Martin Vander Weyer

What advice can I offer Alok Sharma, who took a pasting in the weekend press for his lacklustre performance as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy? While Rishi Sunak knocks up as many runs as he can on a difficult wicket with his job support scheme and VAT deferrals, Sharma is the ‘dead bat’ (in one business chief’s phrase) at the other end — accused of offering no Brexit clarity, not much personal energy and no strategy at all. In defence of this former City accountant, we might say that his rag-bag department, operating under many different names since 1979, has rarely been regarded as an engine of British enterprise.

Good riddance to the passenger rail franchise system which has finally been killed off by Covid, though a majority of the travelling public might say it should long ago have been put out of its — and, more pertinently, their — misery. The complex scheme to privatise British Rail launched by the Major government in 1993 defied those who said it couldn’t be done and was designed by the Treasury to maximise proceeds to itself. In doing so, it fractured the industry into a myriad of separate owners, operators and service providers that rarely worked in harmony or created competition for the benefit of users. The consequences of this structural fiasco were as random as they were unsatisfactory.

A small cheer for Liz Truss’s treaty with Japan. It is, says the official press release, ‘the UK’s first major trade deal as an independent trading nation’ — and we must hope, the harbinger of much bigger deals to come. Even on the government’s own analysis, this one claims to deliver just £1.5 billion to the UK economy and an increase in UK workers’ wages of ‘£800 million in the long run’, whatever that means. What it highlights, I’m afraid, is the imbalance between the range of goods and services that the post-industrial UK is actually able to offer foreign partners — and how much more we need from them, chiefly in the form of inward investment.

‘Every country has a political problem with its fishermen,’ wrote Peter Walker, the Conservative minister who negotiated the first effective EU-UK fishing deal in 1983. ‘Everyone sympathises with the tough life they lead. They all want to take as much fish as they can.’ And here’s Michel Barnier, still speaking as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator in Dublin last week despite rumours he’s about to be sidelined: ‘Without a long-term, fair and sustainable solution on fisheries, there will simply be no new economic partnership with the UK.’ Those quotes encapsulate the bizarre fact that an industry which contributes just £1.

A takeover battle for BT would bring much-needed excitement to the City — as well as a major political row. The privatised telecoms giant that rarely pleases its customers and regulators has seen its shares fall by four-fifths since late 2015. While many other tech-related stocks have rebounded, BT’s price is still down where it was when the market plunged in February — lockdown having interfered with BT Openreach’s broadband installation programme, slashed new orders from business customers and even knocked out the fixtures that might have been shown on BT Sport’s television channels. On top of all that, there’s a gaping hole in the pension fund.

At a low moment in late March, I suggested that all large companies should consider temporary cuts in executive salaries ‘both as a gesture of immediate solidarity and as a move to avert a longer-term backlash against wealth, privilege and the pillars of capitalism’. Latest research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the High Pay Centre reveals that 36 of the FTSE 100 list of top companies followed my advice, most commonly with a 20 per cent salary cut for the chief executive but no reduction to the long-term incentive schemes that make up half of total boardroom pay. The High Pay Centre, which hates high pay, clearly doesn’t think that’s enough of a sacrifice.

Rishi Sunak is contemplating a 2 per cent tax on goods sold online, possibly combined with a ‘green’ levy on delivery vans and a radical review of business rates, all designed to improve the survival chances of high-street retailers while harvesting more revenue from online sellers who have boomed during lockdown.  About time too — but the question is whether the likes of Amazon are so smart at tax minimisation that they will simply outflank new measures and pass costs to consumers.

The price of gold has been rising since the earliest virus reports from China in December. Adherents regard it as a hedge against inflation, bad government, economic turmoil, weak currencies and negative real returns on financial alternatives, all of which are present threats. For pessimists, this week’s headlines — above-inflation pay rises for 900,000 UK public-sector workers, the EU’s €750 billion debt-fuelled recovery package, the WHO’s report of 260,000 new Covid cases in a single day — all represent arguments for this ultimate safe-haven holding. Too late to jump on the bandwagon?

The government’s £1.57 billion lifeline for the cultural sector was bigger than most practitioners were expecting — and drew a chorus of approval from arts panjandrums lined up to offer quotes on the end of the DCMS press release. A nifty media exercise, then, and a smart deployment of the Hank Paulson ‘big number’: when the US treasury secretary unveiled his $700 billion bailout package in 2008, a staffer admitted the number had been pulled out of the air simply because it sounded huge.