Martin Vander Weyer

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 by the industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the inventor Sir James Dyson and the Far Eastern trading Swire dynasty. But if the completed jigsaw of 300 names makes any sort of picture, it is of a vast treasure hoard from elsewhere, and in some cases from nowhere, that has found a relatively safe vault in the UK. That’s not a bad thing in itself as an advert for our quality of life and rule of law.

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 to the level of ‘trend growth’, around 2.5 per cent per annum, that used to be thought of as normal. That’s spookily in line (as is the path of inflation) with Ken Clarke’s achievement as Tory chancellor in 1996 ahead of the election that swept Blair and Brown to power the following May.

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 way to hobble Vladimir Putin’s campaign. But war and finance intersect in many different ways. Consider also the fate of 400 western-owned commercial aircraft that were leased to Russian airlines before the invasion in February 2022. Now stuck in Russia or its satellites, unmaintained to western standards and unfit to fly back into our airspace, they’re a potential multibillion loss for their owners and insurers.

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 say it was adequate, let alone particularly socialist.’ I’m struggling to disagree with that summary. The central idea of taking train operating franchises into public hands as they expire comes as no shock: LNER, Northern, Southeastern and the dreadful TransPennine Express have already met that fate, along with Scottish and Welsh trains, and those that remain private are largely despised by passengers.

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 in her downfall –when the Bank intervened to prevent a pension fund crisis after her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s radical mini-Budget of September 2022 – and that he should be sacked anyway for being part of a Keynesian economic Establishment, with the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility, that has delivered nothing but stagnation, my instinct is to stand up for Bailey.

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 reject unworkable requests, but are obliged to consider and consult. If you’re an optimist, you’ll think workers whose family lives are accommodated by enlightened employers will be happier, more loyal and more productive: ‘5 a.m. will be the new 9 a.m.,’ declares the HR Director, for parents who choose to ‘tackle work before attending to childcare commitments’ then ‘wrap up earlier… prioritising family time’.

‘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 homes’. But no one’s listening to the excuses – for the failing utility, that is, not the dark-blue crew. Thames Water is the pariah of post-privatisation capitalism, facing a charge sheet of poor service and financial opportunism of which rising tides of river filth are merely pungent symbols.

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; Digby Jones moved on from the CBI to serve uncomfortably as a trade minister under Gordon Brown. But there’s one obvious exception to the rule that politics and corporate life require totally different skill sets: Andy Street, who is campaigning for a third term as Tory mayor of the West Midlands, the UK’s second-most populous city-region after London.

As I’ve said before, I hold no brief for Dr. Mike Lynch, the founder of the Cambridge-based software firm Autonomy, who faces fraud charges over the $11 billion takeover of his company by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011. But I watched with foreboding as US marshals bagged Lynch under the lopsided 2003 US-UK extradition treaty and flew him to California — after the then home secretary Priti Patel declined to halt the process — and a judge there changed his pre-agreed bail conditions to place him under armed house arrest. Now, having comprehensively lost the argument that as a UK citizen running a UK company he should have been tried in British courts, Lynch is pleading “not guilty” to a San Francisco jury.

As I’ve said before, I hold no brief for Dr Mike Lynch, the founder of the Cambridge-based software firm Autonomy, who faces US fraud charges over the $11 billion takeover of his company by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011. But I watched with foreboding as US marshals bagged Lynch under the lopsided 2003 US-UK extradition treaty and flew him to California – after the then home secretary Priti Patel declined to halt the process – and a judge there changed his pre-agreed bail conditions to place him under armed house arrest. Now, having comprehensively lost the argument that as a UK citizen running a UK company he should have been tried in British courts, Lynch is pleading ‘not guilty’ to a San Francisco jury.

Is Jeremy Hunt’s ‘British Isa’ worth having? The new £5,000 tax-free allowance for UK equity investment comes on top of the existing annual £20,000 Isa limit, so on the general principle that it makes sense to maximise tax-efficient savings, the answer might be yes. But will it achieve the Chancellor’s aim of allowing patriotic savers to buy into the growth of ‘the most promising UK businesses’ while supporting them with capital to expand? To that, I’m afraid, the answer from the professionals has been a resounding no. UK stock-market performance has been so limp in recent years that UK-only share-buyers would have reaped barely a third of the returns earned by those who opted for global equity funds – and done worse still by comparison with US investors.

St James’s Place is a posh London cul-de-sac that will forever be associated with the late Jacob Rothschild, who based his financial empire there and restored the stately Spencer House across the road. One of his enterprises, J. Rothschild Assurance, was renamed St James’s Place Capital in 1997 and ended up majority owned by Lloyds Banking Group – until Lloyds sold it to stockmarket investors in 2013. Combining fund management, financial advice and life insurance, SJP (as it’s known) joined the FTSE 100 a year later. Though its headquarters are now in Cirencester, the poshness of its name and origin helped polish SJP’s upmarket cachet.

We must be bolder in seizing frozen Russian assets, writes the Prime Minister in a Sunday newspaper. ‘That starts with taking the billions in interest these assets are collecting and sending it to Ukraine.’ Can that really be done? Having consulted international legal opinion, here’s my summary. The principle of ‘sovereign state immunity’ doesn’t prevent the freezing of state assets, but confiscating them would create a very dangerous precedent, namely that no state’s reserves would be secure in anyone else’s banking system.

When I read news of a fresh strategic plan for Barclays, I seem to hear a ghostly rustling from the corner cupboard in the living room. Could it be a forlorn protest from the dusty bundle of share certificates that are the last vestiges of my late father’s lifelong service to Barclays from junior clerk to deputy chairman? They were a modest farewell reward – 40 years ago, in the era before mega-bonuses for senior executives – that might once have been swapped for a country cottage but today would barely yield enough to pay for his upcoming centenary dinner. Even the Qatari sheikhs have sold down their Barclays holdings in despair.