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“It’s not just those leaving work who want to do less – those in work want to do less too” In 1963, anew fund was launched – the Invest in Leisure Unit Trust. Life, its managers reckoned, was on the edge of getting a whole lot better: working hours were getting shorter and “society more affluent”. The result would be fast-rising spending on leisure goods and activities and “correspondingly higher profits” for companies offering them. Lovely. I have no idea what happened to the fund (on this rare occasion Google has nothing to say), but I suspect it was a bit early. Sixty years on and the lives of leisure its backers envisioned seem to be here. In the last few years, says the Financial Times, “millions of people on…

Wendy Wein, 52, from Michigan was facing at least nine years in jail after admitting to attempting to hire a hitman for $5,000 to murder her ex-husband, using the fake website RentAHitman.com, says The Washington Post. The website was founded in 2005 asan internet security business, but when owner Bob Innes began receiving emails from people looking for hired killers, he started to report potential offenders to local law enforcement. Australian TV host Matt Doran cost his network $1m after he botched an interview with singer Adele (pictured), says News AU. Channel 7’s Doran flew from Sydney to London for the interview. But after he admitted that he hadn’t yet listened to the album (having missed an email with a preview copy), Sony Music denied the network permission to air…

“Many in the Gen Z generation [those born after 1997] are essentially clueless about how to build up wealth over their lifetimes. A disturbingly large proportion of them have wildly unrealistic expectations ... a recent survey... by MagnifyMoney [reported that] 27% of Gen Zers... hoped to retire before the age of 50... [for] a hypothetical [American] 25-year-old...earning the average salary for people that age... [that would be barely possible assuming] stock returns will exceed inflation over the next 25 years by 6% annualised... [but] today’s stockmarket is wildly overvalued, making it unlikely that it will produce [anything like those returns]... [as for] retiring at age 50... the odds of running out of money in retirement increase significantly as the number of years in retirement expand... Not just Gen Zers, but…

Three to buy DX Shares Logistics, freight and courier group DX is a key player in the business-to-business and business-to-consumer delivery markets in the UK. The British parcel market is worth around £7bn per year and is expanding by 10% a year; DX accounts for around 1.5% of deliveries. Competition is fierce but DX has concentrated on small and medium-sized businesses and good customer service. “Curiously”, its shares are trading at a quarter of their 2017 level, so this is a good time to buy in. 30p Learning Technologies Group The Sunday Times E-learning and software company Learning Technologies Group (LTG) has acquired America’s GP Strategies, which has four times as many staff and generates twice the revenue; it has a strong global presence and good connections with the likes…

• Shares in Pets at Home have surged after the retailer said it expected a “bumper Christmas”, says Oscar Williams-Grut in the Evening Standard. The virus has created a “heap of new pet owners” set to spend huge sums pampering their “fur babies”. Pets at Home is also set to reap the rewards of ensuring that it has enough goods in stock, including “dog treats and festive harnesses for cats”. Electricals-retailer AO World, by contrast, is “struggling to get hold of Playstations”. Retailers are in for a “K-shaped Christmas”: those who can get stock are“quids in”; those who can’t “face thin gruel”. • Thanks to a “surge in profits”, Royal Mail’s “long-suffering shareholders” are in line for a “bumper one-off payout” of £200m as well as a £200m share buyback,…

The UK government is in talks with the other five members of the “Five Eyes” security alliance over whether it should launch a “diplomatic boycott” of next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, say Caroline Wheeler and Gabriel Pogrund in The Sunday Times. Last week, President Biden said the US might refuse to send diplomats to the games as a protest against human-rights abuses. Calls for action by other nations have increased amid growing concern over the tennis star Peng Shuai, who disappeared from public view after posting a video alleging sexual assault by a Chinese politician. The case for a boycott is strong, but it will require a lot of co-ordination among Western nations, says Patrick Wintour in The Guardian. Beijing has shown a determination to “retaliate if it feels…

Even for one of the most aggressive of corporate raiders, close on $1bn is a big sum. Last week, Elliott Advisors spent that much on a stake in Ahold Delhaize, Europe’s largest supermarket chain. It comes hard on the heels of the Canadian buyout firm Couche-Tard tabling a takeover offer for the French giant Carrefour, swiftly followed by the tentative takeover talks with its rival, Auchan. In the wake of the buyout of Morrisons, we already knew the British supermarket chains were in play. Now it seems the European chains are as well. Why the supermarkets are in play It remains to be seen whether Elliott has any success with its raid on Ahold Delhaize. One point is clear, however. When an investor such as Elliott builds a major stake…

There aren’t many markets where one can feel optimistic about getting a good long-term return, but government bonds are in auniquely tricky position. UK ten-year government bonds (gilts) are on a yield to maturity – the annualised return if you hold the bond until it’s redeemed – of 1.01%. US ten-year Treasuries yield 1.66%. Other major markets are worse: German bunds will return -0.22% (that minus sign is not a mistake). This is far below inflation. The consumer price index (CPI) is rising at an annual rate of 4.2% in the UK and 6.2% in the US. Evidence is growing this is not transitory (see page 26) and while 4%-6% inflation might be more than we expect over ten years, it’s hard to see it falling back to 1%. So…

Why the UK lags on productivity David Smith The Times The latest productivity figures are “a downer”, says David Smith. Output per hour worked is 4.8% down on ayear earlier while output per worker has fallen 1.1% since 2019. Germany, France and the US enjoy productivity levels some 17% higher than the UK. Why? A new report by the Resolution Foundation and the LSE dismisses the longstanding and seductive “long tail” theory, which holds that the key is to improve the performance of the worst performing, mostly smaller, family-owned businesses. First, the long tail is no worse than in these other countries; second, since the least productive 40% of firms account for only 12% of output, lifting their productivity 10% would only raise overall productivity by 1.2%. In contrast, lifting…

“Tens of thousands of people are dead because vaccines became politicised and people chose political identity over rationality,” says Alex Tabarrok. Yet instead of trying to depoliticise medicine, the American Medical Association (AMA) “has doubled down and is going full woke”. The AMA’s guide to the use of language “is so over the top Ithought at first it was satire”. Doctors are urged not to talk about poor health with those on low incomes, but instead to blame landowners and large corporations for “increasingly centralising political and financial power wielded by a few”. Instead of saying “low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease”, doctors are urged to say: “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighbourhoods, and corporations…

A leader in the shift to virtual health services is Teladoc Health (NYSE: TDOC). Worth around $17.5bn, this global business can bring patients and medical practitioners together anywhere. It is a long-term play as it keeps investing to grow its business. The shares have been volatile. For instance, having soared to unjustified heights, they then slumped by 50% early this year as investors wrongly fretted that vaccines would reduce demand for telehealth. In fact, as we have seen, it is a growth area that’s here to stay, making the shares worth a look at these relatively low levels. Rather less volatile but with a strong and growing presence in telehealth is Cigna (NYSE: CI). It is a US-based health insurer with a market capitalisation of $70bn and covers health plans,…

We have a bullish view on the global sports betting and iGaming (online gambling) industries. We are most excited by the US market, where Goldman Sachs expects revenues to increase 23-fold from $2.3bn in 2020 to $53bn in 2033 – a compound annual growth rate of 27%. The key growth drivers are pent-up demand and an easing regulatory environment, which now allows individual US states to decide whether to legalise sports betting and/ or iGaming. Morgan Stanley expects the number of states offering sports betting to increase from seven in 2018 to 39 in 2024. There is now also greater social acceptance of betting on sports. Technological improvements have led to better product offerings, such as the wider availability of “in-play” betting (placing a bet during a live event), and…

Poland’s prime minister once joked that Rafal Brzoska is “a dangerous guy”, says Bloomberg. The entrepreneur known locally as “the Locker King” is certainly a changemaker. Having revolutionised parcel delivery in Poland with its automated lockers, his company, InPost, is now planning rapid expansion across Europe – with a particular focus on the UK. In the process Brzoska, 44, aims “to steal Amazon’s parcel crown”, says The Times. One gets the impression that the pugnacious Pole is relishing the prospect of a fight. A simple but effective idea Brzoska’s idea is simple. “I took something as simple as a PO box… and automated it,” he says. But the result is both more efficient and greener than door-step parcel delivery. The concept has proved a hit in Poland where InPost’s smart…

When it comes to fraud and fantasy, it’s hard to remember a stretch of time so densely packed. In recent weeks, US stocks hit new all-time highs, with the Dow trading above 36,400 and the Wilshire 5000 over 48,900. A new record for the stocks-to-GDP ratio, too, was hit – at more than 200%. Elon Musk ran a Twitter poll to determine whether or not he should sell $7bn of his own stock, which caused the company’s value to go down by as much as $235bn. It was as if the entire annual GDP of Portugal had been erased. “When it comes to fraud, it’s hard to remember a time so densely packed” Meanwhile, a potential Tesla competitor, Rivian, went public. The company has hardly any sales. And it has…

Citadel founder Ken Griffin (pictured) has bought a 1787 print of the US Constitution for $43.2m after outbidding crowdfunded cryptogroup ConstitutionDAO, says Bloomberg. The print, one of only 13 copies, had a pre-sale estimated value of $20m. ConstitutionDAO’s plan was to buy the historical document on the behalf of donors who would then each “own” a share in the constitution. More than 17,000 online donors contributed a total of around $40m using cryptocurrency ether. Unfortunately, the group made its money-raising efforts public, thus making its maximum bid obvious to other bidders. Worse still, now that it has to return the money, the high transaction costs involved in receiving and refunding the ether could eat up as much as halff of the average donation of $200. Griffin intends to give the…

Turkey is heading for “a vicious cycle of inflation and depreciation”, Timothy Ash of BlueBay Asset Management tells Tommy Stubbington in the Financial Times. With inflation running at 19.89% and the Turkish lira plummeting, there is talk of a new currency crisis. The lira has lost 40% of its value so far this year. As of Tuesday it had recorded 11 successive record lows against the dollar in as many days, say Daren Butler and Nevzat Devranoglu on Reuters. Back to 2018 The latest sell-off came after the central bank cut interest rates to 15%, the third cut since September. Interest-rate cuts reduce the attractiveness of lira-denominated assets, causing investors to sell them in favour of other currencies. At the new interest rate, savings in a Turkish bank account would…

Copper is set for along-term bull market, says Focus Money. Demand is rising much faster than supply; by 2030 the market could reach a deficit of 11 million tonnes, compared with 0.7 million this year. The ascendancy of electric vehicles (EVs) will be a key driver of demand: an EV requires 80kg of the red metal; a car with a traditional engine just 22kg. Motors and cables for wind turbines are also highly copper-intensive. Investors who can stomach considerable volatility can ride the boom with Canada’s First Quantum Minerals. It is working on projects that could produce a total of one million tonnes of copper by 2025. The group has also been paying down debt.…

Last week’s decision by private-equity firm Carlyle to pull out of talks over a potential takeover of Metro Bank, ahead of the 2 December deadline, has wiped nearly 20% off the shares, says the Financial Times. This is a further blow for an institution “once hailed as a challenger to the handful of lenders that dominate Britain’s retail banking market”. Despite the fact that the shares have “plunged 97% from their 2018 peak”, leaving it with a valuation of only £200m, Carlyle evidently felt that it was still “not cheap enough to offer the kind of returns that buyout groups typically seek”. It’s an open question whether Carlyle was ever serious, says Patrick Hosking in The Times. This could have been “merely an attempt to see what other approaches might…

After Boris Johnson “lost his place and woke up in Peppa Pig World” during his shambolic speech to the CBI on Monday, a Downing Street source was quoted as saying that the Cabinet needs to “demand serious changes”, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. That’s missing the point. Johnson won’t change, even if No 10 is reorganised and new advisers appointed. He has “supreme confidence” in his own ability and he doesn’t listen. “His flaws and his spectacular political success are indivisible.” His connection with people, including those in Red Wall constituencies, is the reason he won the last election. The way he “skates over the detail and believes two contradictory things at once” is how he got Brexit done. Once upon a time, the Peppa Pig digression “would have…

US president Joe Biden has decided to renominate Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve, so my long odds tip to bet against him remaining in place has fallen through. Meanwhile, Smarkets is offering two markets on whether the Bank of England will raise interest rates from 0.1% at next month’s meeting (the market on the exact number of votes isn’t liquid enough to recommend). With £10,094 matched, you can get 1.46 (68.4%) on a rate rise and 2.76 (36.2%) on the status quo. With inflation now well above the 2% target, you might assume the Bank would step in to act by raising rates. But although governor Andrew Bailey (pictured) has been hinting that he is thinking seriously about a hike, the Bank’s outlook still remains extremely dovish…

• Ole Gunnar Solskjaer (pictured) lost his job as manager of Manchester United last Sunday, but the New York-listed football club will still be forced to pay the Norwegian a “hefty” £7.5m for ending his contract early, says The Sun. The side had handed Solskjaer a new three-year contract as recently as August. Since then, however, Man U has succumbed to five defeats in seven games. Solskjaer is also expected to be paid a full year’s salary, which, together with his severance package, should put him in the top five of highest-earning Premier League managers. • Paul Dacre has returned to the Daily Mail, which he edited for 26 years, in an “active role” as editor-in-chief of the parent firm’s consumer magazine titles, says the Financial Times. According to the…

Conventional bonds have a fixed principal – also known as the face value or the par value – that the bondholder will receive when the bond matures. When inflation is high and maturity is a long way in the future, the real (inflation-adjusted) value of the principal will be much less when the bondholder gets paid than it is today. Assume that you hold a bond that will pay £100 in ten years time, but cumulative inflation over the next decade turns out to be 50%. Then the £100 you get in ten years is worth just £50 today. Investors can take into account how high they expect inflation to be when deciding what price they are willing to pay for the bond. But inflation forecasts are not very accurate,…

Activist investor Elliott Management “has tightened its grip” on Clinigen Group, says Jon Yeomans in The Times. The fund manager is pushing for the supplier of specialised medical treatments to sell its pharmaceuticals division. The company disclosed its 5% stake in Clinigen in September and revealed this week that it had raised its stake to 7.6%, “leapfrogging other investors to become Clinigen’s biggest shareholder”. Clinigen’s shares dropped over the summer after it released a profit warning. It blamed the pandemic for delays in clinical trials and disrupted oncology treatments. The shares have been “broadly flat” since then, despite a series of mergers in the healthcare sector fuelling speculation that it could become a takeover target.…

“Mum made a huge number of very popular movies from the Sixties onwards and earned a great deal of money, but because she was a minor the fruits of her labour were put in a trust fund until she came of age. The Inland Revenue ransacked it on her 21st birthday and helped itself to a whopping 91 per cent. Amazingly this didn’t make her bitter.” Crispian Mills on his mother, the Oscar-winning actress Hayley Mills (pictured), quoted in The Sunday Times “We have two parliamentary groups. One thinks the MPs’ £82,000 salary is the basic salary, which they can build up outside Westminster, and the other considers £82,000 all the money in the world. It is becoming a major source of friction.” A senior Conservative on the division between…

Homeowners are racing to get rid of their mortgages. With easy-access savings rates running at just 0.6%-0.7%, households are instead using their lockdown savings pile to overpay the mortgage. “An average of £1.81bn of mortgage debt was overpaid each month from January to August”, says Imogen Tew in The Sunday Times. That is up by a quarter on last year and puts 2021 on course to be a record year for overpayment. Santander says a third of its customers have “made a lump sum overpayment on their loan this year”. Overpaying clears the mortgage debt more quickly and reduces the amount of interest you are charged. That can add up to big savings. Take a borrower with a £200,000, 25-year mortgage at a 2.5% interest rate, says Stephen Maunder in…

Self-storage group Lok’nStore’s (Aim: LOK) annual results for the financial year to the end of July revealed a healthy rise in cash flow, facilitating the tenth successive annual increase in the dividend. The self-storage sector was relatively unharmed by the pandemic, says Investors’ Chronicle. Demand grew as people renovated and moved homes, and hospitality businesses stored their offerings as they closed or downsized. Growth prospects remain auspicious owing to a lack of self-storage supply in the UK. Lok’nStore also has a strong pipeline of new sites. The stock has gained 69% in a year.…

Charles Price was born in Monmouth Street in London around 1730. In later life he was apprenticed to a clothes-maker before being dismissed for theft and fleeing to Holland, where he worked for a merchant. He became engaged to his boss’s daughter, which was no barrier to his robbing the merchant too before returning to England. Price then became involved in a variety of scams –persuading the actor Charles Foote to invest £500 in a fictitious brewery, for example, and doing some smuggling – assuming a variety of identities for his frauds, once passing as an old man with an eye-patch (thus acquiring the nickname “Old Patch”). He specialised in forging Bank of England banknotes and lottery tickets. How did his schemes work? Many of his scams involved getting people…

Terence The Man Who Invented Design Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity Constable, £25 Whether working as a furniture manufacturer, retailer, restaurateur, educator or patron, the late Terence Conran certainly had a taste for doing things on a grand scale, says Margarette Driscoll in the  Daily Mail. Conran is best remembered for his role in helping London throw off the “dreary shackles” of the post-war years by founding the home furnishings chain Habitat. He later created a business empire encompassing BHS, Heal’s and Mothercare. When this “ambitious attempt to take over the high street ultimately failed”, he went on to create a string of glamorous restaurants instead. Terence: The Man Who Invented Design, by Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity, is intended to be a “frank” account of the tycoon from the…

The owner of a painting thought to be a replica of a John Constable work could multiply their investment ahundredfold after it was verified as an original, reports The Sunday Times. The oil painting, titled The Glebe Farm, was produced in 1828 as a study for a larger work, and is expected to fetch a price of £3m to £5m at auction at Sotheby’s next month. It was bought for $53,750 (£40,000) in Ohio last year. A mum from Chester has saved up to £2,000 on Christmas gifts and food this year by entering more than 15,000 competitions, says The Mirror. Geri Gregg scoured social media, magazines and books for Christmas prizes, preferably hampers, to save her from buying a single gift. Her most expensive wins include a £200 Tesco’s…

Global dividends are very nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. Underlying payouts jumped by 22% year-on-year to hit $403.5bn in the third quarter, according to the latest Janus Henderson Global Dividend index. The dividend index is now just 2% below where it was before Covid-19 struck. Janus Henderson projects that global payouts will hit a new record of $1.46trn for 2021 as a whole. The rebound has been driven by mining giants, which paid an “extraordinary $54.1bn of dividends” thanks to strong commodity prices. The return of bank dividends should continue to provide a tailwind. “For 2021 as a whole, the market expects dividends per share in the FTSE All Share index to be 35% higher than in 2020 but 15% lower than in 2019,” Richard Marwood of Royal London Asset…

One of the main challenges for integrating renewables such as solar and wind into the electricity grid is the fact that “they produce energy intermittently”, says Hannah Ritchie on Our World in Data. We need a way to store energy for later use, but the cost of batteries has made that too expensive to do at scale. Thankfully, that is changing: in 1991 a one kilowatt-hour (kWh) lithium-ion battery cost $7,523 (measured in 2018 dollars). By 2018 the price had fallen to just $181. That’s a 97% fall. What’s more, prices are still falling: “The cost halved between 2014 and 2018.” To put that in perspective, the battery for a Nissan Leaf electric car bought in 2018 cost about $7,300. Back in 1991 a similar-sized battery alone “would cost $300,000”.…

Dubai’s efforts to revitalise its stockmarket are paying off, says Nicolas Parasie on Bloomberg. Shuaa Capital, which oversees around $14bn in assets, is to float two of its portfolio companies, Stanford Marine and NCM Investment. Stanford Marine operates a fleet of offshore supply vessels for the oil and gas industry, while NCM is a Kuwait-based online trading platform. The two firms have a combined value of about $545m. The government, meanwhile, is planning initial public offerings (IPOs) for ten state-owned companies. The buzz surrounding listings has boosted local stocks. Both trading volumes and prices have spiked in recent months.…

Even though Zoom’s third-quarter revenue and profit eclipsed expectations and it issued an “upbeat sales forecast”, the shares fell by 10%, says Dina Bass on Bloomberg. It reported a “smaller-than-projected number of large customers for a second straight quarter”. This has increased “concerns about growth as more workplaces and schools open back up”. Investors are now “closely monitoring” Zoom to see whether its “ubiquitous” online-meeting platform can withstand “rising competition” from companies like Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google. This is all a far cry from October 2020 when Zoom was worth more than Exxon Mobil, says Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. Today its shares have halved and it is adjusting to a world where Covid-19 “is not the paradigm-shattering force it was last year“. Founder Eric Yuan has “begrudgingly agreed”…

Wall Street bank JPMorgan Chase is reimbursing its Hong Kong staff $5,000 each for visits to see family abroad over the next 12 months, says the South China Morning Post. The city has strict Covid-19 restrictions and, on returning to Hong Kong, fully vaccinated staff will be required to quarantine in a hotel for up to 21 days if coming from “high risk” countries, including the US. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon raised eyebrows earlier this month when he and his staff were granted an exemption from the quarantine rules on visiting Hong Kong to thank his roughly 4,000 employees in the city for their “hard work and dedication” during the pandemic. The 32-hour visit was deemed to be “in the interest of Hong Kong’s economic development”, a government agency said.…

“The bond market is not as safe as it used to be,” says Dan Fuss, the veteran US bond investor. Fuss – who retired from managing the $9bn Loomis Sayles Bond fund earlier this year at the age of 87 – began working in finance in 1958. His career has spanned the volatile 1970s, the long bond bull market that began in the early 1980s and the global financial crisis, yet today’s markets are the most extreme he has seen. “It scares me when I see what we have given up in terms of natural prudence and caution,” Fuss tells the Financial Times. “We’ll have to wait to see how things play out, but the reach for yield has overridden the fear factor.” He reckons the Federal Reserve is unlikely…

■ Janus Henderson’s CEO Dick Weil is retiring next March after 12 years with the asset manager, says Margaryta Kirakosian on CityWire. Weil played a key role in the merger of Janus Capital Group and Henderson Group, which was completed in 2017. Janus Henderson finished 2020 with $401.6bn in assets under management, up from $374bn in 2019. But it recorded redemptions of $24bn last year. Weil’s exit comes as an “abrupt move” following pressure from an activist investor, says Chris Flood in the Financial Times. Nelson Peltz’s hedge fund Trian has increased its holding in Janus Henderson to 15% in the last few months and called for independent new directors to be nominated to the board. Janus Henderson has yet to name a successor. The lack of a prompt replacement…

“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” declared Joe Biden in an interview in April 2020 – no doubt to signal that “market modesty” is out and big government action in. Americans will soon wish he still were, says William McGurn. Most people probably could not explain what M2 or quantitative easing is, but they “know inflation when they see it” because it hits them in their wallets. After only ten months of President Biden, Americans are facing the worst inflation in 31 years. As the University of Chicago economist explained, this amounts to a “hidden tax” as nominal rises in pay push workers into higher tax brackets even as what they have left over can buy fewer goods and services. And once let loose, inflation isdifficult to contain. Biden…

• Telehealth: facilitating virtual health interactions between patients and professionals. Covid-19 triggered a huge boost in patients going online for support, and this will transform how primary healthcare is delivered to patients over the long term. Research suggests that 40% of US healthcare interactions could shift to the internet, freeing up facilities for those who need them most while driving cost efficiencies. • Remote monitoring: we are becoming used to the advent of wearables such as the Apple Watch. These can track the wearers’ blood pressure, for instance, in real time. Expanding what can be monitored and transmitting the data directly to the relevant professionals means patients can be tracked remotely as they go about their lives rather than in a health centre, reducing costs and making available funds for…

How can small businesses compete in a labour market where so many sectors are struggling to recruit staff? Some large employers are tackling the crisis by throwing money at it, but at small firms spare cash is in short supply. Still, small businesses do have certain advantages when it comes to recruitment and retention. Firstly, small can be beautiful: people, especially younger generations, increasingly want meaningful roles. It is much easier for small businesses to ensure all staff feel part of the company, with an important part to play, than for larger ones, where employees often feel like tiny cogs. And secondly, smaller employers have much more opportunity to be flexible and nimble. The key for small firms is to play to these strengths. Can you use your flexibility to…

Budget carrier Jet2’s (AIM: JET2) share price has slipped sharply following the announcement that it expects further losses for the six months to March 2022, the second half of its financial year. Rivals have continued to wage an “airline-fare war”, says Bloomberg. Carriers such as Ryanair and Wizz Air are keeping prices low as they try to grow their market share after the pandemic. Jet2’s average flight prices fell by 25% in the six months to the end of September as it tried to keep up. Rising prices for staff, fuel and carbon offsets are also hurting margins. The shares have slid by 22% in 12 months.…

£38, The Wine Society, 01438-741177, thewinesociety.com Abrie Beeslaar made this magnificent wine from 25-year-old bush vines, and it was fermented in concrete tanks with regular punch-downs to gain as much extraction from the powerful pinotage skins as possible. It was then aged for 21 months in 40% new French oak barriques. There is nothing particularly unusual about this recipe, so why is this the most attractive pinotage I have ever tasted? It is extraordinarily expressive with silky black fruit and a a hugely decadent mid-palate that runs on for minutes and then segues into a stunning, savoury, spicy, earthy finish. There is no pelt, burning rubber or pox of any kind – it is clean, fresh and structured and has more layers than a millefeuille. All too often, South Africa’s…

COLAB Theatre, colabtheatre.co.uk Immersive theatre, where the audience is expected to take part in proceedings, has experienced a surge in popularity ever since theatres re-opened back in May. As the name suggests, Crooks 1926, produced by Charlotte Potter and directed by Bertie Watkins, puts you at the heart of an East End “business enterprise” on the wrong side of the law. Assuming the role of either a striking dockworker or railwayman, you are invited to help assist the McDonald gang as they try to come up with enough money to satisfy demands for a payment of £10,000. The debt must be repaid on pain of death and so you turn your hand to crime – rigging a horse race and defrauding a clueless aristocrat. There is also a series of…

• Spare a thought for the world’s super rich, says Jane Fryer in the Daily Mail. They are facing a shortage of private jets – even the second-hand models once owned by dodgy Russians or singer Taylor Swift (pictured). The erratic return of commercial flights and the extraordinary boom in the wealth of the rich during the pandemic are to blame. But really, who could blame them? Few would blink at snapping up a £45m Gulfstream if the waiting time were not now over a year – or even longer if, like Swift, you want to customise your plane. No masks, no crying babies, no plastic plane-food, no queues for the loo. Instead, you have your own “cosy home from home with feather beds, Italian marble bathroom, gym, priceless artworks,…

$34.9m How much artist Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait Diego y yo (Diego and Me, 1949), portraying her husband Diego Rivera as a “third eye”, fetched at auction with Sotheby’s in New York. It beat the $9.8m record set by Rivera in 2018 for a Latin American work. £2,847 The fine incurred after Stately Timber, an adventure novel by Rupert Hughes, borrowed from Dunfermline Public Libraries’ Central Library on 6 November 1948, was returned 73 years late by the borrower’s daughter. The fee was waived. $31.75m The asking price for an eight-bedroom, Tuscan-style villa with views of Florida’s Biscayne Bay that went on sale last week. The current owner of the home, bought from pop singer Madonna, is a German shepherd named Gunther VI. German countess Karlotta Liebenstein left her fortune to…