Martin Vander Weyer

As the election campaign goes into full swing, we hear surprisingly little about the state of the UK economy — because the Tories can’t (and probably don’t need to) promise that they can make it any better in the medium term than it is now, while almost no one takes seriously what Labour has to say about it. The truth is, against the odds and for the time being, that it’s ticking along nicely enough not to be a top concern for most voters. Are we right to be so complacent? After a slowdown in growth to just 0.3 per cent in January to March, most analysts expect a pick-up in the current quarter, and the IMF now agrees with the Budget forecast of 2 per cent for 2017. The construction, services and manufacturing sectors all reported rising activity in April.

Will executive pay pop up in Theresa May’s manifesto? An objective of her snap election is to secure a larger majority on the basis of a smaller burden of manifesto promises than she inherited from David Cameron. But in her only leadership campaign speech last July, her reference to ‘an irrational, unhealthy and growing gap between what those companies pay their workers and what they pay their bosses’ was one of the phrases that caught the most attention. Back then, she was in favour of imposing annual binding shareholder votes on boardroom remuneration, as well as spotlighting the ratio between chief executives’ and average workers’ pay, and even forcing companies to accept workers’ representatives on boards.

Will executive pay pop up in Theresa May’s manifesto? An objective of her snap election is to secure a larger majority on the basis of a smaller burden of manifesto promises than she inherited from David Cameron. But in her only leadership campaign speech last July, her reference to ‘an irrational, unhealthy and growing gap between what those companies pay their workers and what they pay their bosses’ was one of the phrases that caught the most attention. Back then, she was in favour of imposing annual binding shareholder votes on boardroom remuneration, as well as spotlighting the ratio between chief executives’ and average workers’ pay, and even forcing companies to accept workers’ representatives on boards.

Is capping domestic energy prices an equitable way to help the ‘just about managing’, or an electoral gimmick with a whiff of anti-free-market ideology? When it was Ed Miliband’s idea, it was certainly the latter. Now it’s likely to be included in Theresa May’s manifesto, offering a potential £100 saving for millions of homes on ‘standard variable tariffs’, it is defended by the ever-plausible Sir Michael Fallon as a matter of ‘intervening to make markets work better’. And that, after all, is what the Prime Minister said she would do, wherever necessary, in the interests of fairness.

Is capping domestic energy prices an equitable way to help the ‘just about managing’, or an electoral gimmick with a whiff of anti-free-market ideology? When it was Ed Miliband’s idea, it was certainly the latter. Now it’s likely to be included in Theresa May’s manifesto, offering a potential £100 saving for millions of homes on ‘standard variable tariffs’, it is defended by the ever-plausible Sir Michael Fallon as a matter of ‘intervening to make markets work better’. And that, after all, is what the Prime Minister said she would do, wherever necessary, in the interests of fairness.

The lovely Dordogne village of St Pompon that is my holiday hide-away has only 350 voters, but is a perfect predictor of presidential elections. It voted heavily for Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, marginally for Nicolas Sarkozy against Ségolène Royale in 2007, and 59-41 for François Hollande against Sarkozy in 2012. So I’d love to tell you who’s going to win this time on the strength of the chatter at the Good Friday market. But the only national event the locals seemed interested in was a mountain bike championship just up the road.

The lovely Dordogne village of St Pompon that is my holiday hide-away has only 350 voters, but is a perfect predictor of presidential elections. It voted heavily for Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, marginally for Nicolas Sarkozy against Ségolène Royale in 2007, and 59-41 for François Hollande against Sarkozy in 2012. So I’d love to tell you who’s going to win this time on the strength of the chatter at the Good Friday market. But the only national event the locals seemed interested in was a mountain bike championship just up the road.

What troubled places banks have become, I thought as I listened to two news stories, one concerning a formal reprimand for Barclays chief executive Jes Staley after he tried to uncover the identity of a ‘whistleblower’, the other trailing new revelations about the Libor scandal. But both, I’m afraid, were so badly explained that the majority of listeners must have been none the wiser. The Staley episode is mysterious. Anonymous letters to Barclays directors made allegations about a recently recruited senior executive: Staley felt this was an ‘unfair personal attack’, believed ‘honestly but mistakenly’ that it was permissible for him to identify the author, and tried to do so with the help of a ‘US law enforcement agency’.

Since Article 50 was triggered last week, City traders have been avidly watching the fluctuations of the pound. Analysts at Barclays, Nomura and Citigroup think sterling is undervalued against the euro and the dollar, and due for a rebound, having dived in the market tizzy that followed last June’s referendum and kept its head down through the phoney war of the past nine months. As ambiguity over Brexit terms begins to recede, says the City, it’s time for the pound to perk up. Well, maybe — as I’m often moved to observe in relation to bald economic statements. Let’s take a closer look.

Two of the top tips in Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, of which I wrote last week even though he allegedly didn’t write it himself, are ‘Think Big’ and ‘Maximise the Options’, also expressed as ‘I keep a lot of balls in the air’. How should Theresa May apply that advice in response to Spain’s opportunistic bid to raise the issue of sovereignty over Gibraltar as a potential Brexit hurdle? She could, of course, offer a repeat of the 2002 referendum in which Gibraltarians voted 99 per cent ‘No’ when asked whether Britain and Spain should share the Rock’s sovereignty. But the ‘balls in the air’ gambit I have in mind for her is bolder than that.

As I’ve said before, the bellwether of post-Brexit prosperity will be the health of the UK car industry, rather than that of the far larger financial sector. The City is nimble enough to look after itself come what may; it requires little more than plug sockets and clever lawyers to outmanoeuvre barriers to its trade. Car-makers, by contrast, require massive investment in research, robotics and logistics to keep them at the cutting edge of a globalised manufacturing system operating on the tightest of margins. So every indicator is worth tracking. Peugeot-Vauxhall was a mixed signal, and a cloud hangs over the Ford engine plant at Bridgend.