Abstract
Martin Vander Weyer knew he always wanted to be a journalist on The Spectator. But when he graduated from Oxford in 1976, he became a banker, like his father. He spent 20 years with Barclays: “I did not hate it, but I never loved it.” Barclays cannot have loved him either, because he was eventually sacked. By default, he then became a journalist. “Unlike many of the reporters on the Barclays story, I actually know what I'm talking about,” he writes.
He got a job because, as a banker in Hong Kong, he had done a favour for Christopher Fildes, The Spectator's economic commentator. Fildes returned the favour by seeing to Vander Weyer's appointment as business obituarist in The Daily Telegraph. His financial pieces in the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs proved to be both informative and entertaining. Vander Weyer was chosen to succeed Fildes in 2006. Most of this collection is drawn from his Spectator “Any Other Business” columns.
In one of his best-informed pieces he explains why he belonged to a failed generation of City bankers. When he left Oxford in 1976, Vander Weyer was confident that he and his Oxbridge contemporaries would be running the City themselves before they were 50. As it happened, only one of them did (John Varley of Barclays, he says), and he now understands that the reason they fell by the wayside was that they lacked the drive of more motivated thrusters whom he describes as the share-price-driven, media-conscious, technology-literate, bare-ass bankers of the 1980s. “We were the rear guard of the City's gentleman amateur past,” he admits.
So what did happen at Barclays? The problem, he says, was investment banking, and especially, the American head of Barclays Capital, a greedy, mercenary prince of darkness (my description, incidentally, not Vander Weyer's), under whom profits blossomed, and markets such as Libor and foreign exchange were fixed. A former investment banker himself, Vander Weyer left the business believing that the bonus culture is not just bad for the moral fibre of the bankers, but also for clients and the global economy. His payoff did not include his illusions, which he left behind.
His commentary can be sharp too. For example, when his invitation to the World Economic Forum “got lost in the post”, he stayed at home and celebrated Burns Night instead. He wondered what the poet would have thought of the £4bn lawsuit just brought by shareholders against the ruined Royal Bank of Scotland and its former directors: “I pondered what he would have thought of the demise of Scotland's reputation for prudence – or perhaps he knew it was never really so.” Vander Weyer is a good example of how the customary methods of becoming a journalist have altered. Fifty years ago, most had been trained on local papers; 25 years ago, a university degree became the open sesame. Now the trade is opening to people who have already had one career and whose journalism draws on it. Sports writers are a particularly good example. I am not thinking of the ghosted columns that plaster the sports pages of The Daily Telegraph, but the work of former players such as Mike Atherton, Mike Selvey, Vic Marks, Derek Pringle, Angus Fraser and Simon Hughes. Graeme Souness on football is another splendid recruit.
Vander Weyer's payoff from Barclays was good enough for him to purchase a grand house in Helmsley, north Yorkshire, where he now expends the energy he once applied to making money on the Helmsley Arts Centre, of which he was a founder. His experience of amateur acting and playwriting provides him with a fruitful secondary subject. This is the book of a man who feels pleased with himself and who has plenty to be pleased about.