Society

Saturday

Bruce Macfarlane

Ladies, bring us your business plans

In eight years in venture capital, my partners and I have met only a handful of female applicants for capital. Yet we receive 500 to 600 business plans every year. It seems remarkable when you consider that women figure prominently in almost all walks of life — over 50 per cent of medical-school graduates, for example. Indeed, there have been so few that each encounter stands out. Our firm had been going for about a year when we were approached by a very imposing lady with plans for a software company. She was introduced by our accountant, but a little background digging revealed a history of bad debts — including

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business

How times change: the ECB has become the very model of a modern central bank I don’t suppose many of my readers took part in the European Central Bank’s tenth birthday celebrations last week — but if I’m wrong about Jean-Claude Trichet’s taste in columnists, then bon anniversaire, monsieur le président, though I can’t quite bring myself to add beaucoup des retours heureux. It is remarkable how the standing of both the ECB and its French boss have risen in recent times: it makes me feel sorry for Trichet’s late predecessor Wim Duisenberg, the world-weary chain-smoker who bore both the brunt of market scepticism about the fledgling euro and the

Friday

Ruth Dudley Edwards

The ‘No’s seem to have it

The Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs is already making excuses, so I think it’s all over.  As a friend, who voted Yes because Sinn Fein were Nos, texted from Dublin:  ‘The Nos to the left and the Nos to the right have it.’ This is from Breaking News at the Irish Times at 12.39: Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin today blamed a perceived lack of information for the poor showing of the Yes vote as indicated by early tallies. Asked where things went wrong, Mr Martin, director of Fianna Fáil’s referendum campaign, said: “People were on the doorstep were saying ‘I still don’t know enough about this treaty’.” This

Thursday

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Irish Referendum Watch

It seemed yesterday like a No, but I’m not so sure now.  While the taxi drivers were still resolutely No voters (mostly because they resent taxi deregulation and immigrant drivers), everyone else I met yesterday in Dublin was either firmly on the Yes side or was tilting in that direction on the grounds that the No side was fronted by cranks. Libertas, a group which I regard as sane but which has been damaged by rumours about a connection with US armaments manufacturers, has funded 15,000 of the 100,000 posters on Irish lampposts and was quietly confident until now, but is now admitting it fears its campaign peaked too early. 

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Snuff Moves

My old friend Gerald Warner has, I’m glad to discover, a blog at the Telegraph entitled Is It Just Me? (sometimes, yes, Gerald, I’m afraid it is…). In his most recent post Gerald reports that the health industry has opened a new front in the Tobacco Wars. Not content with persecuting smokers, the unco guid are preparing to take aim at snuff aficionados. Seriously. As Gerald observes, this is no surprise: Of course, it had to happen. The health fascists, having overrun the cigarette, cigar and pipe-smokers, are now advancing on the snuff-takers. We have been here before. Persecution of snuff-taking began in the early 17th century when Sultan Amurath

Peter Hoskin

Is Ed Balls trying to kill off grammar schools?

Janet Daley writes on Ed Balls’ latest initiative: So what Mr Balls is proposing is effectively merging local secondary moderns with grammars. And what do you call a grammar school that is merged with a secondary modern? Why, a “comprehensive school” of course. It was precisely that sort of “take-over” (or merger) that produced the first generation of comprehensives – and which resulted not in the raising of all schools to grammar standards, but to the collapse of the grammar school ethos and its tradition of academic achievement. Having failed to extinguish the remaining grammars by traducing them, Labour had to find another way of removing this embarrassing bastion of

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 11 June 2008

Don’t ask an African elephant to show you his cardiograms I can’t help liking elephants, and I was delighted to receive from India a silk tie with a pattern of these huge and benevolent beasts, raising their trunks in the traditional gesture which means ‘Good morning and good luck’. I once had a beautiful alabaster elephant, made in Benares in the early 20th century, coloured golden yellow and red. Originally in its howdah had reposed the stately squatting figure of Lord Curzon, when viceroy. But time and tide had removed his Lordship, and in due course a dusting fall broke the saluting trunk. Finally, a riotous Old Etonian, while admiring

Gerald Warner

Plumed hats, rapiers and heaving bosoms

Gerald Warner celebrates the unexpected appearance of one last ‘swashbuckling novel’, and mourns the loss of a genre that taught boys honour, courage and chivalry ‘Do you have the new novel by Alexandre Dumas?’ Who ever imagined going into the local branch of Waterstone’s and asking that question, in the 21st century? Yet the unexpected — the impossible — has happened and an authentically new historical novel by the legendary author of The Three Musketeers has recently been published for the first time in Britain. Its classically Dumas title in French, Le chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, has been changed for an Anglophone readership to The Last Cavalier. An account of how

Kate Chisholm

Campaign trail

Just when you thought it was safe to come out, here he is again. Still on Radio Four but in a surprising new guise; not performing but acting. On Sunday afternoon, John Prescott, MP, took a leading role as ‘The Policeman’ in the Classic Serial. Or rather he gave us nine economical lines in a very wordy dramatisation of Robert Tressell’s 1914 campaigning novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. But they were nine rather good lines. Prezzie’s got a natural radio voice. Clear, with a naturally high decibel level. He never has to force it. He also didn’t have to put on the regional accent demanded of his part. I would

David Craig

‘Don’t focus on what you can make, but on what you can lose’

David Craig, a pioneer of the British hedge-fund industry, recalls lessons learned from John Paulson, the New York investor who topped last year’s global earnings league New York in the mid-1990s: my long-time investing partner Richard Atkinson and I were in the city seeking out people with whom we might co- invest. We had run our own fund — reputed to be the first hedge fund in London — for 11 years, and had progressed to a stage where we thought we were getting good at this sort of talent-spotting. Nonetheless, we were particularly wary of getting fleeced by second-rate opportunists, or worse, fraudsters. We could only avoid that by

Christopher Silvester

Opportunities for vintage growth

Christopher Silvester says you don’t have to be rich to invest in fine wine, and the rewards can be handsome Wine as an investment asset class intimidates most people, who mistakenly assume it is a rich man’s game when in actuality it is open to anyone who is prepared to commit a few thousand quid and wait for a few years. In the distant past the only game in town was to buy through wine merchants, but in the last quarter of a century a new breed of wine investment company has emerged. These are much the same as advisory stockbrokers, in that they choose a portfolio for you and

Simon Nixon

Time to start putting clients first again

On the face of it, I picked a bad week to volunteer to write about the rebirth of gentlemanly capitalism. My thesis was that the credit crunch would lead to a profound shift in the way the City goes about its business, heralding a return — if not to bowler hats and brollies, liquid lunches and civilised working hours — then at least to an environment where longstanding relationships once again took precedence over the quick buck. After two decades in which the City appeared to have adopted Caveat Emptor as its new motto, I reckoned this financial crisis would bring about the restoration of its old one, Dictum Meum

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Advertising

Shamefully, I don’t think I’d heard of Billy Beer until Mike Crowley posted this fantastic advertisement at The Stump. I mean, what better slogan could there be? Could an reader who’s actually tasted the stuff let me know what it’s like? Bonus points for using Billy Beer as a vehicle for measuring and interpreting the successes and failures of his brother’s Presidency.And if, as John McCain claims, a Barack Obama presidency will, in some mysterious fashion, be Jimmy Carter’s second term does that mean that Billy Beer will make a comeback too? We can but hope…

Peter Hoskin

The Government fails the poor

The Government’s latest poverty statistics were meant to be released back in April. But they’ve been delayed and delayed, such that they’ve only come out today. Now we know why. They record yet more failure from this multi-talentless government.  The amount of children living in poverty rose by 100,000 in 2006-07. Whilst pensioner poverty shot up by 300,000 – the first increase since 1998. Of course, alleviating poverty is an admirable political cause. Sadly, with this Government, it’s been reduced to a big statistical fiddle – spending £billions to get people from just below a (somewhat arbitrary) income level to just above it. Even so, it’s one of the indicators that Brown so frequently asks us

Peter Hoskin

Police lose their High Court challenge over pay

So, the High Court has turned down the Police Federation’s effort to get a 2.5 percent pay deal.  A good result for the Government, surely?  Well, yes.  But there’s a caveat.  I suspect it may make the police so much more determined to get the right to strike.  If so, Jacqui Smith’s problems have only just begun.  Watch this space. 

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Let parents be the tsars

Slip some truth serum into Lord Adonis and, yes, I suspect he will admit the flaw in proposing new combined primary and secondary schools. Not that they won’t work, but because the idea that the politicians know how best to educate children has been tested to destruction. The Tory proposal would let new schools set up in the most poular formats – if there was a demand for new sprawling school, aged 5 to 18, it would be met. More likely the demand will be for small, manageable boutique schools of around 300 pupils, a third of today’s average size. For as long as poliicians are pontificating on exam structure,