Martin Vander Weyer

My item last week about brighter prospects for car makers looked forlorn by Friday lunchtime, when news bulletins were leading with a quote from one Tony Murphy of the Unite union to the effect that an announcement of 800 job cuts at Honda’s Swindon plant was ‘a hammer blow to UK manufacturing’. This was followed at the weekend by a rather less emphatic response to a press release from Jaguar Land Rover which included news of 800 extra jobs at Solihull, continuing a sustained expansion of its workforce that began two years ago. I was hoping Murphy might declare himself ‘over the moon’, but he left it to his assistant general secretary Tony Burke to issue a pious welcome making play of the fact that JLR is only offering one-year contracts.

The sun shines warmly in south-west France, and rabbit bouillabaisse is the pièce de résistance of a New Year lunch at which Nigel Lawson is a fellow guest. The former chancellor and Spectator editor divides his time between his home in the Gers, the Global Warming Policy Foundation which he chairs, and the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards on which he has been sitting alongside the new Archbishop, Justin Welby — who he calls ‘my new friend, an excellent man’. We agree that the argument on banking reform is moving Lawson’s way. As banks continue to rack up huge fines — £2.

In a recent Spectator panel debate titled ‘Review 2012, Preview 2013’, Matthew Parris startled an expectant audience by observing that in his view nothing very interesting had happened in the past 12 months, and not much excitement lies in wait for next year. Prediction, we know, is a mug’s game — those ancient Mayans who said the world was going to end last week must be feeling more sheepish than a flock of Treasury growth forecasters. Even predicting ‘not much excitement’ is to risk being horribly wrong if our banks turn out to be as under-capitalised as the doomsters suggest, and it all kicks off again like September 2008.

The most stylish fellow passenger in Delta Air Lines’ business class cabin from Atlanta to Heathrow last week was a chap in shades and a hoodie with a couple of kilos of bling round his neck. Inquiries in the galley identified him as ‘2 Chainz’, a Georgia-born rapper whose real name is Tauheed Epps. I gathered he had invited the flight crew to call him Tad — and naturally I was keen to befriend him myself, but the Dracula’s-coffin configuration of Delta’s flatbeds made conversation all but impossible. So I was left trying to guess his thoughts on the issue of the ‘fiscal cliff’. That is the impending crisis in which the expiry of George W.

Never say this column doesn’t offer global perspectives. OK, sometimes it comes in folksy Yorkshire parables — but a fortnight ago I was up close with Branson in Mumbai and today I’m speaking to you from the Louisiana Superdome. Yes, I’m standing right on the plastic turf of one of America’s most hallowed football fields, watching the New Orleans Saints warm up for a crunch game against the Atlanta Falcons. You might get weightier economic theories on the op-ed page of the FT, but you don’t get opening lines like that. The proper name of this glitzy concrete bubble, by the way, is a parable of globalisation in itself: the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.

So here I am on a morning flight from Delhi to Mumbai, sitting next to an Englishman in his early sixties with bright blonde hair and a heavy cold. He has his feet up on the bulkhead and I’m distracted by his sensible black lace-ups: his wife packs for him, an aide whispers later. He’s Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire entrepreneur about whom I’ve written so much over the years, most of it sceptical and unflattering, but never previously met. Between visits to Warsaw, Cairo and Moscow he’s in India for 48 hours to relaunch Virgin Atlantic’s Mumbai route, which closed four years ago when too many carriers got in on the act and passenger demand dropped after the financial crisis. I’m a guest for the jamboree and this is my one-to-one slot.

Twenty-five years ago this week, I became managing director of BZW (predecessor of Barclays Capital) in Hong Kong. The office was unstable after a summer of firings, and I had been dispatched from Tokyo to steady the ship. On Friday afternoon, a man called Reggie from Warburgs shouted ‘Heard the news from home?’ across the lobby: the ‘great hurricane’ was battering BZW’s Thames-side headquarters and reducing its trading desks to a chaos of sodden paper and broken glass. On Monday markets crashed everywhere and I flew overnight to London to find panic turning to stoic resignation as our firm, barely a year old, sustained losses of £70 million.