Amidst the gunfire generated by Stephen Hester’s bonus — on which I’m glad to say he took my advice and did the decent thing, so like Stephen Wraysford at the end of Birdsong he deserves a few days’ rest — I was intrigued by the week’s other RBS story. Hester is reported to be selling
‘Always frightfully keen on the money,’ mutters a City grandee who watched Stephen Hester build his career at Credit Suisse, Abbey and British Land before taking over the helm of the sinking Royal Bank of Scotland from Sir Fred Goodwin. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong (let’s remember) in wanting to prosper alongside your shareholders. But as
‘A John Lewis economy’ was a strong soundbite from Nick Clegg, even if it failed to resonate with Netto shoppers lower down the social scale than the Cleggs. The Deputy Prime Minister is ‘pushing for real, early, radical action’ to make this ‘the decade of employee share ownership’, and no one can deny he’s picked
I set out my argument on the unfairness of soaring executive pay back in November, when I pointed out that ‘in all the years I’ve been writing about the socially divisive nature of this trend and the impossibility of justifying it performance terms, the fat cats have multiplied their take more than fourfold’. So I
I thought editors came on a bit strong with the ‘Jailbird Honours’ headlines in response to New Year gongs for ex drug-dealer Chris Preddie (OBE) and former HMP Ford inmate Gerald Ronson (CBE), the property tycoon who was convicted of theft and false accounting in the Guinness share-support scandal in 1990. But what was interesting
About ten years ago, over a good lunch, I had a debate with the late Giles Worsley about Battersea power station. The distinguished architectural writer said Battersea was an industrial icon that should certainly be conserved but — like its sister station turned gallery at Bankside — found a new purpose. If an industrial icon
A consolation of the financial crisis is that it is producing a bumper crop of fiction, the best of which will be read long after all the hefty works of investigative non-fiction have been forgotten. Last year I praised Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, and my Christmas reading this year will include Justin Cartwright’s
I am very fond of the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, because I once saw Mr and Mrs Bibi Netanyahu breakfasting there, and they had a moody teenage son who skulked, and Bibi was powerless over the skulking. It is not brown like the Savoy and, unlike the Dorchester, it has never mistaken me for a
I’m picturing you reading this in your armchair beside a blazing log fire on Friday evening, Christmas tree lights twinkling over your shoulder, spaniels steaming at your feet, beaker of mulled wine in your hand. ‘Quite exciting while it lasted,’ I hear you say, ‘but thank God it’s all over. Here’s to Angela and Nicolas
I admire the Chancellor for his clarity of mind and his coolness under fire, but I don’t believe a word of his forecasts. I didn’t even believe the forecasts he read out on Tuesday from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, and I’ll hazard a guess that the Chancellor wasn’t really putting much faith in
I wrote here in July that I was hoping to see history reversed at Northern Rock. Shortly after that, Swiss boffins declared that time travel really might be possible, after discovering they could fire neutrinos through an Alpine tunnel at a fraction faster than the speed of light. But the idea of propelling the privatised
The Bank of England was expected this week to slash its growth forecast for the current year and next to around 1 per cent, down from previous forecasts of 1.5 and 2.1 per cent — but that’s still optimistic according to a European Commission report which projects no better than 0.7. Official figures were also
What are bond markets saying about Italy? With my usual proviso that markets are best understood as shoals of piranhas, communicating moods of panic, indifference, bloodlust and satiety rather than coherent ideas, the relatively clear message earlier this week was that Italian government bond yields were perilously close to the threshold of panic. That threshold
‘The boom in top people’s pay is gathering momentum,’ I wrote before some of you were born — those of you who are still at school, that is. I went on to quote a leading industrialist of the day: ‘Shareholders won’t be able to stop it. Moderation will have to come through pressure of public
Deep in autumnal France, it’s eerily quiet except for a flock of magpies in the trees — an omen of ‘death and hard times ahead’, or so I read on a website for druids which is as informative as any of the more mainstream sources about the chances of successful resolution of the euro crisis.
As mass expressions of anti-capitalist rage go, ‘Occupy London Stock Exchange’ has been a bit of a damp squib. What was meant to be an assault on the epicentre of evil dealing, co-ordinated with similar eruptions in New York and elsewhere, swiftly turned into an extended coffee morning on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.
The most startling number in this week’s news was the extra £750 million spent on petrol by Tesco customers in the six months to August, compared with the same period last year. This wasn’t some Clarkson-esque craze for seeing off the downturn blues by taking the motor for a spin, but the inflationary impact of
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any other business In the spirit of Richard Ingrams, who as our television critic many years ago reviewed a programme he had not seen but had heard through a hotel-room wall, I felt moved to write about Ireland on the strength of perusing a discarded copy of the Irish Times at a
Hang on to your popcorn – this could be the final reel of the euro disaster movie The good news is we’re in a new phase of the euro crisis. The bad news is we don’t know how it’s going to end. In every good disaster movie, there’s a moment when bickering bureaucrats who have
UBS: the bank that lost the formula to turn Mr Hyde back into Dr Jekyll ‘Thank you, UBS,’ writes the FT columnist Martin Wolf, who as a member of the Vickers commission on banking reform was one of its strongest proponents of the ‘ring-fencing’ of retail banks to protect them from the casino follies of