Retail
The bottleneck in shipping will deliver an expensive Christmas
Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey looks increasingly uncomfortable as inflation notches upwards from ‘nothing to worry about’ towards the…
Why shouldn’t the City pick an Irish Lord Mayor?
The Financial Times carried a curious story at the weekend about ‘the secretive process to elect the Lord Mayor of…
Why private equity sharks are shopping at Morrisons
The late Sir Ken Morrison — founder of the eponymous supermarket chain that’s the latest UK target for US private…
Clinging to optimism as revival collides with fear
The happiest thing that happens in May is the coming into leaf of my long beech hedge. The shift from…
Customer disservice
The insidious creep of corporate friendliness
Talking point
Gossip appears to be good for the mental health. That should make the females of the ancient world some of…
Spring at last – but who’d want to own a giant shopping mall?
Retail footfall will be the first measure of recovery this spring. Everywhere I look, from central London to small-town Yorkshire,…
This tangled tale of Greensill and Gupta may hide systemic dangers
Historians of unforeseen crises talk about ‘chaos theory’ and the ‘butterfly effect’, in which a small perturbation far away —…
Portrait of the week
Home On Sunday 7 February, as the week began, 11,465,210 people in the United Kingdom had received a first vaccination…
Real life
The kitchen tap began dripping as if it knew perfectly well that this would land me in a predicament whereby…
Portrait of the week
Home Supplies of the Pfizer vaccine (made in Belgium) were feared to be at risk from a declaration by the…
The Spectator’s Notes
Many ingenious ways of evading Covid-19 have been devised to assist commerce, fewer to assist worship. In our next-door village,…
The business world has many shades between hero and villain
Separating heroes from villains in the great retail survival struggle is like spotting bent coppers in Line of Duty —…
Portrait of the Week
Home The Commons voted by 291 votes to 78 for new coronavirus regulations putting 55 million people in England into…
High and dry
Does it matter that Debenhams and the Arcadia group have gone under this week, taking 25,000 jobs with them and…
Barometer
Dangerous games Sage scientists advised against playing board games at Christmas. Some games to consider if you are feeling subversive:Pandemic…
Pension funds need a push to invest in the green revolution
We’ve heard a lot this week about infrastructure spending, and how much more will be needed if the UK is…
Driven mad
Why is buying a car such an ordeal?
Barometer
You can’t do that there ’ere Some of the things which have been banned under Public Spaces Protection Orders, according to…
The power of painless payment
I am one of those annoying, mildly claustrophobic people who sit at the end of a row in cinemas. There…
RBS’s note from a crashing plane: wild headline-grabbing or wise advice?
Should anyone take investment advice from Royal Bank of Scotland, the institution which so misread markets before the crash that…
After the Black Friday flop, shops can get back to what they do best
The high street flopperoo that was ‘Black Friday’ may have something to do with terrorism fears, or even the downturn…
TalkTalk shows us the internet is only three clicks from anarchy
I’m not a customer of TalkTalk, the phone company which revealed last week that a hacker had potentially compromised the…
Brand loyalty, or lack of it: why I’d rather run Marks & Spencer than Tesco
This first working week of January is apparently the time when we’re most likely to think about a change of…
Barometer
Other people’s rocks Spain threatened to introduce a €40 border-crossing charge and find other ways of making life difficult for…
