finding ways to make their public life look like the action movie that always ends well
From our UK edition
While attention has focused on the sudden ubiquity and alleged iniquity of payday lenders, boom and impending bust has infected another part of the short-term credit sector. For the very reason that the global economy is recovering, Britain’s pawnbrokers are in trouble. Pawnbroking traces its history to the Medicis, but owes its traditional image in
From our UK edition
‘We need successful energy companies in Britain, we need them to invest for the future,’ said Ed Miliband in his conference speech, as though channelling my thoughts at the very moment I was writing last week’s item on the lack of a national energy strategy. Then he ruined it: ‘If we win the election, the
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Fred Goodwin’s descent from golden boy of British banking to ‘pariah of the decade’ would be the stuff of tragedy if the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief were not such a rebarbative personality. A bully to his subordinates, obsessed with the wrong kind of detail, driven by an egoistic urge to trample his enemies,
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Everyone —including me, if I’m honest — has been talking about a new property bubble. But is it for real? London house prices are rising at an annual rate of almost 10 per cent, and shares in the capital’s bellwether back-from-the-dead estate agency Foxtons soared on their stock market debut last week. Yet according to
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Royal Mail delivers to 29 million UK addresses; last year it generated £9 billion of revenues, of which £324 million remained as profit before tax; and it is likely to be valued at £3 billion in its privatisation share sale, indicating a price-earnings ratio modestly below ten. Twitter — the microblogging phenomenon beloved of self-admiring
