Brazen Burnham should call an election and put his ten year plan to the voters July 21, 2026 Plenty of people were staring at their phones outside the Calais terminal of the Eurotunnel on Monday afternoon, but I sensed I was the only one watching Andy Burnham’s Downing Street address. We left for France under one Prime Minister and came back under another. That’s just how it is these days. My first reaction [...]
If Burnham wants growth he’ll have to save the City July 9, 2026 Quite the roll call: Beazley, Tate & Lyle, Intertek, Schroders, easyjet. Companies abandon their public listing for their own reasons but the cumulative impact cannot be ignored and, given the dearth of any substantial new entrants, it cannot be dismissed as the healthy churn of dynamic capital markets. Far from it. A typically punchy note [...]
‘If you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight’ July 8, 2026 In the great work of historical fiction, Imperium, Robert Harris imagines the Roman statesman Cicero observing that “if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight.” Clacton may be a far cry from the ancient senate in Rome, but Nigel Farage has followed the playbook. Facing a parliamentary standards [...]
Burnham’s encounter with political and economic reality will be brutal when it comes July 7, 2026 This is turning out to be a very strange summer indeed, and I’m not referring to the football. This week, a Prime Minister with no power will attend the NATO summit in Ankara and next week, a Chancellor with just days left in the job will tell a City crowd at the Mansion House banquet [...]
Thin end of the wedge? LLPs brace for major tax overhaul July 2, 2026 The maths genius behind trading firm XTX, Alex Gerko, stands high in the rankings of Britain’s top taxpayers, having paid more than £330m to HMRC last year. For good measure, he also handed out more than £150m to charities and good causes in 2025, focusing on education and supporting talented math graduates to pursue PhDs [...]
Canary Wharf’s reinvention is a triumph July 1, 2026 Seven years ago, almost to the day, I found myself leaning backwards over the ledge at the very top of the Barclays tower in Canary Wharf. I exchanged a glance with the then Lord Mayor, Peter Estlin (a former Barclays exec, incidentally) to my left before pushing off like a commando and conducting a flawless, [...]
Is Andy Burnham a left-wing Liz Truss? June 29, 2026 Say what you like about Andy Burnham (and I intend to say a lot) but he’s not short on ambition. Armed with a single by election victory he now intends to oversee “the biggest change in our lifetime to the way Britain is run.” The PM-in-waiting had popped down to London for some selfies before [...]
London councils won’t be able to sue their way to more homes being built June 25, 2026 Last week I asked the chief executive of one of the country’s largest housing developers to sum up the state of housebuilding in London, and the answer was “dire.” If I’d allowed two words I suspect one of them would have been unprintable. The situation is so disastrous that Sadiq Khan was forced to lower [...]
Has Brexit been a success? It’s too early to tell June 24, 2026 Ten years ago today the country woke to the news that the UK had voted to leave the European Union. Campaigners for Remain were horrified, pro-Brexit activists were jubilant, markets were panicked and in Westminster the Prime Minister, David Cameron, resigned. The magnitude of the Leave campaign’s victory – of their achievement – was sinking [...]
Burnham might lift Labour’s mood but he won’t save the country June 23, 2026 It was a little under two years ago that Keir Starmer stood outside 10 Downing Street and declared that his new government would “end the era of noisy performance [and] tread a little more lightly on your lives.” It was a bold ambition and, after a shambolic end to Tory rule, a welcome one. Was [...]
