Martin Vander Weyer

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.

Here are four connected facts. First, on Monday, Standard Life - one of Britain's most respected investment institutions - cut the value of its payouts to 2.3 million pension savers by 15 per cent. Second, some 30,000 people have lost their jobs in the City of London this winter - including Alex, the cartoon archetype invented by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, who was given the heave-ho by 'Megabank' a couple of weeks ago. Third, also on Monday, Gordon Brown gave a rambling speech to the Social Market Foundation in praise of his own economic policies, in the midst of which he made a single, brief reference to investors, claiming to understand their concerns.