Business is not the enemy

Politicians shouldn't knock business leaders, says Merryn Somerset Webb. We all need them to be successful.

Being a bit sniffy about business isn't considered as odd asit should be in theUK. At universityI took a course in the portrayal of business in literature, a subject that DJ Taylor picks up in The Times this week. In the classic English novel, the business man is "little more than a caricature, tending at the upper level to straightforward swindlers of the Trollope variety and at the lower to dissenting grocers calling their assistants into prayers while sanding the sugar".

Not much has changed: the business man is usually the fattie with the cigar; books on the matter written by anyone with commercial experience "can be counted on the fingers of one hand"; and too many people and politicians still consider business to be the enemy.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.