Matthew Lynn

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.

A traditional British brand. A great history. Businessmen love it. Strong in the home counties. Younger people don’t have much idea what it stands for, and probably wouldn’t want it if they did. If these were the political pages, you’d assume we were discussing the Conservative party. But this is the Business section, and we’re actually talking about Jaguar. Just like the Tories, Jaguar is an illustrious name with a great history. If you look closely, it also has some pretty good products. Yet it has seen its share of the market shrink. The world appears to have moved on around it. Jaguar needs to re-invent itself for a new era. The big cat can be saved — but, like the Conservative party, it needs to be completely restyled.

From a distance, the new Wembley Stadium looks like a stately cruise liner forced by rough seas to dock in some tatty West African port. With its gleaming surfaces and huge vaulting arch, the stadium is all glamour, yet it is moored in a desolate landscape littered with kebab shops and second-hand car dealerships, with the muddy waters of Neasden and Dollis Hill lapping at its hull. Even as you walk closer, appearance and reality keep clashing against one another. It looks magnificent. Yet across the dazzling expanses of metal and glass, there are also little yellow dots swarming like ants. In their hard hats and yellow jackets, the builders are still hammering away to get this beast finished. Deadlines come and go. The 2006 FA Cup Final? No. The coming football season? No. 2007? Maybe.