Matthew Lynn

A collapsing property market, slowing consumer spending, rising unemployment and an economy that is fast deflating: that might sound all too much like a forecast for the British economy. But actually it’s a description of the Irish economy right now. For the last decade, Ireland has been the most dynamic economy in Europe, with growth rates that far outstripped any of its rivals. This republic of not much more than 4 million citizens has turned itself into one of the most prosperous nations in the Western world. Fuelled by a long boom, a swaggering generation of Irish tycoons has emerged, buying up businesses around the world. Yet in the space of a few months all that has swiftly turned around, amid collapsing property prices and fears of a subprime financial meltdown.

The title of the worst deal in British corporate history is hotly contested. Glaxo and SmithKline were worth £107 billion on the day they announced their merger: eight years later, they’re worth £57 billion, and they’re not quite the ‘kings of science’ their chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier said they would be. Getting on for a decade after it paid £75 billion for Mannesmann of Germany in Europe’s largest hostile bid, Vodafone still hasn’t recovered. Capping both of those, Lord Simpson’s foray into the American telecoms industry after he took over at GEC and renamed it Marconi is always going to take some beating for the speed and thoroughness with which he destroyed one of Britain’s largest companies.

Matthew Lynn visits the Bentley factory in Crewe — where Spitfires were once built — and discovers how Volkswagen’s engineers and marketing men have revived the classic marque Turn right as you step into the plush foyer of Bentley’s Crewe headquarters and you find yourself in the company’s museum — a display of gorgeously preserved vehicles from Bentley’s prewar heyday, all gleaming brass and steel, all with their tax discs up to date so they can be taken out on the road at any time. For most companies, the museum might be tucked away somewhere. Not at Bentley. Since the almost-forgotten brand was bought by Volkswagen of Germany a decade ago, its history has been woven into everything it does.

Most of the young men working on ‘hedge fund alley’, the narrow streets leading away from Berkeley Square in Mayfair, have expensive but unsinister ambitions. They’d like a new Aston Martin DB7, preferably convertible. They’d like a swanky new penthouse overlooking the Thames, plus a girlfriend who might have stepped out of the pages of Vogue. They certainly aren’t setting out to re-draw the industrial map of Europe; but the law of unintended consequences applies as much to business as to any other field of human endeavour, and that is what they appear to be doing. Over the last few weeks, the City and the business press have been held in thrall by the battle for control of the Dutch bank ABN Amro.

Even allowing for retro-chic, there were some things from the 1970s that most of us assumed were never coming back: cheese-and-wine parties, lime-green bathroom suites, and trade unions setting industrial policy. The little cubes of cheese and the green baths look safely forgotten. But the brothers? They’re back. In the past few months, trade unions have been making the running on issues ranging from the role of private equity to the responsibility of manufacturers to keep their factories in Britain. Led mainly by the GMB and the Transport & General Workers, the unions have developed a stunt-happy, web-friendly, celebrity-savvy campaigning style that has left the overpaid suits of City PR looking tired and lazy by comparison.

Before the number-crunchers of private equity and the hedge-fund world took control, the City was dominated by a pretty rough gang. Predatory tycoons such as Lords Hanson and White, Tiny Rowland of Lonrho and Sir Nigel Broakes of Trafalgar House were the big beasts of the stock market. They created conglomerates to match their  egos, and made themselves fortunes in the process. Yet either time or shareholders caught up with them, one by one, and their empires disintegrated. Except, until recently, for one. James B. Sherwood, baron of the Orient-Express hotel chain, Great North Eastern Railways, cross-Channel ferries, container-leasing and dozens of other businesses, somehow managed to cling on. He, too, now appears to be on the way out.

Of the Australian tycoon Alan Bond it used sometimes to be remarked that, after a nuclear war, there would be only three things left alive: seaweed, cockroaches and Bond. In British business these days, there is probably only one man with the same kind of durability: Peter Sutherland, chairman of BP. The recent warfare at the top of the giant oil company, which led to the early departure of its much-admired chief executive Lord Browne, might not have been nuclear. But it was noticeable that after the dust had cleared, Sutherland was still in his job and Browne wasn’t. To anyone who knows him, that was no surprise. Sutherland has one of the toughest skins in global business.

If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here’s a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market share at the same time? The answer is the one you’re in: private education. In the last two decades, the British private schools industry has pulled off a trick that most business-school textbooks would tell you is impossible: attracting more business while becoming more and more expensive. Schools have broken out of what is usually the most rigid of all the dismal science’s iron laws: that as prices rise, demand declines.

Matthew Lynn finds private military contractors such as Colonel Tim Spicer — formerly known as mercenaries — responding to demand in a high-growth business sector Sitting behind his smartly fashioned desk in one of the new, antiseptic office blocks that line London’s Victoria Street, Tim Spicer looks the very model of the modern entrepreneur. He talks smoothly about service delivery, market share and profit margins. If he were running a hedge fund or a new media company, you wouldn’t be in the least surprised. In fact, his business supplies tough blokes with guns. And a very lucrative trade it has recently become.

If you happened to be scripting a James Bond movie and were looking for a role model for a fabulously sinister corporation, there can be little doubt where you would look for inspiration today. Gold no longer matters to the global economy, oil is running out, and old-style media magnates are too busy fretting about tumbling circulations to threaten the free world. Right now, only one company has the right combination of fabulous wealth, hidden power, global reach and slightly crazed megalomania that made Ian Fleming’s villains so memorable. It is, of course, Google. Since it was founded in September 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the California-based search engine has become the world’s most breathtakingly successful business.