Barclays kicks off £15bn shareholder bonanza after profit rises February 10, 2026 Barclays kickstarted plans to dish out heaps of cash to shareholders on Tuesday after the bank’s profit breezed ahead of expectations for the 2025 financial year. The FTSE 100 giant launched a fresh £1bn share buyback after pre-tax profit soared 13 per cent in the last 12 months to £9.1bn. This came ahead of internal [...]
Starm before the storm? PM survives the day but crisis still looms. February 10, 2026 Sir Keir Starmer has insisted he is “getting on with the job” following a punishing 24 hours in which he lost his Chief of Staff, his Director of Communications and the support of Labour’s leader in Scotland as the fallout from the Peter Mandelson scandal threatens to collapse the government. As leadership speculation continued to [...]
Fractile pledges £100m UK expansion amid AI chip push February 10, 2026 UK chip start-up Fractile has announced a £100m expansion of its British operations, scaling up in London and Bristol as ministers step up calls for greater domestic ownership of critical AI. The investment, which will be rolled out over the next three years, will fund a new industrial hardware engineering facility in Bristol. The move [...]
Why the Tory Party tried to persuade Karren Brady to run for London mayor February 10, 2026 The Tories need a political heavyweight to come forward and run for mayor. We once tried but to no avail, writes Giles Kenningham
Mandelson scandal proves it’s time to rewrite lobbying rules February 10, 2026 Peter Mandelson, the Prince of Darkness, operated in the shadows. Only improved transparency around lobbying can prevent the next scandal, says Alastair McCarpra Pete Brown’s book Clubland, on the history of Britain’s working men’s clubs, includes an account of early lobbying in Westminster. Faced with the potentially damaging 1902 Licensing Act, the Club & Institute Union [...]
Britain’s failed net zero experiment is a wake-up call February 10, 2026 A net zero revolt is underway in the West, driven by the unsustainable economic costs of aggressive net-zero mandates, says Bjorn Lomborg A new pragmatism is infusing the climate debate in the West, driven by voters weary of soaring energy bills and annoyed by increasingly hysterical and patronising climate rhetoric. From Washington to Westminster, Berlin [...]
Are we seeing the death of the corporate box in sports stadiums? February 10, 2026 The future landscape of sports stadiums is undergoing a radical revolution: clubs and architects alike are growing in confidence, wanting their arenas to be 365-day businesses that go far beyond the 90 minutes of enjoyment football offers. Look at the planned chimneys on Birmingham City’s master plan and the three towers on Manchester United’s 100,000-seat [...]
Why your boss might tell you to wear an Oura ring February 10, 2026 Physiology is becoming the next boardroom obsession with employers deploying wearable healthtech to track performance, says Paul Armstrong There’s a growing gap between how businesses model risk and how performance actually degrades. Corporate performance is still described through revenue growth, operating margin, capital efficiency and market share, yet the real constraint on execution increasingly sits [...]
Ask the expert: I’m in my 40s. Should I start derisking my pension? February 10, 2026 Fidelity personal finance specialist Marianna Hunt is back to help a reader who wants to retire early but is unsure on how to protect the value of their investments as they prepare to stop working. Q: I’m in my late 40s and calculate that I’ve got enough saved into pensions to retire at age 57. [...]
Tesco snaps up shuttered Amazon Fresh sites in convenience store push February 9, 2026 Tesco plans to open over 70 Express stores across the country by March next year, including at least five new sites in London. In a statement released today, the supermarket chain confirmed it had acquired five former Amazon Fresh stores across the capital. These sites – in Kensington High Street, Hounslow, Moorgate, Aldgate East, and [...]