Any other business

Trump’s move on Canada is as mad as it’s insulting

8 February 2025 9:00 am

When I visited Toronto with a UK delegation last winter, conversation focused on the issues of immigration, housing and inflation…

I’m being driven mad by Microsoft Outlook

1 February 2025 9:00 am

Call me a cynic, but I suspect this week’s headlines about a revival of Heathrow’s third runway plan amount to…

Would it be worth Trump buying Greenland?

25 January 2025 9:00 am

London’s capital market needs a kick in the pants, as I write every week, and ‘activist investors’ are no bad…

Rachel Reeves owes Brompton bikes an apology

18 January 2025 9:00 am

I long to write less about Rachel Reeves and more about world-beating British businesses – such as Brompton, the folding…

My business predictions for 2025

4 January 2025 9:00 am

Headed for ‘the worst of all worlds’ is not where any of us would wish to find ourselves at the…

Negroni inflation is out of control

14 December 2024 9:00 am

Forty years ago this Christmas I visited Hong Kong for the first time – a few days after the signing…

The marketing genius of Jaguar

7 December 2024 9:00 am

Woke it may be, but Jaguar’s ‘Copy Nothing’ video is a work of marketing genius. With its ungendered models, ungrammatical…

The dark side of Black Friday

30 November 2024 9:00 am

How is it possible that we’re still reading headlines about the £4 billion fundraising from the Gulf that saved Barclays…

What does the City really think of the Chancellor?

23 November 2024 9:00 am

Regular invitations to Mansion House banquets petered out after I asked a shifty-looking waiter for a glass of champagne and…

Why Trump changed his tune on crypto

16 November 2024 9:00 am

This column comes to you from Atlanta, Georgia, where but for one giant ‘Trump Stands Up For Families’ billboard and…

Is No. 10 coming for game shooting next?

9 November 2024 9:00 am

I confess I was lunching at L’Escargot in Greek Street as Rachel Reeves delivered her Budget. My excuse was that…

Still hunting for a Trump trade? Gold may have further to rise

2 November 2024 9:00 am

Anyone hunting for a ‘Trump trade’ at this late stage has probably missed the US election bus. If you bought…

Wahed’s alarming Tube adverts

26 October 2024 9:00 am

As the interminable Budget wait goes on, so does the trawl through the Chancellor’s bin bags. I refer to the…

In defence of eating out

19 October 2024 9:00 am

Scheduling the Budget almost four months after their election victory would have counted as a monumental misjudgment for the Labour…

Where are all my after-dinner speaking gigs?

12 October 2024 9:00 am

How excited are you to hear the Prime Minister talking tech with Eric Schmidt, an American billionaire who used to…

Goodbye to Old King Coal

5 October 2024 9:00 am

So farewell, Ratcliffe-on-Soar: the UK’s last coal-fired power station shut down on Monday, having burned five million tonnes of coal…

The Murdochs’ next move: Rightmove

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Next month’s Budget tax raids on capital have provoked a festival of creative doom-mongering on the fringes of Labour’s conference…

In defence of McJobs

21 September 2024 9:00 am

The burden of higher taxation must fall on those with ‘the broadest shoulders’, says the Prime Minister, and City folks…

Don’t look back in anger… it’s just how ticket sales work

14 September 2024 9:00 am

We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the…

Why is no one marching against VAT on school fees?

7 September 2024 9:00 am

How passively we respond to revelations of Labour’s real direction of travel. As millions of pensioners brace for the confiscation…

My time on Hinge

31 August 2024 9:00 am

Back to work, back to school, back to politics: the French call it la rentrée and my own summer idyll…

The tragic misfortune of Mike Lynch

24 August 2024 9:00 am

Twice I met the tech tycoon Mike Lynch (missing, feared dead, as we went to press), once a decade or…

After the Olympics, France has to face its grim reality

17 August 2024 9:00 am

The French television personality Laurent Baffie, interviewed by Le Figaro, came up with a nice phrase for the success beyond…

Market apocalypse? No, a welcome correction

10 August 2024 9:00 am

A bout of global stock-market turmoil and an outbreak of UK street violence as adjacent news items gave an apocalyptic…

How many summers do you have left?

27 July 2024 9:00 am

If the new government’s ‘pensions review’ takes forward last year’s ‘Mansion House reforms’ – credited to chancellor Jeremy Hunt but…