Martin Vander Weyer

Nigel Farage and I agree on one thing: a red-carpet welcome at the London Stock Exchange for Shein, the Chinese online fashion retailer, would be ‘a very bad idea’. Valued at £50 billion, Shein could become London’s biggest-ever initial public offering. Both the departing Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and the shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds have

The City is having a busier year than pessimistic observers – including me – might have expected. The biggest deal on the block, the £39 billion bid by Australian giant BHP Billiton for its London-listed South African mining rival Anglo American, has fallen away. But plenty of bankers’ and advisers’ fees have already been clocked

I suspect I’ve had a lot more fun writing about the annual Sunday Times Rich List over the years than many of its denizens have had clambering into it and staying there behind their high-tech security gates and their phalanx of tax advisers. The 2024 roll call includes some great British wealth-creation stories – led

If the 0.6 per cent first-quarter GDP uplift reported by the Office for National Statistics is sustained for the rest of this year, Rishi Sunak will be able to claim – as he waves goodbye – that he and Jeremy Hunt have succeeded against their naysayers in dragging the UK economy from pandemic depths back

The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks – designed to impede imports needed for the continuing assault on Ukraine – is biting hard, reports the FT, quoting an investor who thinks ‘the logical endpoint of this is turning Russia into Iran’. Quite right too: sanctions like these are a vital non-military

How radically left-wing is Labour’s proposed ‘renationalisation’ of the railways? Though militant Mick Lynch of the RMT union ‘strongly welcomed these bold steps’, the real answer is: hardly at all. The revolutionary socialist group Counterfire agonised thus: ‘While it would be extremely obtuse to say that Labour’s policy is bad, it would be naive to

The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, is a loyal and well-intentioned public servant in a role that, by its nature, attracts constant blame and hindsight judgment. Liz Truss is a spectacularly failed 44-day prime minister with a book to sell. So when Truss says Bailey should have been sacked for his part

Can flexible working get the best out of what a ministerial press release calls ‘hardworking Brits’ – or is it a couch potato’s charter? As of 6 April, employees have had the right to ask for flexibility – including remote working and hours to suit – from their first day in a job; employers can

‘It would have been ideal not to have so  much poo in the water,’ said Oxford captain Leonard Jenkins after losing the university boat race to Cambridge last Saturday. Thames Water blamed high groundwater levels after weeks of rain for sewage discharges that are a less unpleasant alternative than ‘letting it back up into people’s

Commentators like me often lament the lack of business experience among leading politicians – but also observe how few business leaders ever make successful transitions into the political arena. Archie Norman tried his hand as an opposition front-bencher, didn’t like it, and returned to the boardroom, latterly to lead the revival of Marks & Spencer;

Lynch is pleading ‘not guilty’ to a San Francisco jury