What position should the distant observer take on the COP28 conference in Dubai? That the sight of 70,000 delegates flying into a desert oil state from around the world to discuss human impacts on climate change is beyond satire and that its proceedings are never likely to rise above Greta Thunberg’s encapsulation of all such jamborees as ‘blah blah blah’? Or that the climate problem is now so obvious and urgent that all efforts towards global action, however small, should be uncynically applauded?

I leave that choice on the table. But I’m finding it hard to take a positive view of Sultan Al-Jaber, president of the Dubai gathering, who also happens to chair Abu Dhabi’s national oil company, which proposes to double its current output by 2027, and who has denied that the meeting offers useful opportunities to strike new oil and gas deals with visiting nations. Yes, the world needs secure oil supplies until renewable energy sources finally catch up, and yes, Sultan Al-Jaber also happens to run a wind and solar business. But how wrong was Greta to call his appointment ‘completely ridiculous’?

As for his claim to have ‘delivered history’ on the first day of the meeting with the announcement of a $400 million ‘loss and damage fund’ to compensate poorer countries for damage inflicted by climate change, let’s take a closer look. The US, which spends well over $2 billion a day on military budgets, offered $17.5 million towards the fund; the great industrial nation of Japan just $10 million. At $75 per barrel, Abu Dhabi pumps $400 million worth of hydrocarbons in less than two days.

And to add a little more perspective, the new fund is a small fraction of the sum proffered by Abu Dhabi’s vice president Sheikh Mansour to assist the Barclay family in settling their debt to Lloyds Bank relating to ownership of the Telegraph titles and The Spectator, of which more below. Climate action must and surely will move forward, but COP28 so far is hot air and a handful of desert sand.

Saga of decline

If there’s a brand in the UK that ought to be riding the wave of baby-boomer prosperity, it is surely Saga, the insurance and travel group that aims everything it does at what its boss Euan Sutherland – who resigned last week – called ‘the Experience Generation’. This was a business that should have made ever-rising returns from encouraging fun-loving over-fifties to part with savings they were disinclined to pass on to their offspring. Instead it turned into a much less attractive vision of the ageing process, in which everything gradually goes wrong.

Saga’s cruise ships took a big hit during the pandemic. Its motor insurance business has suffered from the inflated cost of claims. Despite disposal of troublesome offshoots, including care homes, its borrowings ballooned above £650 million – a long-running problem Sutherland blamed on former private-equity owners who left the company ‘loaded with debt’ when it floated on the stock exchange in 2014.

Following £78 million of first-half losses, Saga’s market value – which once stood above £2 billion – has dwindled to £160 million. The founder’s son Sir Roger de Haan, no youngster himself but still holding 26 per cent of Saga’s shares, injected £100 million to stave off a crisis in 2020 and has recently offered another £85 million in loans.

Now Lazard has been hired to restructure the balance sheet – which means reducing the debt, most likely by selling off insurance interests. Or perhaps they’ll find a take-over buyer to rejuvenate the whole fading enterprise.

Folksy farewell

The folksy double act of billionaire investor Warren Buffett and his business partner Charlie Munger became, with longevity, a bit of a cliché. But as stock-pickers on behalf of their master company Berkshire Hathaway and its loyal shareholders, they were right far more often than they were wrong – Buffett graciously claiming that his own costliest mistakes happened when he failed to consult Charlie, who died last week aged 99.

Munger’s scorching views of what he habitually called (even in prim television interviews) ‘crypto shit’ accord with my own and have been quoted everywhere. But I prefer to recall his more positive ‘simple rules for a better life’: ‘You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles, you deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do.’ And more poignantly, often attributed to him though he may not have been the first to say it: ‘All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.’

Pass the Spectator parcel

I can claim tenuous connection or acquaintance with every owner of The Spectator since Ian Gilmour, who acquired the magazine in 1954. In the case of Harry Creighton, the wheeler-dealer in machine tools who bought from Gilmour in 1967 and sold to Henry Keswick in 1975, tenuous means posthumous, since I never met him but wrote his obituary. In the case of the Fairfax family from Australia (1985-88), it means I once spent a weekend up a Japanese mountain with a Fairfax heir who memorably remarked: ‘Jeez, Martin, you’re brave, skiing that fast with technique that bad.’

If the most flamboyant owner was Conrad Black, who bought from Fairfax and eventually sold to the Barclays, it was the mining entrepreneur Algy Cluff (between Keswick and Fairfax, then long-time chairman) who was our most heroic supporter. I was sorry not to see Algy – still a player at 83 – in the current bidding, even if the price might be hundreds of times higher than he paid last time.

As to who’s next, safest not to comment or predict. But let me at least offer a couplet by way of festive greeting: Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan/ Is there no trophy you’re not plannin’ on buyin’?