Royal Mail delivers to 29 million UK addresses; last year it generated £9 billion of revenues, of which £324 million remained as profit before tax; and it is likely to be valued at £3 billion in its privatisation share sale, indicating a price-earnings ratio modestly below ten. Twitter — the microblogging phenomenon beloved of self-admiring
A big hello to the revived Trustee Savings Bank — the spin-off of 631 Lloyds branches that were going to be sold to the Co-operative Bank to fulfil EU conditions for the bailout of Lloyds after its catastrophic takeover of HBOS. The new entity starts life with 4.6 million personal and small-business customers, a clean
Vodafone, which has just collected an £84 billion windfall from the sale of its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless of the US, is either a hero or an anti-hero of British capitalism, according to taste. To me, the world’s second-largest mobile phone business is heroic because it achieved that position from a standing
The mega-rich are best housed behind high fences, on wooded estates patrolled by dogs; that way, they don’t have to annoy the rest of us. But I can see how irritating it must be, if you live in the crowded Ladbroke Grove area of west London, to have a neighbour like Reade Griffith, an American
Justine Greening is unlucky to have been passed the transport chalice so early in her cabinet career, and her tenure will surely be even shorter than the already short average for the post. On the issue of a third Heathrow runway, opposition to which was a theme of her campaign for her Putney seat in
My thanks to ‘AndyB’, the only reader who posted an online comment on my column last week. It was ‘Don’t you ever go on holiday?’ and the answer is yes I do, and here I am deep in the Dordogne, glass of rosé to hand, lunch on the terrace in prospect, scanning cyberspace for some
The fracking debate has been brought to a new heat by David Cameron’s message to Home Counties nimbyists and eco-crusties that he wants ‘all parts of our nation’ to share the shale gas bounty, not just lucky northerners. But the argument is proceeding in almost total ignorance of how the controversial extraction technique works and
By and large it was a good week for the big banks — underpinned by encouraging news from the wider economy, in which every little uptick brings a few more zombie borrowers back to the land of the living. Lloyds returned to profit, promised to start paying decent dividends again and declared itself oven-ready for
I’ve been in the pulpit again, this time to salute the centenary of the death of Charles Norris Gray, a formidable Victorian vicar of my Yorkshire town of Helmsley. Gray was a social activist with strong opinions on everything from sanitation to election candidates, and he did a great deal of good for his parish
One of the best articles I ever commissioned as an editor was an account by James Doran of a road trip from the steps of the New York Stock Exchange to the back streets of Detroit in October 2008, at the nadir of the financial crisis. At his destination, Doran found a shocking vista of
Here’s a competition for you: ‘The most irritating discussion on Radio 4 in the past month.’ Answers in not more than 140 characters — but on a proper postcard, preferably written in fountain pen. My own choice was an edition of The Moral Maze that heaped abuse on ‘Baby Boomers’ (usually understood as those born
‘Does anyone seriously doubt that this amazing scheme is actually going to go ahead?’ boomed Boris Johnson last week. ‘No is the answer!’ He was waxing rhetorical about the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, the fourth such scheme since the landmark hulk’s turbines were switched off in 1975. The Malaysian consortium behind this £8 million
Marc Rich, the godfather of global commodity trading who died last week, ‘deserves credit as one of the greatest creators and sharers of wealth in business history’, wrote James Breiding in the Financial Times in a counterblast to obituarists who had painted the secretive Swiss-based billionaire and former fugitive from US justice as ‘a flamboyant,
Sir Mervyn King was his own man to the end: professorial, downbeat, against the tide. At last week’s Mansion House dinner — as in his final vote in favour of more QE, on which his Monetary Policy Committee colleagues bade him farewell by defeating him six to three — he was still worrying about a
Quite a spell of bowling from the Chancellor last week, skittling Stephen Hester’s stumps at RBS and causing Paul Tucker of the Bank of England to walk even before the new Canadian umpire had time to raise his finger. The kindest thing to be said about Hester’s innings (enough of the cricket already) is that
When a politician’s speech is spun ten days in advance, you know there’s trouble behind the scenes. Next week’s Mansion House dinner will be seen by City attendees principally as a farewell to Sir Mervyn King — and journalists present (including your columnist) will be timing the ovation to see how it compares with Eddie
On my way to chair a town meeting, I was chuckling over Phillip Warner’s cartoon last week headed ‘Mary Portas reinvigorates the High Street’. First, TV’s sharp-tongued queen of retail holds forth in front of a row of abandoned shops; then townsfolk dance in the street at the news that she has ‘buggered off in
‘You are a company that says you “do no evil”,’ Margaret Hodge told Google’s Matt Brittin a fortnight ago, ‘I think that you do do evil.’ It was a soundbite of the kind we’ve come to expect from grandstanding select committee chairmen. Since then — I won’t labour the point — we’ve seen an example
When the Manchester-based Co-operative Bank was announced last July as the buyer of 632 Lloyds branches, tripling the size of its own network, I hailed the news as a step forward for ‘banking biodiversity’. In February, George Osborne was still praising the deal, codenamed Project Verde, as one that would ‘shake up the established players’.
You may have gathered from last week’s column that I’ve been cruising the Med in search of fresh subject matter. It’s the sort of cruise that includes a programme of lectures, and the star turn on that front has been the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, enjoying a change of pulpit after his much-praised
