Martin Vander Weyer

Is there a banker in the house? Well, please don’t ask me to go on apologising for you If I have one last sentiment to offer for 2009 — apart, of course, from warm compliments of the season — it is that I’m bloody fed up of apologising for bankers. I’ve been thinking this since October, when I told an audience at the Ilkley Literary Festival that I would rather let banks reform themselves than see them subjected to punitive taxes and fierce new regulation — only to be set upon by two elderly ladies telling me I was part of the smug conspiracy that was the root of the problem. So let me be plain.

Bankers are often accused of having such short memories that they are condemned to repeat the errors of their immediate predecessors, only more so. They would certainly need elephantine memories to remember a time when new banks, each with a distinctive mission and marketplace, were coming to life and flourishing everywhere. Indeed it was, in a corporate sense, Britain’s oldest banker — Alexander Hoare, 11th-generation head of C. Hoare & Co of Fleet Street, though himself still only in his forties — who pointed this out to me long before the credit crunch started knocking over high-street lenders like wonky dominoes.

Go East, young man: if I was 25 again, this is where I’d try my luck Hong Kong Not four hours since the plane touched down at Chek Lap Kok and I’m howling ‘My Way’ into a Wanchai karaoke machine to the discomfort of my Chinese friends, who all sing like Charles Aznavour. I’ll give some of the credit — for my energy level, not my singing — to Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class ‘flatbed’, which is so comfortable that Sir Richard Branson is busy claiming patent rights so he can sue competitors who copy the design. But I’ll give most of the credit to Hong Kong itself: brash, noisy, diesel-fumed, neon-lit, money-crazy, and always energising.

I was Shriti’s speechwriter once upon a time — but she won’t need me in Seoul Several national newspapers lazily copied each other last week in describing me as ‘a former speechwriter to Shriti Vadera’ — the business minister who is leaving the government to become Gordon Brown’s emissary to the G20, and perhaps to prepare the way for his post-election role as director-general of a new economic world order of his own devising. As it happens, I am indeed her former speechwriter, but only in the rather limited sense that the late Bob Monkhouse is my former speechwriter: that is, I occasionally use one of Bob’s jokes, and my old friend Shriti once used one of mine.

Bourneville chocolate with Kraft cheese slices? Not a recipe I’d recommend The £10 billion bid for Cadbury by Kraft Foods, Inc of the US has provoked little protest — other than from the chocolate maker itself, which says it would rather remain a ‘pure-play confectionery business’ than become a component of Kraft’s ‘low-growth conglomerate’. The fight will come down to price, sentimental factors such as history and culture swiftly forgotten. Cadbury, in its model village of Bourneville on the edge of Birmingham, used to be an icon of progressive Quakerism in business.

Deep in the Dordogne, I can’t find a damned thing to be miserable about Sometimes in this job you feel you’re right in the thick of it, setting agendas, kicking butt, lobbing firecrackers into the national debate. Other times you might as well be some no-mates blogger in the middle of the night. Here I was at the start of August, listing positive economic signals that justified a mood of mild optimism as we set off for our holidays, and declaring that worries about an extended recession should be left for September. And what happens? Did postal disruptions prevent that issue reaching Threadneedle Street?

Sir Fred’s return is one more sign that the storms are over — at least for now Of course it’s too early to declare an end to the economic crisis — who knows what storms the Gods have in store for us in the autumn, not to mention swine flu — but I think we can be forgiven for feeling relatively upbeat as we head into the holiday season. The FTSE 100 index has just enjoyed one of its longest unbroken rallies of modern times. The price of copper, a useful predictor of manufacturing activity several months ahead, has been rising since February. The price of oil is more volatile than we’d prefer it to be, but as George Trefgarne explained here recently, there’s plenty more in the ground. The 0.

When the solemn temples are dissolving, why are they still offering giant salaries? I had the pleasure of giving a prize-giving speech on Saturday, at a lovely school called Fyling Hall which looks out over the North Sea near Whitby. I have developed a theme which seems to go down well on these occasions: treasure your long-term friendships, I advise the leavers, because the people with whom you walk life’s path will turn out to be far more reliable than the institutions along the way, which look so permanent but turn out not to be: cue quote from The Tempest about gorgeous palaces and solemn temples dissolving.

Eddie was a model public servant: that’s why Gordon was so rude to him In Tokyo in the mid-Eighties, I bumped into a very senior Japanese investment banker who had just been to London to negotiate an operating licence. ‘We met...’ he paused for effect, bowing slightly at the neck and adopting what I can only describe as obsequious grimace, ‘...Eddie-George-san!’ All the other Japanese present nodded vigorously and sucked their teeth in accord. Lord George, who died last Saturday aged 70, was a big player on the world banking stage long before he became Governor of the Bank of England in 1993. He was also a model public servant: modest, calm, courteous, firm-principled, and a master of market technicalities.

Lloyds becomes one more catastrophe for which Brown will never apologise How Lloyds Banking Group chairman Sir Victor Blank must regret not having had a prior engagement on Monday 15 September last year, the night he bumped into Gordon Brown at a City reception and got bounced into the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB. Dubbed ‘the bank that did dull’ by Neil Collins, Lloyds was a safe bet to survive this crisis unscathed — until Brown started mumbling through his canapé about sweeping competition issues aside, safeguarding Scottish jobs and saving the world. With its debt downgraded by Moody’s this week, Lloyds will be crippled for years by HBOS’s losses even if it manages to avoid majority taxpayer ownership and Treasury control.

A hot new brand, a better train service and a kinder role model for harsh times Here in Old Queen Street, we have (in our editor’s eloquent phrase) said pants to recession by launching a fistful of ‘brand extensions’ this year: our Australian edition, our online Book Club, and the soaraway monthly Spectator Business. Even in the teeth of recession, there are other potent brands out there waiting to be exploited, and the next one I’ve got my eye on is the Bullingdon Club. This Oxford University bad-boys elite, boasting David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson among its former members, has emerged this year as the new nexus of money and power.

My hopes for America lie less in Obama- mania, more in Vaud and the Villains Long before I became a journalist I taught myself to absorb the essence of an unfamiliar city by staying alert in the taxi from the airport: Los Angeles offers a particularly vivid first encounter. As the yellow cab barrels out of the precincts of LAX on to an angry avenue called La Brea, images and warnings crowd in. Neon signs in Korean and Spanish tell me that this is one of the planet’s most multi-ethnic conurbations. Half-crazed vagrants haunt the sidewalks, their random possessions piled in shopping trolleys. Radio ads offer a catalogue of modern American neuroses. Behind on your mortgage payments, facing foreclosure? Here’s the number of a friendly lawyer. Expecting the unexpected?