Any other business
Bring back apprentices, Chancellor!
The only photo I could find of the invited audience at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry for John Healey’s…
How to save Middlesbrough
When I wrote here 30 years ago that ‘Middlesbrough, once renowned for building bridges for Sydney Harbour and the White…
The stock market crash is coming
Margaret Thatcher famously told the Commons in 1988 that ‘there is no way in which one can buck the market’.…
Mike Ashley is the hero of the British high street
Adura, a new name to most of us, turns out to be a joint venture between Shell and the Norwegian…
Farming today: field fires and food price hikes ahead
I report from FTSE boardrooms and City bars, but I also spend time – mostly in Yorkshire, currently in France…
The fall of AI’s shooting star
Situational Awareness is a hedge fund that has just taken a spectacular dive. Its name was adopted from the title…
How to be a truly patriotic millionaire
Patriotic Millionaires UK, led by the former City trader Gary Stevenson and endorsed by Gary Lineker, has ‘100-plus’ members but…
The cinema is back
The hottest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco GTI in metallic dark green. I once drove it…
Count Binface has shown Burnham how to make a manifesto
Count Binface’s manifesto, made for Makerfield and tweaked for Clacton, is a rare point of light in today’s Stygian political…
For true Brits, air con is as foreign as a bidet
A quartet of news stories all point in the same troubling direction. First, easyJet is about to become the latest…
Storm warnings for Burnham from the weathermen of Basel
Reading the annual economic report of the Bank for International Settlements while lying beside a pool with an Aperol spritz…
Alan Greenspan and the slow death of independent central banking
The passing, aged 100, of the former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, prompts thoughts about shifting tensions between politicians…
Brexit was a huge opportunity shamefully mishandled
The Damascene moment in my personal Brexit journey came not when my pen hovered over the referendum ballot on 23…
No, minister: investing in tech ventures isn’t your job
To the London Stock Exchange (LSE) for a ‘scale-up capital’ circus in which 18 ambitious tech ventures had ten minutes…
Can we trust Palantir?
Best not to say too much about Albert Manifold, who was ousted as chairman of BP last week after only…
The Spectator’s caught in the EU crosshairs
Is the flotation of Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture on the US Nasdaq exchange a beacon for the future of earthly…
Manchester won’t raise a statue to Andy Burnham
Already heard enough of ‘Is Manchesterism a thing and did Andy Burnham invent it?’ I’m afraid you’ll hear a great…
How private equity changed the world
The 50th birthday of New York private-equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts – founded with $120,000 by the cousins George Roberts…
Don’t blame Trump for food price hikes and cancelled flights
In the hierarchy of factors that will make consumers curse politicians and company bosses this summer, food price inflation probably…
I’ll dare to say what Andy Haldane doesn’t
A sandwich with Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England economist, now president of British Chambers of Commerce, is the…
People need to calm down about Nigel Farage’s bitcoin wheeze
There’s a Tube strike in the old-fashioned style as I write – and you’ll understand the irritation, mine and that…
A private credit crash is coming
What with headlines focused on the Strait of Hormuz and scare stories about out-of-control AI, forecasts of a storm in…
Making Tax Difficult: another Whitehall farce
Welcome to the new tax year, with its overflowing hamper of half-baked, growth-eating, enterprise-crushing Labour measures. And if you happen…
Hong Kong is the new Dubai
I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that National Savings and Investments (NS&I) began life in 1861 as the Post…
Never mind bashing ‘profiteers’, slash fuel taxes and green levies
As chairman of the value-for-money Iceland frozen-foods chain, Richard Walker might be expected to know what he’s talking about in…
