January The new year starts as the old one ended with one of

January

The new year starts as the old one ended with one of the most bitterly contested takeover battles of recent times – Granada’s hostile tilt at the Forte hotels and restaurant group. And don’t you dare suggest we are open to criticism, warns Martin Taylor, chief executive of Barclays, BZW’s parent company. For how much longer can the City get away with messy compromises of this sort? By any stretch of the imagination, this one’s a classic. By doing what it did, the Panel avoids an embarrassing court challenge to its authority and BZW escapes without even the slightest reprimand. The Americans were in no mood to abide by the Panel’s decision, should it have gone against them, and the writ was already under preparation. So why extend the bid, allowing the Americans to gain control? “Oh, that’s because they didn’t tell us about it.” Yes, well.The lawyers were just dying to crawl all over this one. Even if we had known about this fee, the Panel says, we still would have allowed BZW to make all those defensive share purchases in the market.

Eddie George will be persuaded to take early retirement and Gavyn Davis, senior economist at Goldman Sachs, is appointed Governor. Don Cruickshank will survive as director-general of Oftel, as will his opposite number at Ofgas, Clare Spottiswoode, but the other regulators, Ian Byatt (Ofwat), Stephen Littlechild (Offer), John Bridgeman (Office of Fair Trading) and John Swift (the rail regulator), will go – all to be replaced by high- profile political animals.I make no apologies for returning to the high drama surrounding the closing stages of CE Electric’s bid for Northern Electric. Scottish Widows is demutualised via a takeover from a leading English clearing bank.And now for the silly but plausible predictions. Sir Leon Brittan will retire from the European Commission to become a highly paid international gopher for Goldman Sachs.

That creates a British vacancy at the Commission and who better to fill it than Kenneth Clarke? He’ll need a job shortly. EMI’s chairman, Sir Colin Southgate is a friend of Pearson’s chairman in waiting, Dennis Stevenson, Sir Colin is known to want to take EMI into other forms of intellectual property – publishing in particular – and both companies are under threat of hostile takeover. The relationship between BT, Rupert Murdoch and Mr Blair becomes progressively stronger causing growing unease in media and political circles.Competition policy will be operated with a light touch, despite stated intentions on this front; those that believe Labour will kill off the deal-making industry will be proved wrong. BT’s deal with Labour – to wire up all public institutions to the superhighway free of charge in return for being released early from the ban on broadcast entertainment – is enacted, causing a flood of litigation from cable operators, which claim they would never have set up their rival networks had they known this was going to happen. On top of that, they can expect much tougher regulation including the introduction of a formalised system for sharing profits between customers and shareholders. Shares in companies that remain independent can be expected to be reduced to the status of bonds.There will be a revival of the corporate state under Mr Blair.

As senior figures in Germany’s most powerful media organ, Spiegel’s Nazis were well- placed to deflect public campaigns against relics of the Third Reich. The network looked after its own, frequently springing to the defence of any member of the fraternity under attack.The boys from Konigsberg turned their magazine into a “letter-box” for the Nazi elite, littering the pages with coded messages. He retired as chief business manager of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, and died in 1985 a thoroughly respected man.His SS chum Georg Wolff, who spent the war in Norway, retired from Spiegel in the 1970s after a glittering career and died last summer.Long after the war, he continued to hold curiously familiar views, as he betrayed in an essay about Africa: “The Negro is intelligent, skilful and eager to learn, but he is lazy,” Wolff said in a scholarly journal.Karl Friedrich Grosse, the Berlin correspondent, and von Oven in Latin America also clung on to their respectability, despite attempts to expose their pasts. Had Hitler invaded, Mahnke was the man marked out to implement Britain’s “purification”.In 1952 he joined Spiegel as international editor, and remained on staff until 1959, when he switched to another magazine. His job was to draw up lists of British Jews, MPs and other “undesirables”. One of them, Horst Mahnke, was charged at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials with the murder of 38 Jewish intellectuals in Russia in 1941.During the war he was in the group that developed Operation Sealion, the proposed invasion of Britain.