Corporate standards might be well noted down the road in Whitehall January 17, 2022 A mischief-making tweeter last week asked whether a CEO caught in breach of lockdown restrictions would be given the same second chance that Boris Johnson seemingly has been given by his party. The answer came yesterday – when Antonio Horta-Osorio stepped down as Chair of Credit Suisse after two ill-advised quarantine breakouts. Whatever the ins [...]
Turning off support now puts at risk billions of taxpayers’ cash already spent January 11, 2022 At least we now know Number 10 can organise a p***-up, even if it wasn’t in a brewery. Some of their decision-making in recent weeks, and indeed since the start-of the pandemic, had rather suggested it was beyond them. Nowhere is that more clear than in the ongoing work from home order, which is gradually [...]
There’s nothing wrong with plain speaking… January 10, 2022 ONE COMPLAINT of business journalists is that some chief executives, drilled to within an inch of their life by a phalanx of corporate communications professionals, have on occasion been known to not perhaps be the most interesting interview subjects. It’s understandable: one doesn’t get to the top of corporate behemoths, as a rule, by shooting [...]
Two CEO success stories should put nonsense comparison to bed January 7, 2022 Today marks what unions and one particular think tank term ‘high pay day.’ It’s the day at which an average FTSE 100 CEO has earned the equivalent of the whole-year earnings of the so-called average worker. As ever, the comparison is facile, the implication idiotic, and it is deserving of no more than these few [...]
Could 2022 really be a happy new year after all? January 5, 2022 Perhaps, at last, we really are learning to live with Covid-19. The government’s decision to scrap a host of the most over-bearing restrictions on travel suggests that life may one day return to something like normal. When the new variant was identified in southern Africa, it made sense to quickly slap restrictions on travel from [...]
Treasury must come around to the obvious: The UK needs London December 10, 2021 In the mid-1970s, a bankrupt New York City went begging to the federal government in Washington DC for a bailout. It had got itself into immense financial difficulty; indeed, it was bankrupt. The President, Gerald Ford, effectively said no. The New York Post’s headline the day after was simple, but iconic: “Ford tells City: Drop [...]
The time has come for a football regulator with teeth November 25, 2021 The point of free-market capitalism, which this paper subscribes to with whole-hearted support, is not that the animal forces of supply and demand should be left perfectly unchecked. For that reason, we set a level playing field – from the Financial Conduct Authority to the Competition and Markets Authority, we put safeguards in place to [...]
Keir’s offensive could put the business vote in play November 22, 2021 AROUND this time two years ago, as we hurtled towards the General Election of 2019, this newspaper published a front-page editorial which urged you, our readers, not to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. Not because of the politics – though high-tax, high-spend has never been our particular brand – but because of the anti-semitism [...]
Whitehall should not be able to escape TfL’s case for funding November 18, 2021 There is a brilliant, if possibly apocryphal, anecdote that emerged from the 2000 US election. Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s election strategist, was finally accosted by the journalists who had been following Bush on the campaign trail for weeks, reciting the same speech, city by city, state by state. The hacks begged Rove to change [...]
Editorial: Time to stare down the militant union jeopardising the night tube November 12, 2021 So, we’re back to RMT unrest on the tube. It’s almost enough for us to pine for lockdown again. The barney is thus: in the before times, the night tube relied on around two hundred part-time staff. Those posts were scrapped during the pandemic (for blindingly obvious reasons) and those staff gradually brought in to [...]
