Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator and was City editor of The Week. A former investment banker, he is also a regular contributor to The Daily and The Sunday Telegraph, and other national newspapers and magazines.

Is it wrong to do business in Zimbabwe?
Shell and Barclays were the two highest-profile British companies in South Africa during the apartheid era.

Date of publication 09/07/2008 14:47

These days, Vesco the fugitive fraudster would have had a top job on Wall Street
So farewell, Robert Vesco, the fraudster, drug trafficker and fugitive from US justice whose death last year has been 'confirmed by Cuban burial records', according to the Daily Telegraph.

Date of publication 15/05/2008 09:54

The Chariots of Fire moment that revealed Gordon's 10p tax timebomb
The abolition of the 10p starter rate of income tax in Gordon Brown's last Budget has a special significance in recent Spectator history: coming only a month after our move from Doughty Street in Bloomsbury to Old Queen Street in Westminster, it was the event which made us realise how useful it is to operate within sprinting distance of the Palace of Westminster.

Date of publication 23/04/2008 14:12

I think I've spotted the 'trash and cash' merchants, dining at Mayfair's best tables
A posse of hedge fund managers came round to The Spectator the other day, not to indulge in 'trash and cash' - or the even less attractive 'pump and dump' - but to participate in a breakfast discussion about how they are perceived by the media and the political world, and what they ought to do about it.

Date of publication 26/03/2008 15:56

What scrapes ice, picks locks, tempts shoppers -- and bolsters shaken banks?
'Sexual intercourse began in 1963,' wrote Philip Larkin; consumer debt, with similar connotations of gratification and regret, began in Britain three years later with the launch of Barclaycard, based on the model of the world's first mass-market credit card, BankAmericard in California, which dated back to 1958.

Date of publication 05/03/2008 17:05

In the end, they may have to auction what's left of Northern Rock on eBay
When the nationalisation of Northern Rock was announced at the beginning of the week, commentators queued up behind the shadow chancellor to declare a return to the dark days of the 1970s and to dance on the ashes of Alistair Darling's career.

Date of publication 20/02/2008 14:47

Network Rail's performance is poor enough to test an archbishop's patience
The archbishop and I - not having been formally introduced - confined ourselves to an exchange of despairing glances.

Date of publication 24/01/2008 16:04

Is that an iceberg ahead?
Make mine a jereboam and put it on my credit card.

Date of publication 28/11/2007 17:18

Let’s not go to Angola: a glimpse of the costs and benefits of prison reform
Is prison reform an economic issue, as well as a moral and social one?

Date of publication 14/11/2007 14:51

The tale of Grand Central's ghost train
Rail delays are a daily fact of life, but Grand Central's ghost train has set new records. Due to depart from Sunderland last December, it has yet to pass York en route to King's Cross.

Date of publication 01/11/2007 11:21

Piggy in the middle between the grain speculators and the supermarkets
The concentrated aroma of — how shall I put it — deep piggy doo-doo that wafts through your car window as you motor up the A1 through North Yorkshire is, in normal times, nothing more nor less than the smell of money.

Date of publication 18/10/2007 13:39

As the party games turn nasty, Sharapova shows bankers the elegant way to lose
When I bumped into Barclays chief executive John Varley at Wimbledon one mid-week afternoon in July, I thought he looked remarkably relaxed for a man locked in a potentially career-breaking takeover battle with his deadliest rival.

Date of publication 04/10/2007 15:40

How the spirit of the Rock triumphed over the prudence of the Northern
Hindsight suggests that the Rock was always likely to get the Northern into trouble one day.

Date of publication 19/09/2007 16:21

Shoppers stay home as rates and floods rise — but there’s a bit of better news for M&S
Shoppers have spent these past few weeks sheltering from incessant rain, rising interest rates and renewed threats of terrorism.

Date of publication 11/07/2007 00:00

Fast bucks all round as Saga and the AA form the Victor Meldrew conglomerate
The £6 billion merger of Saga and the AA is a gift for cartoonists: a company whose ideal customer is Victor Meldrew with a broken fan-belt on the hard shoulder of the A22.

Date of publication 03/07/2007 00:00

Can Patak’s fiery flavour survive in ABF’s big corporate cooking pot?
I have long been a fan of Patak’s, the Lancashire-based Indian sauce-and-pickle empire that was acquired last week by Associated British Foods for an undisclosed price thought to be somewhere north of £100 million.

Date of publication 08/06/2007 15:39

Hot tips in the World Bank stakes: Blair, Bono, Clarkson ...but not me
Shortly after the death of John Paul II in 2005, the wise and amiable Father Dominic Milroy, former prior of the Benedictine college in Rome, leant across a dinner table and said, ‘Martin, you’d make a good candidate for Pope.’ ‘But father,’ I protested, ‘I’m not even a Catholic.’ ‘Oh don’t worry,’ he responded, ‘We can soon see about that.’

Date of publication 23/05/2007 00:00

The party’s almost over — but not in the land of the weeping camel
The Dow Jones Industrial Average of leading US stocks passed 13200 for the first time last week, after its strongest run (23 rises in 26 sessions) since 1955.

Date of publication 09/05/2007 00:00

The row about private equity is mostly the Labour party arguing with itself
The real credit crisis: the nation refuses to give any to Gordon Brown

Date of publication 22/03/2007 00:00

The row about private equity is mostly the Labour party arguing with itself
The current row about private equity seems to me to have much more to do with the flexing of union muscles in anticipation of a return to influence under Gordon Brown than it has to do with efficiency and fairness in the use of capital.

Date of publication 28/02/2007 00:00

The benefits of privatising BA seem to have worn off — so why not do it again?
It is exactly 20 years next week since British Airways was privatised. Arguably, it was the most successful of all the Thatcher-era privatisations.

Date of publication 31/01/2007 00:00

Who’s new in 2007 — and how are things in Sakhalin, Comrade Lobachov?
An entry in the new edition of Who’s Who isn’t quite like a knighthood — you can’t buy one, for a start — but it is nevertheless a distinction.

Date of publication 18/01/2007 00:00

Snouts still in the trough — and now bosses want 20 per cent of every profit
I like to think I helped start the national debate about fairness and executive pay with an article here in May 1993 headlined ‘Snouts in the Trough’, illustrated by Garland with pin-striped porkers helping themselves to huge portions of gravy.

Date of publication 03/01/2007 00:00

Boston’s in a hole and still digging. Will London’s Olympics go the same way?
On the way into Boston from Logan Airport, you pass a cavernous, closed-off tunnel entrance, full of construction vehicles, looking at night like an avant garde set for Siegfried.

Date of publication 23/11/2006 00:00

What makes a great businessman: a silver tongue or a killer instinct?
‘Who’s the most impressive business leader you’ve ever met?’ I asked a group of senior executives the other night.

Date of publication 09/11/2006 00:00

Reflections on the book trade from the man who wants his shops back
The week in which HMV completed its £63 million takeover of Ottakar’s — and announced that Ottakar’s bookshops will be rebranded as Waterstone’s, which HMV already owns — seems a good moment to contemplate the future of the book trade in the virtual and digital age.

Date of publication 12/07/2006 00:00

You’re hired — so long as you swear like they do on telly, and you don’t smoke
Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice — even our usually infallible television critic James Delingpole, who told me that he loved it ‘because it’s so awful’.

Date of publication 20/05/2006 00:00

Galbraith versus Friedman: the great debate is not over yet
I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy in New Delhi in March 1963 when Milton Friedman, champion of laissez-faire, came to lunch with J.K. Galbraith, high priest of higher welfare spending and at that time President Kennedy’s ambassador to India.

Date of publication 06/05/2006 00:00

Knock, knock! A toast to the City’s peerless chronicler and jokesmith
Christopher Fildes’s City and Suburban column first appeared in June 1984 and notched up over a thousand appearances; before that, he served as business editor under Nigel Lawson in the late 1960s.

Date of publication 08/04/2006 00:00

Even Lassie gets to Yorkshire quicker than the Royal Mail these days
Watching the charming remake of Lassie, I realised — stifling a sob — how easy it was to suspend my disbelief that a soulful collie could make a solo journey from the Highlands via Glasgow to a village in Yorkshire, arriving home just in time for Christmas.

Date of publication 18/02/2006 00:00

Labour tries its hand at privatisation - and hands John Major’s firm a fast buck
QinetiQ, the business created out of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, is Labour’s first attempt at full-scale privatisation, and it has deservedly run into heavy flak.

Date of publication 19/01/2006 00:00

Any other business
Who will be man enough to stand up for big business against Cameron and Brown?

Date of publication 14/01/2006 00:00