Any Other Business

Martin Vander Weyer

23 February 2008

In the end, they may have to auction what’s left of Northern Rock on eBay

It was back in April 2000, when he was Archbishop of Wales before being translated to Canterbury, that I first started to worry about Dr Rowan Williams. I formed the view that his combination of benign unworldliness and roving intellect would one day lead him into trouble when I read an article he had written in the Guardian criticising Barclays for closing branches in the Welsh valleys. In it he referred to a ‘utopian’ world in which governments would regularly intervene ‘to make banks behave’ — that is, to make them keep unprofitable branches open and put the convenience of small customers ahead of the legitimate profit-interest of shareholders. Plenty of small Welsh customers agreed with him at the time, but like his recent intervention on sharia law he seemed to be allowing himself free intellectual rein in territory where he could all too easily look out of touch with the real world. No one has yet asked Dr Williams what he thinks about slapping taxes on non-doms, but I think we can guess: if you’re a foreign resident who finds our British tax laws culturally offensive, feel free to abide by your own tax laws — or by logical extension, no tax laws at all.

I’ve just had my first experience of ‘speed networking’ — at the opening of a smart new club, One Alfred Place, off Tottenham Court Road — and it was so exciting that I had to go and lie down afterwards. The idea is to introduce yourself to a total stranger and discuss business ideas, intensely, for just three minutes until a whistle blows — when you move on to the next stranger and do the same again. By this mechanism I met a succession of eager entrepreneurs half my age, all of whom spoke in a vocabulary that was quite unfamiliar to me: when the organiser, Oli Barrett, asked ‘Who turned the wiki pink?’, I was guessing this must be some coded reference to drugs — but he was actually talking about the ‘pre-event wiki’, a kind of free-form website to which we had all been invited to contribute.