Business

Reputations rise and fall, but Lord Richardson deserves a City statue

30 January 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman of Lloyds Banking Group — making a similar observation in David Kynaston’s great history of the City: ‘I think his personality was such that he seemed to be quite tall but he wasn’t. Very elegant; very imposing. A God.’

Lord Richardson died last week, aged 94, and Bischoff must be one...

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How the brewers of Smethwick became the plaything of Barbados billionaires

23 January 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

If you don’t follow hospitality-trade news closely, you could be forgiven for thinking of Mitchells & Butlers as a Midlands-based brewery notable for its handsome Edwardian pubs. But it has not been that for decades, and if it was once an icon of progress in the beer trade, its name these days symbolises everything that’s depressing about modern corporate wheeler-dealing.

Let me simplify the history. The Smethwick breweries of Henry Mitchell and William Butler merged in 1898; their company’s heyday lasted until 1961 when, during a fever of consolidation across the industry, it merged into what became Bass Charrington. After...

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Be thankful for Cheshire salt: at least we don’t have to buy the stuff from Russia

16 January 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

The winter is arctic and the economy is a long way from spring, but commodities are hot again. Gold, the doomsters’ favourite, has a charmed life of its own, though its recent ascent has run out of oomph. Copper, the metal of choice for professionals betting on global recovery, perked up at the beginning of 2009 and has climbed steadily most of the way back to its 2008 peak. Nickel, zinc and aluminium bounced last spring in anticipation of a surge of industrial demand and continue to zigzag upwards, offering good returns for those who get their timing right. But...

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Taking a stick to the City hasn’t worked, so why not try knighthoods as carrots?

9 January 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses. Statistically, your chance of a gong this time was many times higher if you had designed an exciting range of lingerie (Michelle Mone, creator of the Ultimo cleavage-enhancing bra, picked up an OBE) than if you had come up with an exciting range...

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A decade to forget? No, remember Viagra, the iPod and the death of good manners

2 January 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

It’s tempting to label the Noughties ‘the decade to forget’, except that we only get about eight decades each, so it doesn’t really seem wise to forget any of them. It was certainly a decade of nasty shocks — 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — and of nasty wars and bad politics, beginning with George W. Bush’s disputed election and ending with Gordon Brown’s disintegration before our very eyes. It was a decade of financial madness that began with the bursting of the dotcom bubble and ended with half our high-street banks under state control and our public...

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A happy New Year? Let Spectator Business be your guide to what to worry about, what to celebrate and who to watch

19 December 2009
Martin Vander Weyer

Welcome to this special issue of Spectator Business, sister magazine of The Spectator. Especially welcome if you have discovered us by way of WHSmith, which is offering this issue exclusively in its major travel outlets. If you’d like to receive the magazine direct — at only £18 for a year’s subscription — please telephone 0800 031 9715 today.

Launched in 2008, Spectator Business aims to offer intelligent and distinctive coverage of business and economic themes, very much in the spirit of The Spectator – which has been a weekly must-read on politics and current affairs since 1828. In this Christmas...

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