Martin Vander Weyer
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Essential to my theory of impermanence is the realisation that things change for the better as well as for the worse, but that they always change. I hope that’s a comfort to the debt-laden generation now leaving university and contemplating a graduate job market in which there are an average of 48 applicants for every place. The Association of Graduate Recruiters says vacancies are down this year by a quarter, and that employers forecast scant improvement in 2010.
The AGR report also reveals a couple of cruel ironies. The first is that the students who have bothered to acquire the kind of technical skills on which the future of our economy depends, in computer sciences and engineering, are among the least likely to find employment this year. The second is that anyone who finds a job in an investment bank or fund management firm can still expect a starting salary of £36,000 — which is about 40 per cent higher than UK average earnings, and tells us what the City really thinks of the idea that moderating its own pay-scales might help create a future in which the solemn temples don’t dissolve quite so often.
Spectator Rail
I am preparing my bid to take over the East Coast Mainline rail franchise, now that the dismal National Express service has hit the buffers barely 18 months after it took over from the superior GNER. Both companies made the fundamental mistake of offering the government too much money, and both had to surrender the franchise because the finances of their parent groups were under strain. The Great Spectator Railway Company — under the honorary presidency of I.K. Gricer, Christopher Fildes’ much-missed correspondent — will be a model of prudence, and will drive a hard bargain with transport minister Lord Adonis. But our unique selling proposition (as the marketing men say) will be our passionate belief in both the future and the past of this too-often mismanaged mode of transport.
To create a new golden era of British travel, we’ll take a globalised approach. Our executives will be Swiss, our engineers German, our drivers Japanese, our caterers French and our on-board staff impeccably polite Poles. Our technology will include an at-seat ‘Big Brother’ gadget by which passengers can vote to eject from their carriage anyone who is drunk, aggressive or shouting into his mobile. And to ease overcrowding, we’ll reintroduce third-class carriages with hard wooden seats: but these will be reserved exclusively for ministers, MPs and Whitehall officials until they have restored the public finances to sufficient health that major investments can be made in the rail network without having to cane the mainline franchisees year after year to pay for it.
Vintage Moulton
The loquacious venture capitalist Jon Moulton has been back in the news, offering his views on the economic crisis (we need a ‘turbo-charged Maggie Thatcher’ to get us out of it, he told the Independent) and wading into a new row about the demise of MG Rover at Longbridge, which the Serious Fraud Office is investigating. Moulton’s firm, Alchemy Partners, was a potential bidder for the ailing car group in 2000, but was tarred as an ‘asset-stripper’ by union leaders such as Tony Woodley and Jack Dromey of Unite, who with the then trade and industry secretary Stephen Byers favoured the so-called Phoenix Four — the quartet of Midlands businessmen who were allowed to buy MG Rover for a token £10 and take millions out of it in pay and pensions for themselves before its final collapse in 2005, followed by the sale of its remains to China. Moulton may feel he was cynically misrepresented, but he must also be glad not to have lumbered himself with the intractable Longbridge project. And he can take comfort from the success of one of his other ventures: his award-winning vineyard at Shoreham in Kent. I’ve just tackled a bottle of his Recession Red (‘Serve with whatever food you can afford’). Like its creator, it’s what I’d call uncompromisingly robust.
Lush places
In the spirit of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, the ‘Lush Places’ nature columnist of The Beast who was accidentally despatched to cover an African war in Scoop, I can announce that coots have nested atop the concrete pipe that runs just below the surface of the lake in St James’s Park. This is such a charming sight that I now regularly enjoy a lakeside breakfast picnic on my way to Old Queen Street. It’s all thanks to work carried out during the winter, when the previously murky lake was completely drained and scraped — making it rather less of a plashy fen for Boot’s feather- footed questing vole, and rather more of a fragrant habitat for water-birds. I rang the Royal Parks department to congratulate them, but with an ulterior motive: I wanted to know how much the clean-up cost and whether it came in on budget, since it offers a perfect example of the kind of public spending that brings quality-of-life benefits but which in the current climate we can scarce afford. Disappointingly, their spokesman refused to reveal the figure, but I’m guessing several hundred thousand pounds. Even so, there’s an opportunity for positive headlines on this one. ‘Malodorous slime banished,’ Boot might have reported, ‘New freshness pervades Westminster air’ — and we thought that wasn’t due to happen until 21 July, when parliament rises for the summer.
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