Five years since its last rescue and only months before the start of work on a Royal Navy contract that was supposed to secure its future, Harland & Wolff, the builder of the Titanic, is on the rocks again.

An ill-focused strategy and galloping costs pushed the insolvent parent company into administration this week, putting 1,200 jobs at four yards and one of the most illustrious names in British shipbuilding on the line.

The clock is now ticking in the race to find a buyer — or buyers — for the 163-year-old Belfast operation and yards in England and Scotland in an effort to keep vital defence contracting in the UK.

Trevor Taylor, director of the defence, industries and society programme at the think-tank Royal United Services Institute, said the choice of H&W for the Royal Navy contract “was always a giant risk given the minimal labour force and limited manufacturing infrastructure that they had in place”.

An “effective rescue” of the four yards, he added, was needed to “maintain any credibility for the National Shipbuilding Strategy”.

Despite the cash flow problems at the parent company, H&W had been expanding the historic Belfast shipyard and its apprentice scheme in readiness for a traditional steel-cutting ceremony early next year to mark the start of work on three Royal Navy ships — the first vessels to roll down its slipway in over two decades.

The £1.6bn Fleet Solid Support (FSS) contract, secured in 2022 by a consortium led by Spain’s Navantia — and involving final construction and assembly at H&W’s Belfast yard — had appeared a lifeline for the ailing shipbuilder.

Belfast, dominated by H&W’s famous yellow cranes, is receiving most of the £77mn of FSS investment and is expanding its main fabrication hall.

A global giant in its early-20th century heyday and once Northern Ireland’s largest employer, the flagship Belfast yard finally looked set to emerge from decades of decline that had been exacerbated by stiff competition from cheaper Asian competitors and other, better-capitalised UK defence contractors.

But analysts say the firm, which was rescued from administration in 2019 by energy infrastructure group InfraStrata, lost its way and ran out of cash.

“The costs built up at a much quicker rate than the revenue came in,” said interim executive chair Russell Downs, an experienced restructuring expert.

Unaudited results, published in July, showed revenues more than tripled to £87mn in 2023 from the year before, while operating losses more than halved to £24.7mn. But interest costs rose 50 per cent to £18.4mn. 

H&W bought three more yards after its rescue by the then CEO John Wood — Appledore in Devon in south-west England plus Scottish facilities at Methil in Fife and Arnish in the Hebrides — and pivoted to a range of energy, renewables and cruise liner refurbishment operations, as well as non-core activities such as a Scilly Isles ferry.

A probe is now under way into allegations of “misallocation” of £25mn and other spending for “little or no corporate benefit”, underlining H&W’s weak financial oversight. No one has been named or wrongdoing established.

Harland & Wolf is one more headache for the UK’s new Labour government as it battles industrial crises ranging from British Steel in Scunthorpe and Tata Steel in Wales to the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland and Thames Water in south-east England.

Its refusal to grant a key £200mn loan guarantee in July, which could have enabled H&W to unlock cheaper funding, left the London-based parent company scrambling for finance. US lender, Riverstone, which had already lent H&W $115mn, granted an emergency $25mn loan in August. Most of this has already been spent, according to people briefed on the situation.

The shipbuilder was by then “insolvent — and not a little bit insolvent, but a lot insolvent”, Downs said. H&W’s failure to clinch the government facility sealed its fate. “It went wrong because [H&W] got turned down and they had no fallback,” he said.

Freddy Khalastchi, business recovery partner at consultancy Menzies, said H&W had been hobbled by cash flow problems since 2019 — possibly in part because of the Covid pandemic — and never turned a profit.

Downs announced this week he was appointing Teneo as administrator and hoped to sell the four yards together within weeks.

Only the Belfast yard, which employs some 600 and has two of the biggest dry docks in Europe, and Appledore are involved in the FSS contract.

“Clearly the purchaser’s main target will be the jewels in the crown [Belfast and Appledore] because of the income the FSS contract generates and also because of the future opportunities this could bring,” said Khalastchi.

Buying H&W might make the most sense for Navantia, analysts say — fuelling union fears that shipbuilding and jobs could be lost to Spain, leading to job losses in Northern Ireland, one of the poorest parts of the UK.

The consortium led by the Spanish state firm clinched the FSS contract two years ago after beating an all-UK bid that included defence contractors BAE Systems and Babcock International​​. All three declined to comment on their interest in buying all of H&W or just the Belfast yard.

Kate Forbes, Scotland’s deputy first minister, has noted the “economic opportunities” for the Methil and Arnish yards and a global defence contractor has expressed interest in acquiring the Scottish business, according to one person briefed on the situation, declining to identify the company.

H&W’s collapse is a blow to attempts by successive governments, most recently in 2022, to forge a national shipbuilding strategy that would deliver a steady pipeline of work to yards across the country. 

But the Labour government has defended its decision on the loan guarantee, blaming its Conservative predecessors for dragging its feet.

“In some ways, we were lucky that the first big decision we were handed was such an obvious basket case,” said one Labour figure. “There were plenty of red flags around it and it was a clear-cut decision not to go ahead with the loan guarantee.”

Francis Tusa, analyst and editor of the Defence Analysis newsletter, said the shipbuilding strategy had several “disjoints” from the start. Aside from a lack of money, it proved difficult to foster competition while at the same time promising a viable domestic warship industry with work for all yards.

Despite the uncertainty, some workers in Belfast said the mood was “nothing like 2019” when the company previously filed for insolvency.

Apprentice Ethan Baxter, 18, who joined H&W in Belfast three weeks ago was also hopeful. “I have heard there will be new buyers. I’m not worried.”

But unions who occupied the Belfast site for nine weeks in 2019 before its £6mn rescue were concerned their hard-fought victory will have been in vain.

“I was involved in 2019 when we literally just refused to give up — and you know, we would do the same again,” said Susan Fitzgerald, Irish secretary of union Unite, which represents most of the workers in Belfast and Appledore.

“We want to hear that our members’ jobs and skills are safe for the next generation. We don’t want someone coming in squandering that opportunity.”

Navigating choppy waters

1861

Harland and Wolff is founded by Edward Harland and Gustav Wolff in Belfast

1912

The company’s most famous ship, Titanic, sinks on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York

1975

H&W nationalised after decades of decline amid rising competition from Asia

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1989

H&W returns to private ownership in a management buyout backed by Norwegian industrialist Fred Olsen

2003

Anvil Point, the last ship built in Belfast, is launched

2018

Norway’s Dolphin Drilling, formerly known as Fred Olsen Energy, puts H&W up for sale

aug 2019

H&W files for insolvency after Dolphin Drilling files for bankruptcy

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Oct 2019

UK energy infrastructure group InfraStrata, led by John Wood, agrees to buy H&W for £6mn.

2023

H&W is part of consortium led by Spain’s Navantia that is awarded £1.6bn Royal Navy contract to build 3 support ships

Jul 2024

Government rejects £200mn loan backing

Aug 2024

US lender Riverstone agrees emergency £25mn loan. As a condition, Wood departs to be replaced by Russell Downs who disposes of non-core assets

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sep 2024

Company is declared insolvent and administrators appointed

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An innovative new funding mechanism championed by former UK prime minister Gordon Brown is to provide $1.5bn in low-cost loans to improve education in poorer countries around the world.

The International Finance Facility for Education (Iffed) is set to launch what it described as the largest one-off investment in decades to improve inadequate schooling in response to global education budget cuts.

The initial $1.5bn has been raised through support from governments including the UK, Sweden and Canada, and from philanthropic and corporate backers, who will offer guarantees to underwrite a programme to disburse new loans and grants through leading multilateral financial institutions.

Iffed has signed a first agreement with the Asian Development Bank, and is set to authorise an initial disbursement in 2024 of over $100mn. It has approved 10 Asian countries as being eligible for financing, including Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.

Discussions are advancing with other backers and intermediaries including the African Development Bank and the World Bank.

Many lower- and middle-income countries have cut their education budgets in recent years, and the World Bank has warned of low levels of basic numeracy and literacy — notably in Africa — compounded by further “learning loss” driven by pandemic-era school closures.

An estimated 250mn school-age children are currently not in class, with 800mn of the world’s 2bn children set to leave education without any secondary qualifications. 

International aid is dominated by health projects, while education represents just a small fraction and countries often struggle to demonstrate short-term returns to donors.

Brown, the UN’s global education envoy, told the Financial Times that the “groundbreaking innovation” in international development finance had been years in the making. He spoke after Iffed received an AAA rating from credit agency Moody’s and was graded AA+ by S&P.

Under the programme, multilateral banks lend money to governments of lower- and middle-income countries at a very low interest rate. This is in exchange for commitments to invest the money alongside existing domestic spending on credible national education programmes. 

“People traditionally think of international development in terms of grants or loans,” Brown said. “I think the transformative innovation here is to think not just of guarantees, but how you can leverage guarantees to create the kinds of resources that will never be created in the near future through loans and grants alone.”

He added: “It is shocking that nearly half of all the children on our planet still have no formal schooling. But that can begin to be consigned to history.”

Brown said the model had the capacity to become the “third arm for the development agenda” and was a “vehicle that should be more widely used” across other areas of public policy, such as health.

Donor backing will help to ensure that the new bonds issued by the multilaterals have a high credit rating. So far Canada, Sweden and the UK have committed $342mn in guarantees and paid-in capital and $100mn in grants.

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The price of fuel for nuclear reactors has surged much faster than that of raw uranium since the start of 2022, in a sign of the bottlenecks that have built up in the west following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Enriched uranium has more than tripled in price to $176 per separative work unit — the standard measure of the effort required to separate isotopes of uranium — since the start of 2022, according to UxC, a data provider.

Demand for uranium has been driven by a revival in atomic power. However, Russia plays a significant role in the multi-stage process of turning mined uranium into the fuel for a nuclear reactor. This includes converting yellowcake — uranium concentrate — into uranium hexafluoride gas, enriching it to increase the concentration of the type of uranium used for fission, and then turning the enriched uranium into pellets that go into reactors.

Uranium hexafluoride has jumped fourfold in price to $68 per kg in the same period, indicating that conversion is the biggest bottleneck in the nuclear fuel supply chain, analysts said. In contrast, uranium ore has only doubled in price.

“The conversion and enrichment prices are reflecting a much bigger supply squeeze due to the Russia-Ukraine war and other factors,” said Jonathan Hinze, chief executive of UxC.

“Uranium alone does not tell the whole story when it comes to price impacts in the nuclear fuel supply chain.”

Russia controls 22 per cent of global uranium conversion capacity and 44 per cent of enrichment capacity. Those services are out of bounds for some western utilities following a US ban on Russian uranium, although waivers are allowed until the end of 2027.

France, US, Canada and China are the other countries besides Russia that are home to large-scale conversion sites.

The US government said this week that it is closely tracking whether imports of uranium from China are providing a back door for Russian material, after bumper exports in May when the ban was introduced.

The UK used to contribute to global conversion capacity via the Springfields site but conversion services halted in 2014, while France’s plant has faced delays in getting to full capacity.

“The conversion market is very, very tight for the simple reason that existing facilities are in care and maintenance,” said Grant Isaac, chief financial officer at Cameco, the world’s second-largest uranium producer, on an earnings call.

“Because of the delays in getting all of the conversion-producing centres up to full production in the western world . . . conversion has a very good tail of strength for the next little while.”

While higher nuclear fuel prices are likely to hit the profitability of power companies, the bigger issue is making sure there is enough investment in mines, conversion and enrichment to meet demand from extensions to existing reactors’ lifetime and new ones.

Nuclear fuel companies such as France’s Orano and British-Dutch-German owned Urenco have committed to boosting enrichment capacity, but so far no one has committed to building new conversion capacity in the west.

Nicolas Maes, chief executive of Orano, said at an industry conference this month that investments needed in conversion and enrichment were “massive” compared with the size of the relevant companies.

He compared Orano’s annual revenues of almost €5bn to the €1.7bn needed to expand its enrichment capacity in southern France by more than 30 per cent.

Johnathan Chavers, director of nuclear fuel and analysis at Southern Nuclear, which operates eight nuclear plants in the US, said at the same conference that utilities and the nuclear fuel suppliers were unwilling to make “big bets” due to a “chicken and egg problem”.

Power plant operators are reluctant to sign long-term supply agreements unless the facilities are being built, giving certainty over expected delivery times for nuclear fuel, yet suppliers balk at making big investments without such deals to underwrite them, he said.

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Artificial intelligence-powered search engine Perplexity is in talks with brands including Nike and Marriott over its new advertising model, as the start-up mounts an ambitious effort to break Google’s stranglehold over the $300bn digital ads industry.

The San Francisco-based group is seeking to redesign the auction-based ads system pioneered by Google, where marketers bid to have a sponsored link placed against search queries.

At present, Perplexity’s AI chatbot gives a comprehensive response to user questions based on information from the internet, citing sources and including links to web pages. Below this, Perplexity offers suggested follow-up queries.

Under its new advertising model, brands will be able to bid for a “sponsored” question, which features an AI-generated answer approved by the advertiser.

Perplexity has held talks with a small number of top companies, including Nike and Marriott, according to correspondence seen by the Financial Times. The company said it hoped to roll out the ads system by the end of the year and was targeting “premium” brands. Nike and Marriott declined to comment.

Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chief executive and a former Google intern, said: “Ads are really useful when they are relevant and coming from brands that are high quality, and a lot of people make purchases based on that.”

Perplexity’s effort is part of a wave of new competition faced by Google as the search business undergoes its most radical shift in more than two decades.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT also provides quick and complete answers to many questions, threatening to render redundant a traditional search engine’s list of links, and the lucrative ads that appear alongside them.

Google, which has spent billions of dollars developing generative AI, has launched an experimental AI search function and also considered offering a subscription AI search service, the FT reported in April.

Analysts suggest Google is held back by the “innovator’s dilemma” as generative AI could damage the basis of its existing search offering. However, there remains scepticism on whether the technology will seriously disrupt Google’s dominance.

Under Perplexity’s ad system, marketers will be charged on a so-called CPM basis — paying above $50 for every 1,000 impressions generated by these sponsored posts, said a person familiar with the model. This compares with an estimated $1,100 for the same number of impressions by Google, according to analysts eMarketer.

Last year, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said its multibillion-dollar alliance with OpenAI would improve its Bing search engine, while helping to demolish the high profit margins that have underpinned Google’s core business.

But despite being one of the first big tech giants to add AI to search, Microsoft has only just started to gain more share in search advertising in the latest quarter, said Joseph Teasdale, head of tech at Enders Analysis.

Meanwhile, Google’s search business has grown 14 per cent in the three months to June, compared with the same period the year before. Search accounted for $48.5bn in revenue, more than half of parent company Alphabet’s total revenues.

“As the incumbent champion, Google has the most to lose from any shake-up,” Teasdale said. “But Google is also in the strongest position: it’s strong in AI, users trust it for search, and it controls key user surfaces like Android and Chrome that it can deploy its version of AI search on.”

The financial success of Perplexity’s new ads system depends on whether it can gain significant scale. The company says 250mn queries were made on its search engine in July, compared with 500mn in the whole of last year.

Perplexity makes money through subscriptions, charging $20 a month for its Pro service, which offers access to more advanced models and image generation. Annualised revenues — a projection of full-year revenues based on extrapolating the most recent month’s sales — have grown from $5mn in January to $35mn in August, according to the company.

Srinivas said he wanted its advertising system to become “a money-printing machine.”

“A good chunk of our traffic comes from the US and other high GDP countries, making it a good experiment . . . we want to IPO and be a successful company of our own, and there is no reason not to be.”

Additional reporting by Eri Sugiura and Kana Inagaki

Brad Raffensperger is all too familiar with attempts to subvert US democracy.

The Secretary of State for Georgia was on the receiving end of the infamous Donald Trump phone call after the 2020 election, when the then-president urged his fellow Republican to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win the state. Raffensperger refused and death threats ensued.

Almost four years on from the unrest that followed the last presidential election, Raffensperger is again in the crosshairs of the Trump faithful, as he battles a Maga-friendly majority on the swing state’s election board who passed last-minute laws that critics claim will pave the way for post-election legal chaos, if not violent unrest.

“There are a lot of bad actors out there,” Raffensperger acknowledged as he visited a polling station in DeKalb County this week for a “security health check”, a live test of one of the big-screen voting machines that will be used across Georgia on the November 5 election. “That’s why we need people that are going to stand their ground no matter what.”

If the loudest election deniers in the Republican party are to be believed, there will be plenty for Raffensperger to resist.

He and others in the state are in a battle to prevent ‘bad actors’ from undermining the vote in Georgia, both through public education about voting systems and by rolling out security measures, including panic buttons, for poll workers and training in using antidotes for poisoning.

Simultaneously, officials at the county level “are trying to lay the groundwork to dispute the election results in Georgia if former president Trump loses,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).

Their goal is to use allegations of fraud as a “pretext” for election deniers who would then refuse to ratify the results from Georgia on January 6 2025, he added, in what “would literally be history repeating itself”.

Trump has foreshadowed such an outcome. “We have to make sure that we stop [Democrats] from cheating,” he said at an Atlanta rally in August. He then praised three of five members of the state election board as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory”.

The trio, who were appointed by Republicans, have pushed through a last-minute rule change that allows local election officials to halt the certification of election results in order to conduct a “reasonable inquiry”, without defining what reasonable might look like.

The board on Friday introduced a rule that all ballots in Georgia must be hand-counted — a move that campaigners warned was unlawful and unworkable, and could delay the election result for weeks. Raffensperger has accused the board of introducing “eleventh-hour chaos”, but he has no power to reverse their decisions.

A report published by Crew last month found that at least eight election officials in Georgia had refused to certify election results since 2020, the most of any swing state since the last cycle. They all remain in their positions.

With fewer than 50 days to go to the election, and Trump and Kamala Harris neck-and-neck in the Georgia polls, Raffensperger has embarked on a tour of more than two dozen counties to reassure the 5mn voters expected in the state that their votes will be safe.

Alongside technicians working for his office, he painstakingly demonstrates how the Dominion Voting Systems devices used in Georgia — themselves the target of conspiracy theories — are protected from hackers and illegal tampering, and how votes are digitally counted and cross referenced.

“There is a process in place and it has worked well in the past,” the 69-year-old former engineer said, in his soothing Southern drawl. He insisted local election officials have no discretion to stop certification. “When you come to the following Monday, the state law says you must, counties shall certify the election . . . that’s right there in black letter law.”

The Harris campaign, among others, is challenging the state election board’s new rules in court, with a trial set to begin next month.

Pro-democracy activists have expressed faith in the legal system to prevent attempts to delay results. Efforts to undermine the vote “will ultimately fail because of the robust protections in place and because journalists, pro-democracy advocates, and voters are watching closely,” said Justin Berger, a Georgia lawyer working for advocacy group Informing Democracy.

Crew said any election official who refuses to certify election results can expect to be sued “immediately” by well-prepared attorneys.

But Berger warned of an ominous “change of tactics” in the run-up to the 2024 vote. “It’s not so much a full-frontal assault as it is guerrilla warfare, because [the election deniers] win if they just create uncertainty . . . all it took was some manufactured uncertainty [in 2020] and we had January 6,” he said of the 2021 attack on Capitol Hill.

Although Georgia has more election deniers in crucial positions than elsewhere, they are making inroads in other swing states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Marc Elias, a lawyer who successfully fought more than 60 lawsuits brought by election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 vote and now works for the Harris campaign, has warned Republicans are “building an election subversion war machine” and are “far more organised” than four years ago.

As well as installing election deniers in key election administration roles, groups who promoted conspiracy theories after the 2020 vote have attempted to disqualify tens of thousands of voters in key states, in so-called mass voter challenges, claiming the rolls are full of dead people, illegal aliens, or Americans who have moved to other states.

Even if such efforts have been largely unsuccessful, there are mounting fears of voter intimidation and the targeting of poll workers.

A recent poll found almost 30 per cent of Republicans with favourable views of Trump want armed citizens to take over as poll watchers.

In Georgia, where two poll workers were hounded out of their homes and jobs after being falsely accused of fraud by then Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani after the last election, Raffensperger’s office has handed out lanyards with panic buttons to individuals working in precincts across the state.

Election supervisors have also been trained to use Narcan, an antidote to opioid poisoning, after fentanyl-laced letters were sent to the Fulton county board of elections office.

In an attempt to shore up confidence in the voting process, Georgia has joined forces with the “Vet the Vote” campaign, which encourages veterans to become poll workers, in the hope they will be trusted by voters across the political divide.

But Raffensperger is under no illusions that such measures will convert those who believe the conspiracy theories touted by members of his own party.

“Some people just can’t believe that their candidate has come up short,” he said. “I’ve been very clear that no matter how you look at it, there was a race back in 2020 and the 227 Republican congressmen all got more votes in all of their districts than president Trump did. And in Georgia, we saw the same thing . . . People just left the top of the ticket blank.”

Despite coming under repeated attack from Trump, who claimed at the Atlanta rally that Raffensperger was doing “everything possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win”, the secretary enjoys a higher approval rating in Georgia than the former president.

“People know no matter what, I’m going to do my job,” Raffensperger said, even as he lamented that his “microphone’s not big enough” to drown out voices seeking to inject doubt about the integrity of Georgia’s elections.

When asked what would happen if a large number of counties refused to certify the vote in November, Raffensperger smiled ruefully. “Then the judges will be busy.”

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I love Steve Coogan. I first saw him the night after he won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh in 1992 where he was appearing as one of his many alter egos, the Mancunian bombshell Pauline Calf. He was scorchingly hilarious, and I’ve been an ardent fan ever since. 

To my mind, Coogan’s most famous creation, the quintessential Little Englander and broadcaster Alan Partridge, remains one of the funniest characters on television, eclipsed only by Coogan’s turn as Himself in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip. I have an infantile weakness for anyone who can do impressions, and enjoy few things in life so much as watching the actor “doing” Roger Moore. Next month sees Coogan in his first major West End role in a restaging of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, another collaboration with Armando Iannucci with whom he has worked for 30 years. He takes time out from rehearsals to talk about the undertaking, which will see him take on four roles (compared to Peter Sellers’ threesome), and a career that has seen him switch between high comedy and more serious parts.

Lately, Coogan has become a style icon – or at least his wardrobe has come to represent a style that typifies the British male. The crumpled linens, tan blazers and Ray-Bans of The Trip were the focus of much discussion about the modern wardrobe, and what might be appropriate for the mature man to wear. For this reason, I’m delighted that he should feature in this autumn’s men’s style issue, which I hope will be a useful and approachable guide. 

Why not make clothes that people actually want to wear?

In our tailor’s directory, for example, we unpick the bewildering range of services in London dedicated to the making of a suit. While many of our readers are keen to try bespoke suiting, many report feeling overwhelmed when trying to work out who and what will fit them best. Are they looking for something traditional and highly structured, or are they in search of something softer, lighter and with more slouch? Aleks Cvetkovic has put together an index that we hope may help. From the lean, lengthening lines of Edward Sexton to the regal cuts of Kent & Haste, we hope this answers everything you wanted to know about suiting but were afraid to ask.

Not in the market for a three-piece? Maybe a black hoodie is more your vibe. Mark C O’Flaherty has found out how the sporty basic has become akin to haute couture. Likewise, at Sunspel, the T-shirt specialists are debuting a bespoke service to help men (and women) find the perfect fit. We’ve sent Louis Wise to test it out. 

In the 13 years since founding his men’s ready-to-wear label Ami Paris, Alexandre Mattiussi has introduced womenswear, accessories, leather goods and jewellery, and turned his business into a global €300mn brand. His recipe for success has been the provision of a core line in utilitarian trousers, shirts and basics at an aspirational price point. His trousers especially come highly recommended by many of my peers. 

“I’m not a niche designer, I’m not an intellectual designer, I’m not a conceptual designer,” he tells Jessica Beresford. “I want to dress the maximum amount of people I can, in a very inclusive way.” Ami’s success reveals a truth within the industry that many brands don’t seem to hear. Why not make clothes that people actually want to wear?

Lastly, our cover story takes you on a journey across Croatia, aboard the Jadrolinija ferry with Leon Dame. It’s always a delight to feature my favourite supermodel on these pages: Dame is one of the only people in the world who could wear a bin bag and still look super-chic. 

@jellison22

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