The Blackburn brothers who are bringing Asda home
What a triumph of entrepreneurial empire-building — if that’s still an acceptable phrase — is the £6.8 billion acquisition of…
This dead-bat business minister should plead to be reshuffled
What advice can I offer Alok Sharma, who took a pasting in the weekend press for his lacklustre performance as…
Worth doing badly
The greatest pain of lockdown has been, for me, the absence of am-dram. In one half of my life I’m…
Covid has ended the rail franchise fiasco at last
Good riddance to the passenger rail franchise system which has finally been killed off by Covid, though a majority of…
This deal with Japan is little more than cheese and biscuits
A small cheer for Liz Truss’s treaty with Japan. It is, says the official press release, ‘the UK’s first major…
Wrecking final Brexit talks won’t help our fishermen
‘Every country has a political problem with its fishermen,’ wrote Peter Walker, the Conservative minister who negotiated the first effective…
Are the wheels coming off Rolls-Royce?
Along, cold weekend brought a haul of business news more bad than good. The worst was from aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce,…
A bid battle for BT won’t bring better broadband
A takeover battle for BT would bring much-needed excitement to the City — as well as a major political row.…
The true cost of the 14-day quarantine
Doing the math, as the Americans say, became this column’s theme after I abandoned another planned trip to France. Seven…
At last, boardroom pay starts to swing away from blatant excess
At a low moment in late March, I suggested that all large companies should consider temporary cuts in executive salaries…
BP, Amazon and airlines light different paths to survival
We should take heart from BP’s £5.1 billion second-quarter loss, accompanied by a halving of its dividend. What’s good about…
The vulgarity of easy money: lessons from Malaysia’s mega-scandal
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?
The price of gold has been rising since the earliest virus reports from China in December. Adherents regard it as…
Banning Huawei is right, but late – and bad for productivity
This column has been banging on about the peculiar nature of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, ever since its expanded…
A bailout for the arts is good but reopening would have been better
The government’s £1.57 billion lifeline for the cultural sector was bigger than most practitioners were expecting — and drew a…
Entrepreneurship – not Johnson’s New Deal – will lead us back to prosperity
John Maynard Keynes looks down and smiles, recalling his own perhaps too-often quoted remark that ‘when the facts change, I…
A VAT cut won’t boost spending if we don’t trust this government
Should Chancellor Rishi Sunak cut VAT as an emergency stimulus to the consumer economy? When Labour’s Alistair Darling made a…
Shares have defied pessimism – but another fall is surely coming
Do stock markets foretell the future while politicians fudge and economists mumble? No: share prices collectively have a life of…
Quarantine will block more holidays abroad than foreign virus-carriers
All logic suggests that the 14-day quarantine for arrivals from abroad really is, as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair put it,…
Car factories revive but theatres remain dark and in danger
Car showrooms are open again: some dealerships, with a hint of forgivable hyperbole, report a surge of pent-up demand. And…
If ‘whatever it takes’ means state share stakes in industry, so be it
Should the government be prepared to take equity stakes in major companies that will struggle to survive the current crisis?…
This is Royal Mail’s chance to appoint a boss fit for the new age
The Royal Mail worker who rang my bell to deliver an Amazon package on Friday was wearing a glittery ball…
The birth of a new telecoms giant heralds the end of Branson’s empire
This month’s most significant corporate deal attracted less attention than it might have done in normal times, crowded out by…
Don’t throw money at airlines now: wait for creative destruction ahead
British Airways warns of 12,000 redundancies. Ryanair announces 3,000 job losses as ‘a minimum to survive the next 12 months’;…
Sunak was right to tie the banks into his rescue loan scheme
Was the Chancellor wrong to guarantee only 80 per cent, rather than 100, of ‘coronavirus business interruption loans’ to keep…
