Any other business

When I first joined The Spectator under the proprietorship of Conrad Black, we operated in sisterhood with the Telegraph titles which he also owned, and no one objected to the Daily Mail ringing the Spectator house in Doughty Street most Fridays to buy the best of the week’s articles for re-publication or to commission the

How, I wonder, did a shortlist of candidates to succeed Sir Mark Tucker as chairman of HSBC come into the public domain? The three names ‘exclusively’ revealed by Sky News, if they really are the final contenders, ought to be a secret kept between a board committee led by senior independent director Ann Godbehere and

The softening of the Bank of England’s stance on ‘stablecoins’ looks like another tugging of the British forelock towards the Trump regime. Stablecoins are virtual money akin to cryptocurrency, but theoretically safer because their value is pegged to the dollar or other conventional currencies. Often used by investors to buy into crypto, they’re claimed to

Call me hard-hearted, but I doubt even a magic mushroom-induced tantric visualisation of a harmonious universe could transport me into a state of sympathy for Rachel Reeves. Her content-free but don’t-blame-me speech on Tuesday morning did nothing to make me feel more benign. Yes, it’s not entirely her fault that a Labour cabinet can’t deliver

In a radio discussion of the Renters’ Rights Act which passed into law this week, I heard ‘Britain’s housing emergency’ referred to as a given fact. If that’s so, then the housebuilders who create supply and feed home-owning aspirations ought to be public, political and stock-market heroes. But they’re not – and it’s worth asking

Who knows what Rachel Reeves reads in bed. Perhaps she dips into her own debut book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics (2023), and dreams of those carefree pre-government days when serious people, Mark Carney for one, thought she might make a decent Chancellor. But if she’s also burning midnight oil over drafts of her

Between news bulletins of the Manchester synagogue attack last week, I popped into my local Co-op for some groceries. When the public address system said something indistinct about ‘solidarity’, I paused to listen: it was an advert for Sun & Stone lager, produced in Scotland in collaboration with Taybeh, a Palestinian microbrewery, and with a

A friend runs a small factory employing 60 skilled workers. He exports industrial components worldwide, competing with Europe for quality and China for price: a model enterprise for the productive economy we wish we had more of. Earlier this year, his top concerns were the hike in employers’ national insurance (costing the equivalent of several

Barely noticed amid all the other bad news and political shenanigans, there’s a slump in UK housebuilding that makes Labour’s promise of 1.5 million new homes within this parliament not just ‘stretching’, as the departed minister Angela Rayner called it, but a Truman Show fantasy of utopian suburbs that will never exist. Glenigan, a data

I awoke on Sunday to what felt like a Brave New World moment: Radio 4’s news-reader reciting an unedited Downing Street script for Donald Trump’s visit, about US financial firms (mostly Citigroup, in fact) agreeing to invest £1.2 billion over here to create 1,800 jobs. Or some such propaganda, the Financial Times having already set

Gold goes on up: having risen by an unprecedented 40 per cent in a year to pass $3,600 (or £2,675) per ounce by the beginning of this week, even its most ardent devotees are wondering how long the surge can last. Much of the rise clearly represents a stampede towards the most traditional of safe

‘We’re going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea’ was certainly a winning line for Kemi Badenoch to deliver to the Offshore Europe conference in Aberdeen this week, just as she might open with ‘I love puppies’ to a spaniel breeders’ convention in Surrey. But other than as an appeal

The theme of my holiday reading has been the insidious ways in which the vanities and fetishes of rulers harm the interests of citizens. I started with 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new history of the Wall Street crash, which I’ll be reviewing elsewhere ahead of its release in October –my point here being not about

In this season of scant corporate news – a Ryanair rant against the French here, a new BP oilfield there – it’s hard to know what business leaders are thinking about the cold months to come. Until, that is, you read a survey conducted last month for the Institute of Directors. Given that I’m writing

I must modestly doubt that the Supreme Court justices took account of my 12 July column in their ruling on the issue of hidden car finance commissions. But the effect, limiting compensation claims to the more egregious cases of overcharging, is to do exactly what I hoped: namely to head off ‘a tsunami of claims

At Stansted on Monday, a currency kiosk offered me €270 for £300. ‘Wrong way round,’ I said, having swiftly figured €300 for £270 would represent an exchange rate of 1.11, close enough to the current market level of 1.14. ‘Nah, mate, airport rate, innit?’ This week’s first lesson is never buy euros at the airport;

The weekend’s torrential Yorkshire rain amid a hosepipe ban offered a handy metaphor for the chaos that has befallen the privatised UK water industry. Sir Jon Cunliffe’s Independent Water Commission report – aiming for a ‘fundamental reset’ to restore public confidence, clean our waterways and ensure future supply – is welcome for the clarity of

The nation owes the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock an eternal debt for losing the 1992 general election when he was clear favourite to win it, thereby sparing us whatever socialist folly he might have brought to Downing Street. I salute him again for popping up to propose a 2 per cent wealth tax on