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Michael J Oakes
Martin began his career as an investment banker in London, Brussels and the Far East. He now makes sense of the business world at The Spectator. Hailed by Boris Johnson as ‘The most oracular and entertaining commentator in town', rather than a technical take on the state of the economy, Martin examines the real-world impact of business and markets with insight, wit, and the occasional financial morality tale.
View / Submit“Refreshing and relaxed. Martin shared some very interesting insights with us”
Hogg Robinson Group Plc
Martin Vander Weyer is the Any Other Business columnist of The Spectator, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the English language. He is also its business editor, having been appointed by the then editor, Boris Johnson. He is a thirty-year contributor to the Daily Telegraph, for which he has written over a thousand obituaries, and to the Literary Review. For The Spectator, Martin leads the Economic Innovator of the Year Awards scheme for UK entrepreneurs.
He is the author of The Good, the Bad and the Greedy: Why We’ve Lost Faith with Capitalism, Any Other Business: Life In and Out of the City, Fortune’s Spear, the biography of 1920s fraudster Gerard Lee Bevan, and Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank. Martin was the principal author of Closing Balances: Business Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph.
Martin was an Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College Oxford. As a former Visiting Research Fellow of York University Management School and Patron of the York Union, he regularly chaired debates at the university. He was also a member of the advisory council of the LSE Business History Unit.
Widely engaged in the performing arts, Martin is a long-serving trustee of Helmsley Arts Centre, of which he was director throughout its development, and remains treasurer and chief fundraiser. His stage writing includes Talent Night, a political comedy; Mozart’s Voice, adapted from Mozart’s letters; Steak Frites, an ‘Anglo-French comedy of manners’, and large-cast adaptions of A Christmas Carol and Around the World in 80 Days.
Before turning to writing, Martin spent fifteen years as an investment banker with Schroders and Barclays, including postings to Brussels, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and Hong Kong and privatisation work in Eastern Europe. He was a director of Barclays de Zoete Wedd, the predecessor of Barclays Capital.
Martin is vice-chair of governors of Ampleforth College, the leading Roman Catholic independent school, and former deputy chair of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. He is a former trustee of Opera North, the UK’s leading opera company outside London. Other former trusteeships include York Arc Light, a pioneering charity for the homeless.
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