Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.

China’s rockstar-of-tech has fallen foul of Xi

14 November 2020 9:00 am

FTSE indices soared as the Biden Bounce met vaccine euphoria, underpinned by the Bank of England’s announcement of another £150…

Ruthless Ryanair could show us the future of aviation

7 November 2020 9:00 am

Aviation, nuclear power and public transport — along with good restaurants, golden retrievers and hand-knitted bed socks — are, as…

What’s the point of trying to break up ‘big tech’?

31 October 2020 9:00 am

The ‘antitrust’ law suit launched by US authorities against Google has been reported as a potential turning point in the…

Who’d want the job of vaccinating the nation?

24 October 2020 9:00 am

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel — or a second lockdown thundering unstoppably towards us? News…

Why now is the perfect time to invest in art

17 October 2020 9:00 am

The Bank of England has told commercial banks to prepare for the possibility of negative interest rates. This last hypothetical…

The Blackburn brothers who are bringing Asda home

10 October 2020 9:00 am

What a triumph of entrepreneurial empire-building — if that’s still an acceptable phrase — is the £6.8 billion acquisition of…

Could ‘clean tech’ save the aviation industry?

3 October 2020 9:00 am

What advice can I offer Alok Sharma, who took a pasting in the weekend press for his lacklustre performance as…

It’s not all fluffed lines: the serious business of amateur dramatics

26 September 2020 9:00 am

The greatest pain of lockdown has been, for me, the absence of am-dram. In one half of my life I’m…

The end of the line for the rail franchise fiasco

26 September 2020 9:00 am

Good riddance to the passenger rail franchise system which has finally been killed off by Covid, though a majority of…

The Japan trade deal shows how desperate we are for investment

19 September 2020 9:00 am

A small cheer for Liz Truss’s treaty with Japan. It is, says the official press release, ‘the UK’s first major…

Wrecking the Brexit talks won’t help our fishermen

12 September 2020 9:00 am

‘Every country has a political problem with its fishermen,’ wrote Peter Walker, the Conservative minister who negotiated the first effective…

Now get off your sofa to help save the arts

5 September 2020 9:00 am

Along, cold weekend brought a haul of business news more bad than good. The worst was from aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce,…

Zoom falling: has the video-call novelty worn off?

29 August 2020 9:00 am

A takeover battle for BT would bring much-needed excitement to the City — as well as a major political row.…

Has Downing Street calculated the real cost of quarantine?

22 August 2020 9:00 am

Doing the math, as the Americans say, became this column’s theme after I abandoned another planned trip to France. Seven…

The battle to tackle excess boardroom pay may already be won

15 August 2020 9:00 am

At a low moment in late March, I suggested that all large companies should consider temporary cuts in executive salaries…

In defence of Amazon

8 August 2020 9:00 am

We should take heart from BP’s £5.1 billion second-quarter loss, accompanied by a halving of its dividend. What’s good about…

Will retail giants outsmart the online sales tax?

1 August 2020 9:00 am

When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a…

Is it too late to jump on the gold bandwagon?

25 July 2020 9:00 am

The price of gold has been rising since the earliest virus reports from China in December. Adherents regard it as…

We’ll never know whether Huawei is still listening

18 July 2020 9:00 am

This column has been banging on about the peculiar nature of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, ever since its expanded…

The extinction of the arts has been deferred – for now

11 July 2020 9:00 am

The government’s £1.57 billion lifeline for the cultural sector was bigger than most practitioners were expecting — and drew a…

Why Boris Johnson’s ‘New Deal’ won’t save us

4 July 2020 9:00 am

John Maynard Keynes looks down and smiles, recalling his own perhaps too-often quoted remark that ‘when the facts change, I…

Tinkering with VAT won’t make us trust the government

27 June 2020 9:00 am

Should Chancellor Rishi Sunak cut VAT as an emergency stimulus to the consumer economy? When Labour’s Alistair Darling made a…

Is there anywhere visitors will be welcome this summer?

20 June 2020 9:00 am

Do stock markets foretell the future while politicians fudge and economists mumble? No: share prices collectively have a life of…

Who would want to come to Britain for a holiday now?

13 June 2020 9:00 am

All logic suggests that the 14-day quarantine for arrivals from abroad really is, as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair put it,…

Our theatres are dark – and in danger

6 June 2020 9:00 am

Car showrooms are open again: some dealerships, with a hint of forgivable hyperbole, report a surge of pent-up demand. And…