Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
The British trade union movement needs to get a grip on itself. The British trade union movement needs to get a grip on itself. These days, the public associates the brotherhood of organised labour chiefly with the bizarre antics of the highly politicised Unite union, with its warring and tweeting joint general secretaries and its
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Hedge funds can be accused of many different sins, not least because they operate in many different shapes and forms across the investment universe. As a label, ‘hedge fund’ is so loosely generic that generalising about the sector is almost as pointless as trying to corral it with tighter
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business ‘Why do we care what the markets think?’ asked the comedian Jeremy Hardy on Radio 4’s News Quiz last Friday. Whingeing leftie though he may be, Hardy had a point. ‘The markets’ were identified by spokesmen of all three political parties as the invisible presence at their secret post-election
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business The downside of globalisation is contagion. That was the lesson of the Icelandic ash that damaged the livelihoods of Kenyan rose-growers, and it’s the lesson of this week’s Greek bailout. The deal that will see Greece’s euro partners stump up E80 billion, plus E30 billion from the IMF, touches
Asking NHS staff to call a medical hotline — rather than their boss — when they feel ill has cut ‘sickies’ by a quarter. Martin Vander Weyer meets the man behind the scheme It’s Monday morning and you’re feeling a bit below par. Maybe it was last night’s kebab, maybe it’s the bug that’s going
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I’ve come up with a slogan to revive flagging Conservative canvassers — and an encouraging report from the doorsteps. My man in the housing estates of suburban York, of which I wrote two weeks ago, told me ‘the Labour vote is collapsing’ two days before reporters started using that
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business There’s a distinct whiff of unfinished business about the current assault on Goldman Sachs, which stands accused of fraud by the US Securities & Exchange Commission and of ‘moral bankruptcy’ by Gordon Brown — you know, that Scottish bloke who sometimes stands on platforms quite close to Nick Clegg.
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Bored by the election already? If you want to avoid it completely, I suggest a three-week holiday in scenic Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, where the national dish is boiled horse, the national pastime is bride-kidnapping, and they still change governments the old-fashioned way, with a little help from their
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Bob Diamond, the generously remunerated American president of Barclays, has been put through his paces so often in this column that we really ought to give him his own treadmill in the Any Other Business penthouse gym. But I make no apology for mentioning him again — and this
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business It’s never easy to know what the Mayor of London really thinks — as many of us at The Spectator can attest from weekly experience during his benignly idiosyncratic editorship. His opposition to a third runway at Heathrow, and his espousal of an apparently fantastical alternative scheme to move
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Who’s the Manchurian candidate? That’s what I want to know. Even Tony Woodley, the hatchet-chinned joint general secretary of the Unite union, who has pursued a decade-long mission to cripple the competitiveness of the British airline industry, must realise that the timing of the BA cabin-crew strike is catastrophic
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business No sooner do I confess (6 March) to having dabbled in the dark art of off-balance-sheet finance, than along comes an official report into the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm led by the monstrous Dick Fuld, that reveals the mother of all financial disappearing tricks.
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business A dark hour imprisoned in a gridlocked multi-storey car park close to Old Trafford on a home-match evening gave me an opportunity to ponder what was once called ‘the beautiful game’. I was a Chelsea fan in my youth — the heroic era of Cooke, Wilkins and Droy —
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I can’t claim to have invented the off-balance-sheet sleight-of-hand used by the Greek government, under the guidance of Goldman Sachs, to beggar itself so spectacularly. But I was certainly a pioneer in the field. Long ago, at Barclays, I devised a scheme to help a famous brewery (now, needless
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business And so to VAT — an opening that I realise sounds about as enticing as a job ad for a shorthand typist in the Prime Minister’s office. Frankly, I doubt even Bob Monkhouse had a decent gag about VAT in his repertoire. But like many things that are not
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business ‘I don’t want to be treated like a criminal,’ a senior Barclays trader told me recently, in a slightly menacing European accent. That gives you a clue that he was not Bob Diamond, the bank’s American president, or John Varley, its very English chief executive, who have both foregone
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I was sorry to hear Gillian Tett, the FT’s fragrant financial commentator, calling the eurozone’s southern members ‘pigs’ last week. In sunnier times, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain were referred to collectively as ‘Club Med’, but lately the acronym of their initial letters has come into common usage, with
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Will I join the ticker-tape parade to welcome back Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Congressman Henry B. Steagall of Alabama? Well, I might lurk in the crowd, but I certainly won’t be cheering. These venerable legislators sponsored the US Banking Act of 1933 which built a wall between
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business If you don’t follow hospitality-trade news closely, you could be forgiven for thinking of Mitchells & Butlers as a Midlands-based brewery notable for its handsome Edwardian pubs. But it has not been that for decades, and if it was once an icon of progress in the beer trade, its