‘There are two superpowers in the world today,’ said the American columnist Thomas Friedman in 1996. ‘There’s the United States and there’s Moody’s bond rating service. The US can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody’s can destroy you by downgrading your bonds.’ Well, not any more. Last Friday’s removal of triple-A status from British
We have had a very high failure rate in deliveries of the catalogues for Emily Patrick’s exhibition,’ says an email from the painter’s husband. ‘Over 50 per cent have been lost in the post or inexplicably delayed.’ Come to think of it, my own most recent Amazon order, allegedly dispatched a fortnight ago, hasn’t reached
Antony Jenkins, the new-broom chief executive of Barclays, has the tone of a junior minister, not long in parliament, who finds himself promoted to high office after the big beast who preceded him was toppled by scandal. In fact he’s been in the bank 30 years, climbing the ladder so quietly that none of my
Funny how little phrases go viral. Suddenly everyone’s talking about ‘fasting diets’, ‘zombie companies’ and ‘leadership plots’. As to the first, the idea of the ‘5:2 intermittent fasting diet’, I gather, is to eat as little as you can for two days a week. It’s all over the media, and any moment now someone will
Investing £33 billion in HS2 — £46 billion if you accept the Taxpayers’ Alliance’s calculation — won’t boost us out of this triple dip, but it might ease the one after next, early in the reign of hugely popular, three-times-married King Harry, in whose favour his elder brother will abdicate, Dutch-style, after his 50th birthday.
It’s only fair to warn you — especially if you’re Greek, Irish or Chinese — that this week’s column contains negative stereotyping. I’ll leave the transsexuals to Rod Liddle, but I’m still bracing for the Twitter storm. My propensity to commit this category of thought crime was first pointed out to me by Giorgos Papaconstantinou,
My item last week about brighter prospects for car makers looked forlorn by Friday lunchtime, when news bulletins were leading with a quote from one Tony Murphy of the Unite union to the effect that an announcement of 800 job cuts at Honda’s Swindon plant was ‘a hammer blow to UK manufacturing’. This was followed
So farewell, Wegelin & Co, the oldest bank in Switzerland and the one with the simplest strategy for growth — which was to offer secret accounts to American tax-evaders who could no longer obtain that valuable service from bigger Swiss banks such as UBS. Founded by a linen merchant in 1741, which makes it half
The sun shines warmly in south-west France, and rabbit bouillabaisse is the pièce de résistance of a New Year lunch at which Nigel Lawson is a fellow guest. The former chancellor and Spectator editor divides his time between his home in the Gers, the Global Warming Policy Foundation which he chairs, and the Parliamentary Commission
In a recent Spectator panel debate titled ‘Review 2012, Preview 2013’, Matthew Parris startled an expectant audience by observing that in his view nothing very interesting had happened in the past 12 months, and not much excitement lies in wait for next year. Prediction, we know, is a mug’s game — those ancient Mayans who
I tried, I really did, right to the bitter end. No column has made more effort than Any Other Business to spot pinpoints of light on this year’s dark economic horizon. If there was a Spectator Optimist of the Year award, I’d walk it. But with the Chancellor and the Governor drowning out the carol
BP continues to pay a full price for the Deepwater Horizon disaster — deservedly so, you might say, given that 11 rig workers died in the April 2010 explosion that caused ‘the world’s worst oil spillage’ in the Gulf of Mexico. The contractor Halliburton and the rig operator Trans-ocean were also implicated, but blame has
So now we know. It’s not the popular insider, the All Souls professor or the Whitehall veteran. It’s not an Old Etonian — uniquely, they couldn’t find one for the shortlist. The winner of the Governorship stakes turned out to be the Goldman Sachs candidate, Mark Carney, currently at the Bank of Canada but formerly
The most stylish fellow passenger in Delta Air Lines’ business class cabin from Atlanta to Heathrow last week was a chap in shades and a hoodie with a couple of kilos of bling round his neck. Inquiries in the galley identified him as ‘2 Chainz’, a Georgia-born rapper whose real name is Tauheed Epps. I
Never say this column doesn’t offer global perspectives. OK, sometimes it comes in folksy Yorkshire parables — but a fortnight ago I was up close with Branson in Mumbai and today I’m speaking to you from the Louisiana Superdome. Yes, I’m standing right on the plastic turf of one of America’s most hallowed football fields,
‘Like a scene out of Village of the Damned,’ one UBS banker describes the moment of collecting his redundancy envelope. He’s over-dramatising, I’m sure, but let’s not be unsympathetic: in my banking days I found myself on both sides of that life-changing moment, doing the sacking and being sacked, and it’s never painless, even when
So here I am on a morning flight from Delhi to Mumbai, sitting next to an Englishman in his early sixties with bright blonde hair and a heavy cold. He has his feet up on the bulkhead and I’m distracted by his sensible black lace-ups: his wife packs for him, an aide whispers later. He’s
The news agenda has gone mad. Imagine this is the issue of 27 October 1917, and our headlines are filled with allegations concerning the depravities of the late Mr Oscar Wilde, calls for a new enquiry into police handling of the 1888 Match Girls’ Strike, and rumours that Mr Bonar Law is habitually rude to
Twenty-five years ago this week, I became managing director of BZW (predecessor of Barclays Capital) in Hong Kong. The office was unstable after a summer of firings, and I had been dispatched from Tokyo to steady the ship. On Friday afternoon, a man called Reggie from Warburgs shouted ‘Heard the news from home?’ across the
George Osborne knows how to stick pins in his enemies. Using the phrase ‘Workers of the world unite’ to introduce a wheeze that will allow employees to swap employment rights for shares in their employer got well up the noses of the left. ‘There are so many holes in this it deserves to sink without