The Notebook: Andy Silvester on suppressed British success stories, why Global Airlines could raise the game and Bazball
Where the City’s movers and shakers get a few things off their chest. Today, Morning Wire editor Andy Silvester takes the pen
British cynicism can mean we overlook our success stories
Heading east out of the City towards the Strand one passes the ugly, brutalist facade of King’s College London, nobody’s idea of an architectural landmark. Combining dark grey, pebbledash and concrete, the only bright spots are the portraits of former students and staff who have made their mark in the world.
One of them is Rosalind Franklin, the former King’s researcher whose work was central to the discovery of DNA. The discoveries she made led to Nobel Prizes for a host of her colleagues and informed those of successors in her field, who also won Nobels. She is a British success story, largely unknown to most British historians – let alone Brits at large.
We aren’t, as a country, particularly good at celebrating our own success stories. That’s true in British business, too. The company Darktrace is a good example: a UK business built on genuinely world-leading technology that somehow fails to get the credit it deserves. JD Sports is another, a retail powerhouse. Yet ask most people even in the City and the former will be best known for a short-seller report that turned out to be deeply exaggerated and the latter for just about the only misjudgment in former boss Peter Cowgill’s career, when he met a takeover target’s CEO in a car park for an informal chat.
The benefits for those investors who are able to see past the headlines and look at the fundamentals of a business, however, are obvious.
Darktrace’s share price has shot up around 40 per cent since the firm was given a clean bill of health by auditors at EY. And anybody who has stuck around on the JD Sports bandwagon has done very well indeed, with the stock up 70 per cent over the past five years. Long-term investors can still find British success stories if they look hard enough.
A new competitor for airlines is no bad thing
The launch of Global Airlines has attracted plenty of scepticism, but there is good reason to believe that this latest attempt to break the monopoly of the big carriers on transatlantic routes might have some more positive momentum than others. Perhaps the best sign is that rather than undercutting low-margin fares, the airline appears to be pitching for quality worth paying for. British Airways may have a fight on their hands.
A book on index funds has me hooked
With the summer holidays on the way, there’s nothing like getting away from work and reading something totally alien – or so I’m told. I find myself instead ploughing through ever more books on the world of finance, and few have entertained me recently as much as Robin Wigglesworth’s Trillions. Charting the birth of index funds may not sound the most compelling topic for a book, but this is a pacey, readable history of an invention that revolutionised global finance, for better and for worse.
Notes from the city
Last week I met Andrew Carter, the CEO of Chapel Down, the profit-making English winery. We’ll publish my full interview with him tomorrow, but as we sat overlooking the pitch at The Oval ahead of the fifth Test against Australia, we found common ground on the need for Britain to adopt a little of the ‘Bazball’ mentality. Risk is out of fashion in everything from politics to the economy. It is vital we get it back.
A heartening sign as I walked into the office this weekend was a crowd of construction workers busying themselves in the new City arm of The Wolseley, loosely pegged to open next month. Taking up the ground floor of the former House of Fraser at the top of London Bridge, the new iteration of one of the capital’s oldest and most feted restaurants appears to be a welcome vote of confidence in the Square Mile’s magnetism.