Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
Who’s the Manchurian candidate? That’s what I want to know. Even Tony Woodley, the hatchet-chinned joint general secretary of the Unite union, who has pursued a decade-long mission to cripple the competitiveness of the British airline industry, must realise that the timing of the BA cabin-crew strike is catastrophic for Labour’s election prospects. And if dear old Bob Crow, the railwaymen’s leader and the last Leninist in British public life, wades in to bring the trains to a halt for Easter — the week before the election is likely to be called — it will be game over for Gordon before he’s even had time to pin a Unite-funded rosette to his lapel.
That’s the bit I don’t understand: if Unite is Labour’s paymaster, how can its politburo possibly want the party in their pocket to lose? If that’s not what they want, then the cabin-crew dispute, which has little public support, looks very much like Woodley’s personal vendetta against BA chief executive Willie Walsh. In which case, why can’t his fellow general secretary Derek Simpson restrain him (along with his sidekick ‘Red Len’ McCluskey, who likes quoting Che Guevara, and their man at Heathrow, Brian Boyd, who’s the spitting image of Coronation Street’s Les Battersby) for the good of the cause? But if they do want Brown to fall — despite the fact that his attack-dog Charlie Whelan is their own ‘political director’ — who would they install as Labour leader in his place? Surely it can’t be their own deputy general secretary Jack Dromey, who has just been awarded a safe Labour seat in Birmingham, in tandem with his wife Harriet Harman: that would be too horrific to contemplate. I’m no Kremlinologist of the British left, but I suspect the truth is that all of the above-named big brothers hate each others’ guts, have no collective strategy, and are blundering angrily towards self-destruction like their predecessors of 30 years ago.
Rub a dub dub
A big hello to the boys and girls at the Advertising Standards Authority, who I’m assuming must be readers of this column. Last month (13 February) I pointed to the glut of nanny-state advertising with which Labour ministers are using up departmental budgets before they’re kicked out of office: I was particularly irritated by what I called ‘Ed Miliband’s £6 million essay in ill-timed alarmism’, the ‘Act on CO2’ campaign. The ASA — encouraged, it must be said, by 939 other complainants — promptly banned two of the CO2 ads, based on nursery rhymes, for making exaggerated claims. That in turn provoked Energy and Climate Change Secretary Miliband to a new demonstration of his commitment to accurate use of language, in the form of a statement that he felt ‘comprehensively vindicated’ by the ASA’s decision not to ban all the other ads in the series. It’s worth giving the banned slogans a last airing: ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought’; and ‘Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub — a necessary course of action due to flash flooding caused by climate change’. Frankly, I’d have banned them for sheer witlessness, never mind misrepresentation of science.
Golden Range Rovers
The easiest way to make money over the past 12 months was to buy the FTSE 100 index, which has risen by 60 per cent. But if you’re suspicious of volatile securities markets and happen to own a big shed, you would also have done pretty well stockpiling secondhand four-wheel-drive cars. Time was when it was too embarrassing to drive your conspicuous Chelsea tractor into a Waitrose car park for fear of being screamed at by Miliband cultists, never mind trying to sell it for a few miserable quid in the local paper. But the coldest winter for 30 years combined with a surge in climate-change scepticism means that — despite the penal road taxes — Range Rovers and BMW X5s are the new kruggerands and copper futures. In the depths of January, seven out of ten enquiries to some used-car websites were for 4x4s, while the auctioneers Manheim’s reported month-on-month price rises of between 12 and 22 per cent. Even with spring advancing, demand remains strong. As the garage chap said with a gleam when I told him I was thinking of trading my battered Freelander for something beefier, ‘Suddenly everyone wants one.’ That’s a good market to be in.
Kathmandu to Riga
The first business article I ever wrote, 23 years ago, was a colourful (I’d have to say now, wildly overwritten) profile of the Nepal stock exchange, which in those days consisted of a polite man in Kathmandu who facilitated sales of shares in the handful of local companies that had achieved a basic public listing. The article was commissioned by Robert Cottrell, a correspondent for various British papers (including The Spectator) who doubled as editor of Pacific, an investment magazine published in Hong Kong by the bank where I happened to be the boss at the time. So Robert didn’t really have the option of spiking my copy, or even knocking out my superfluous adjectives, and indeed he politely encouraged me to write more. The rest, in my case, is history — and it’s always fun to catch up with someone who once shone a light on your path. I was startled to discover that Robert now runs a secondhand English bookshop in, of all places, the Latvian capital of Riga. But the Baltic book market is, he assures me, almost as strong as the British 4×4 market. And he also runs an elegant website called The Browser, which recommends a selection of the best in daily journalism from around the world; the least I can do to thank him for my debut is to draw The Browser to your attention.
You’re probably also curious to know what’s happened to the Nepal stock exchange. Well, like me, it has come a long way since 1987. It has 168 listed companies, an index (the Nepse), and a busy volume of trade. But the Nepse peaked in August 2008 at 1175 and is currently languishing at 475, having shown no sign of following the recovery path of neighbouring exchanges such as Bombay’s. One broker blames the Nepse slump on a ‘titanic’ rush of new listings, swamping the market with more shares than local investors can absorb. Ah yes, supply and demand: whether for cars, books or shares, it’s what makes the world go round. High time I trekked back to Kathmandu for a follow-up piece.
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