Tesco

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said of the EU referendum: ‘If you want to be part of the government, you have to take the view that we are engaged in an exercise of renegotiation to have a referendum and that will lead to a successful outcome.’ This caused a certain amount of uproar, with newspaper headlines saying things like ‘PM: Back me or I will sack you.’ Mr Cameron the next day said: ‘It’s clear to me that what I said yesterday was misinterpreted.’ His remarks followed the launch of a grouping called Conservatives for Britain (run by Steve Baker, the MP for Wycombe), which boasted the support of

Home The prospect of a parliamentary alliance between Labour and the Scottish National Party injected an element of fear into the election campaign. The SNP manifesto promised to increase spending and to find a way to stop the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said she wanted to make Labour in government ‘bolder and better’. Lord Forsyth, a former Conservative Scottish secretary, said that the building up of the SNP, to take seats in Scotland, was a ‘dangerous view which threatens the integrity of our country’. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said the Tories should not be ‘talking up’ the SNP. Even the Democratic Unionists

Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan) found themselves debating the direction of causation in the purchase of electric drills. Their dispute revolved around one question: do men a) conceive a need for making a hole and therefore go and buy a drill or b) buy an electric drill in a shop because it looks cool and then wander around the house desperately looking for any excuse to make holes in things. (One joy of working in advertising is that you get paid to have the kind of conversations when sober which other people are only allowed

Here’s one for all you conspiracy nuts out there, prompted by readers’ comments on my recent item about whether BP has been unjustly targeted by the US political and judicial establishment. I gather there’s a theory that the hounding of non-US banks by the US Department of Justice for sanctions-busting and trading misdemeanours has a more sinister foreign-policy impetus behind it. Notably — according to Conflicts Forum, a website I’m told is breakfast reading for trainee spooks — the $9 billion fine imposed by US authorities on BNP of France for financing trade with Iran, Sudan and Cuba may also have been intended to punish the French for refusing to

I really wouldn’t want to be chief executive of Tesco, I wrote in January, because the ‘too big, too dull, too dominant’ supermarket giant, besieged by discounters, has become ‘a business-school case study of a brand that has lost all positive emotional connection to its customers’; the incumbent Philip Clarke, a Tesco lifer with scant hope of measuring up to his predecessor Sir Terry Leahy, had ‘everything to lose’. Well, now he’s lost it — to be replaced by Dave Lewis, a Unilever executive who knows how to turn dull products into sexy brands, Dove soap and Lynx deodorant being two of his triumphs. If Clarke’s departure, after only three years in post, looked as inevitable as that of David Moyes from Manchester United

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 choice I would make if the job genie swooshed out of the pantomime lamp and told me I could re-invent myself as chief executive of a FTSE100 company. Given recovering consumer confidence — and everything to play for in the ‘bricks and clicks’ treasure hunt for the best mix of online and physical offerings —

This week’s discovery that some burgers sold in UK supermarkets contain up to 29 per cent horse meat was met with a combination of concerns about the labelling and sourcing of food, and jokes about the burgers’ ‘Shergar content’. But the fact that people are inadvertently eating horse meat isn’t the only worrying part of the finding; an additional concern is the provenance of the meat. In many equine-consuming countries, horses are bred specifically for their meat, in the same way that livestock are in the UK. If you go to Auchan in Calais and pick up a horse steak from the ‘boucherie’ section, then your meat should be perfectly