Martin Vander Weyer

QinetiQ, the business created out of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, is Labour’s first attempt at full-scale privatisation, and it has deservedly run into heavy flak. The Daily Telegraph is particularly agitated about the fact that private investors cannot apply for shares in next month’s £1.1 billion flotation, which is open only to institutions. Bankers handling the sale say QinetiQ is too complex to explain to ordinary punters without spending unjustifiably large sums on a marketing campaign. Spokesmen for small shareholders declare that every citizen should have the chance to benefit from the sell-off of state assets.

The laptop on which I’m working tells me that it has sent 7,392 email messages to date, and if I knew how to reach its innermost parts it would probably provide a rather embarrassing list of every website it has ever visited on my behalf as well. Like most internet users, I have absolutely no idea how any of that traffic actually happened. I have a fantasy that it involves satellites in space and bunkers deep underground, full of scary professors and beautiful girls in lycra spacesuits dancing attendance on giant computers; and I sometimes wonder whether my cyber-correspondence is being monitored for key words (‘jihad’ perhaps, or ‘Galloway bank account’) at GCHQ Cheltenham or Langley, Virginia.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch. The early crowd in the foyer of Claridge’s ballroom was largely made up of City guests invited by our excellent sponsor, Threadneedle Investments, while less well-mannered parliamentary and media guests arrived late or not at all. I recognised several senior figures from my own banking days, among them a former colleague. Since this column is, this once, about journalistic good manners rather than corporate name-dropping, I will not hint at his identity. We exchanged pleasantries until a third party in the conversation moved away; then he brought his face closer to mine, with a rather chilly smile, and said quietly: ‘I thought what you wrote about Jack was unforgivable.

Rivers of fudge are to be expected from corporate PR people, but the Cadbury factory at Bourneville has an unusually impressive one — an endless six-feet-wide flow of the soft, brown confection, about to be sliced into ribbons, then chopped into tiny rectangles, coated in chocolate and popped into Milk Tray boxes. Even more seductive is the assembly line for chocolate Creme Eggs — made in halves with the yolk in one half only, then neatly flipped together, sealed, wrapped and sent bobbing along the conveyors.

I have mixed memories of New Orleans. The hospitality was gracious and the cuisine was fine, but there was a pervasive whiff of something rotten which must have a bearing on the city’s lack of preparedness for the present disaster. I once spent an afternoon in the police headquarters hearing about efforts to eliminate corruption in the local force, and I recall an earlier visit in my days as a banker in the 1980s: I found myself being lunched in a dark corner of a restaurant by an adviser to four-term Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, who confidentially offered me a slice of the action in a gas pipeline project across the state. Eager as I was to bring home new business, I knew enough of Governor Edwards’s reputation to make an excuse after the gumbo and leave.

Martin Vander Weyer on the British idea that businessmen are by nature greedy, heartless, incompetent or dishonest — or all four Our local arts festival this summer included a community opera with a large cast of children and teenagers, playing to a capacity audience of their families and friends. The show was so full of joy and energy that I came out with tears in my eyes — but also a feeling of unease. The problem was ideological: Maggio’s Magic — book and lyrics by Peter Spafford — was a theatrical triumph, but it was also a vivid parable of the perceived evils of capitalism, a reinforcement in all those young minds of an age-old British prejudice against the profit motive.

Banff, Alberta, Canada I’ve been invited to address the annual meeting of the Canadian Investment Dealers Association on the subject of ‘why China isn’t going to be a global superpower’ — a theme I explored here in January, in contradiction of eminent pundits whose New Year essays had gone large on the coming ‘Chinese century’. To be negative about China in any gathering of investors is to invite the response provoked by H.M. Bateman’s Man Who Asked for a Double Scotch in the Grand Pump-Room at Bath, and this turned out to be especially the case in Alberta, which has oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia’s and sees the Chinese as huge future customers.

What with Jamie Oliver dictating government policy last month, and Lady Isabella Hervey flaunting her tanned bod for the lads on Celebrity Love Island, you could be forgiven for thinking that social mobility in Britain, both upwards and downwards, has attained what scientists might call inertia-free perfection. Daily observation suggests that the game of snakes and ladders between the classes has never been so vigorously played, and that the rules have been entirely rewritten. An expensive education and a father with friends in high places no longer buy you a double six to start; received pronunciation is now a positive handicap in any career in which you might ever have to open your mouth in public.

Many years ago, Chris Gent tried to explain to me how computers worked. I was a trainee banker; he was a systems manager in the same firm; his explanation had something to do with ferrite rods and magnetic poles. It was a very fluent explanation, but I never quite got the hang of it. That is perhaps why Gent — now Sir Christopher — became a great tycoon of the technology age and I didn’t. He moved swiftly on from that airless back office in Holborn where we first met. After a few more years in computers he joined a fledgling mobile-phone company which had been set up by Racal, the defence electronics group, behind a curry house in Newbury.