Retail

A slip of the tongue George W. Bush condemned a political system where one man could wage a ‘brutal and unjustified invasion of Iraq’ before correcting himself and saying ‘Ukraine’. Some other Freudian slips by US politicians: – In the 2012 US election Senator John McCain, who had been the Republican candidate four years earlier, made a speech in which he attempted to look forward to a Mitt Romney presidency, but somehow managed instead to say: ‘I am confident that with the leadership and the backing of the American people, President Obama will turn this country around.’ – At another event in the same election, Romney himself introduced his running mate, Paul Ryan, as ‘the next President of the United States’.

Would Andy Haldane, the economist who left the Bank of England to run the Royal Society of Arts, have made a better governor than Andrew Bailey? You might be thinking that Daffy Duck would have made a better fist than Bailey of combatting the cost of living crisis. But seriously, Haldane was an outsider (backed by this column) in the race won by Mark Carney in 2012, and Dominic Cummings reportedly wanted him to follow Carney in 2020. He’s a brilliant real-world observer and it’s poignant to know that, though he warned Monetary Policy Committee colleagues early last year to brace for inflation, it has ‘surpassed my worst expectations’.

Last month, my bicycle got a flat tyre. ‘Both of those tyres are gonna need replacing and you’ve knackered your sprockets,’ huffed the bike man. The bill came to £230. It’s the kind of irritating expense that means I run out of beer money a week before payday. I’ve always assumed I’m a reasonably normal spender. Work pays me, the money gradually disappears over the month, with hopefully a bit left over for my Isa. I’m vaguely aware that something exists called a ‘credit card’, but my parents always made clear to me that if you don’t have the money for something, don’t buy it. Where I differ from older spenders is that like many under-thirties I use a Monzo card.

This is getting serious. Never mind global shortages of microchips, plastics, copper and container ships; now we’re running out of pigs in blankets. The British Meat Processing Association says its members are so understaffed that annual production of 40 million packs of this popular pork item for the Christmas market is under threat. The British public have so far stoically accepted occasional empty supermarket shelves as a pandemic knock-on, to be blamed in part on necessary pinging of key workers and delivery drivers and in part on neighbours’ stockpiling, rather than on systemic government cock-up. But if the succulent sausage-in-bacon delicacy is nowhere to be found, trouble will surely follow.

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey looks increasingly uncomfortable as inflation notches upwards from ‘nothing to worry about’ towards the Bank’s latest prediction of a decade-high 4 per cent peak later this year and a possible ‘Oops, we’re back to the 1970s’ if spiralling wage and price pressures confound the forecasters. I wrote last week about the UK’s lack of lorry drivers, but that’s just one of many bottlenecks that need unblocking, as Bailey says, to bring ‘a wave of supply back on to the market’ and quell the blip. More significant globally, and much more difficult to resolve, is the logjam of shipping.

The Financial Times carried a curious story at the weekend about ‘the secretive process to elect the Lord Mayor of London’ being ‘thrown into disarray’ by ‘objections from some City leaders’ to the candidacy, for 2022, of Nick Lyons — who has just been elected as one of the City’s two sheriffs but who happens to be an Irish citizen. Lyons’s unnamed opposers say City rules have always required the Lord Mayor to be a British citizen. The City Corporation, the Square Mile’s local authority, says it has legal advice to the effect that Lyons is not disqualified, EU citizens being permitted to stand in UK local elections.

The late Sir Ken Morrison — founder of the eponymous supermarket chain that’s the latest UK target for US private equity — had the blunt manner of the Yorkshire cattle farmer he became in reluctant retirement after he was ousted by his own board. Criticising his successors from the floor at one of his last AGM attendances, he roared: ‘I have 1,000 bullocks… but you’ve got a lot more bullshit than me.’ So I’m sorry he’s not around to accost the suits from the New York firm of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (and their adviser, former Tesco chief Sir Terry Leahy) on the intentions behind the takeover bid that sent Morrisons’ shares soaring on Monday.

Historians of unforeseen crises talk about ‘chaos theory’ and the ‘butterfly effect’, in which a small perturbation far away — the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Australia, as it were — have impacts across much larger connected systems. More usually applied to weather events, the theory had its 2008 moment when the collapse of AIG, a US insurer whose name meant little over here, threatened to cripple so many banks that, without immediate bailouts, our high street ATMs (we were told) might have been switched off there and then.