Martin Vander Weyer
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By contrast with John Lewis — where sales were 6.2 per cent up over Christmas — Tesco is in trouble, having issued its first profit warning in 20 years and seen £5 billion wiped off its market value. After decades of expansion, the empire suddenly looks bloated and tired. So I remind you of what Ross Clark wrote in May 2008, in an article titled ‘Tesco I hate you — and you need to know why’: ‘When the last few Tesco superstores are sold off to a chain of cheap and cheerful bowling alleys around the year 2030, just remember that you read about the decline of Tesco here first.’
Have Anglo-Saxon habits infected the truffles of Périgord — or is a rogue trader at work? Sunday found me at the annual fête de la truffe in the medieval town of Sarlat, hoping to bring home some voxpops about Standard & Poor’s downgrading of French debt from triple-A to double-A-plus. But the crowd was too absorbed in the serious business of gastronomy: sampling amuse-bouches offered by local chefs, all based on the pungent Tuber melanosporum and ranging from truffled cappuccino of ceps (delicious) to truffled macaroons (yuk).
But what really caught my attention was the behaviour of wholesale truffle prices. In the big freeze of 2009–10, these passed €1,000 a kilo, but after the recent mild autumn they opened in late November at €400, doubling to €800 by mid-December when the volume traded also doubled. After Christmas they dropped to €500, but have perked up to €600 again. That’s what I call volatility. There’s something inherently sinister about these ‘diamants noirs’, and someone’s making a killing in them.
I tried to spot the villain amid the gourmet throng. Maybe it’s not a human being, I fantasised, but a laptop lurking behind one of Sarlat’s shuttered facades — a bit like the super-computer in Robert Harris’s The Fear Index, which I happened to have been reading all weekend. ‘One could no more pass moral judgement on it than one could on a shark,’ writes Harris at a climactic point in his gripping narrative. ‘It was behaving like a hedge fund.’
Nick Clegg grabbed another headline by dismissing Michael Gove’s leaked suggestion of a new Royal Yacht — but both seem to have overlooked my own value-for-money proposal (4 June 2011) that Britannia should be recommissioned as a 90th birthday present for the Duke of Edinburgh. My idea was that she should resume both royal duties and her part-time role as a prestigious venue for overseas missions selling British financial services — and that the entire cost should be met by ‘a whip-round in the City, as a gesture of atonement for distress caused and gratitude for past business generated’. The 58-year-old yacht, now a sad tourist trap in Leith dock, has been leaking and listing lately, so perhaps not even the seadog Duke would be keen to put to sea in her again. But the £60 million price of a modern replacement would be just 1.5 per cent of the £4 billion-plus bonus pot that will be paid out in the City in the next couple of months. As I said last year — only more so, for the Jubilee and the Duke’s 91st — ‘how the nation would cheer’.
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