I’ve always respected stationmasters, but that sentiment is not universally shared. A distinguished friend of mine across the Channel described François Hollande the other day as ‘un chef de gare, sans aucune dignité’ — and it’s not difficult to picture the little president, peaked cap awry, trousers unbuttoned, haplessly waving his whistle as the last
The cautionary tale of the Co-operative Bank, its black hole and its naughty chairman has recently taught us that if a financial institution has the reputation of being dull, earnest and set in its ways, it probably isn’t. The collapse last year of Switzerland’s oldest private bank, Wegelin & Co — whose boss once claimed
This first working week of January is apparently the time when we’re most likely to think about a change of career; and last Friday was the 30th anniversary of the launch of the FTSE100 index of leading companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. The combination of those two diary items made me wonder what
I blamed the pheasant casserole, but I did it an injustice. Its only contribution to the drama behind my disappearance in mid-December was a residue of lead shot in the small intestine that briefly confused the radiologist. The real villain revealed by the scan was my appendix, which had taken on the raging, bull-necked, bug-eyed
Top of my Christmas reading pile is Saving the City by Richard Roberts, a new account of the largely forgotten crisis which afflicted global markets at the outbreak of the first world war, forcing the London Stock Exchange to close on Friday 31 July 1914 and stay dark for six months. It’s a reminder of
‘If I can’t see a factory from up here,’ I mutter to myself, throwing the car round an uphill bend of the B5032 south of Ashbourne, ‘I must be in the wrong county.’ But no, I’m not lost; there below me is a long pale slab of a building that announces itself as JCB World
The naughty Reverend Flowers will be a comic footnote in the history of the financial crisis — but no more than that. In terms of making ministry relevant to modern congregations, you’ve got to take your hat off to a man of the cloth who knows his ‘Charlie’ from his ‘ket’ (for the uninitiated that’s
My man in Dublin calls with joy in his voice to tell me ‘the Troika’ — the combined powers of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF — have signed off Ireland as fit to leave their bailout programme and return to economic self-determination. This is a remarkable turnaround in just three years
‘Satan seizes control of saintly bank’ would be a fair summary of much of the coverage of the deal that has rescued the crippled Co-operative Bank from oblivion, or ‘resolution’ as it is technically called. In order to avoid that fate, the parent Co-op Group has had to inject £462 million into the bank while
You know my theory that Unite leader ‘Red Len’ McCluskey is a Conservative secret agent? Well, having watched events at Grangemouth last week, I’m convinced his Scottish comrades Pat Rafferty, Unite’s Scottish secretary, and Stevie Deans, chair of Falkirk Labour as well as Unite’s Grangemouth convenor, are part of the same subversive cell. Having called
Prediction, as Mervyn King once observed, is ‘a stab in the dark’. Who can say with confidence where the wholesale price of electricity will be in ten years’ time, let alone 45 years hence at the end of the contract struck by Energy Secretary Ed Davey with EDF of France for the building of the
Some say it’s natural optimism that makes the Americans so different from the British, and some say it’s a lack of cynicism. Either way, our cousins over there have long had difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction, and are forever finding ways to make their public life look like the action movie that always ends well
While attention has focused on the sudden ubiquity and alleged iniquity of payday lenders, boom and impending bust has infected another part of the short-term credit sector. For the very reason that the global economy is recovering, Britain’s pawnbrokers are in trouble. Pawnbroking traces its history to the Medicis, but owes its traditional image in
‘We need successful energy companies in Britain, we need them to invest for the future,’ said Ed Miliband in his conference speech, as though channelling my thoughts at the very moment I was writing last week’s item on the lack of a national energy strategy. Then he ruined it: ‘If we win the election, the
Everyone —including me, if I’m honest — has been talking about a new property bubble. But is it for real? London house prices are rising at an annual rate of almost 10 per cent, and shares in the capital’s bellwether back-from-the-dead estate agency Foxtons soared on their stock market debut last week. Yet according to
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