Martin Vander Weyer

Hinkley Point — for all its flaws and the whiffs of suspicion around its Chinese investors — has finally received Downing Street’s blessing. Meanwhile, ministers hold the party line that High Speed 2 will go ahead according to plan, backed by news that the project has already bought £2 billion worth of land; and investors hunt for shares in the construction sector that might benefit from the multi-billion-pound infrastructure spree widely expected in Chancellor Philip Hammond’s autumn statement. But still no decision on a new airport runway for London — the one piece of digger work, short of tunnelling under the Atlantic, that would signal Britain’s raging post-Brexit appetite for global business.

In the post-Brexit landscape whose shape was barely glimpsed in G20 discussions at Hangzhou, one thing is clear: soon we’ll have to stop waffling about trade deals and start pushing British products the world wants to buy. One such is education, at our universities, independent schools and English-language colleges — an export sector calculated in 2011 by the now defunct Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to be worth £17.5 billion. Not only does this sector attract foreign exchange, plug funding gaps for cash-strapped universities and support thousands of jobs, it also lays the ground for future relationships with students who return home to embark on business careers.

Should we care two hoots whether negotiation of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP, pronounced ‘Tee-tip’ by cognoscenti) has ‘de facto failed’? That’s what German economy minister Sigmar Gabriel said this weekend, pointing out that since talks between Brussels and Washington began three years ago, no agreement had been reached under any of the 27 headings tabled. European Commission spokesmen rushed to claim the deal was still alive, but no one would bet on it reaching a conclusion in this decade — nor on that conclusion, whatever its shape, being greeted with joy by Europe’s citizens. ‘So what?’ I hear you ask.

The revelation by actuarial consultants Lane Clark & Peacock that 56 of the supposedly blue chip companies in the FTSE 100 index are running deficits totalling £46 billion in their defined benefit pension schemes puts the BHS story into a new perspective. It tells us that the £571 million ‘black hole’ in the chain’s pension fund was by no means out of the ordinary — it is a small fraction of the deficits declared by the likes of BT, Tesco, BAE Systems and BP, even if it might have been mitigated by wiser decisions on the part of the scheme’s trustees and greater generosity on the part of former BHS owner Sir Philip Green.

There are reasons why Theresa May might harbour doubts about the Hinkley Point nuclear project — chiefly its unproven French technology and the high probability of time and cost overruns — but the fear expressed by her aide Nick Timothy that ‘the Chinese could use their role to build weaknesses into computer systems which will allow them to shut down Britain’s energy production at will’ sounds — even to a Sino-cynic like me — far-fetched. As I wrote here during President Xi Jinping’s visit last year, ‘The least sinister thing about the Chinese is their money. A ten-digit cheque… even from China National Nuclear Corporation… does not carry a ‘backdoor’ listening device.

Apart from Boris, where have all the posh boys (and girls) gone in Theresa May’s government? The answer, curiously, is the new department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Secretary of state Greg Clark is impeccably classless, being the product of a Roman Catholic secondary school in Middlesbrough where his father and grandfather were milkmen. But his ministerial team consists of three Old Etonians — Nick Hurd, Jo Johnson and Jesse Norman — plus Margot James (Millfield) and convent girl Baroness Neville-Rolfe. Reassuringly, however, all five have business experience — and more so than Clark himself, who has quietly climbed the greasy pole as an all-purpose policy wonk.

It’s easy to see why Arm Holdings, the UK’s only global-scale internet technology company, looked worth a quick £24 billion bet by Softbank of Japan. At $1.32 to the pound, the price is a lot cheaper than it could have been before polls closed on 23 June, when sterling stood at $1.50; that made it easy for Softbank to offer a fat premium over last Friday’s closing Arm share price — and harder for Arm’s board to say no. As for Arm’s business, it’s unlikely to be knocked by Brexit since its microchips are priced in dollars and sold chiefly to smartphone makers in Asia and the US. And its prospects — in the development of the ‘internet of things’, from driverless cars to WiFi-powered kitchens — are huge.

I spent Sunday at the Sage Gateshead watching an epic performance of Götterdämmerung (I declare an interest, as a trustee of Opera North), so my head was full of it as I braced for more political backstabbing and immolation on Monday. That was very much the way it went as Andrea Leadsom fell, Theresa May rode her horse into the ring of flame that is the forthcoming Brexit negotiation, and Jeremy Corbyn, still clutching Labour’s tarnished ring, was dragged underwater by Angela Eagle, unlikeliest of Rhinemaidens. Enough of the Wagner mash-up: what really caught my ear during the brief moment between Mrs May’s campaign launch and coronation was her attack on the business elite.

I enjoyed the Daily Mail’s lambasting of the Financial Times as ‘panic-monger-in-chief’ for its doom-laden post-Brexit tone: ‘Is it determined to provoke a downturn in a bid to justify its lurid predictions?’ And I’m happy to let ‘Britain’s most self-important business newspaper’ take some flak, my own rather downbeat column last week having been so at odds with our ‘optimist’s guide’ on other pages. Panic-mongering used to be the Mail’s own stock-in-trade back in the Gordon Brown era, when it regularly invited me to wax apocalyptic on ‘the death of the middle classes’ in response to stock-market wobbles and stealth taxes.

My column calling Brexit campaigners ‘hooligans’ and ending ‘Reader, I voted Remain’, caused quite a stir — coinciding as it did with The Spectator’s eloquent call for Leave. ‘Pathetic,’ spat a famous columnist encountered in the street. ‘Your words and Farage’s poster resonated so much that I (reluctantly) voted Remain,’ emailed a broadcaster who had previously given me a talking-to on the virtues of freedom. ‘I quite like being a hooligan,’ declared a Leaver on Facebook, alongside a selfie with the Boris-bus emblazoned ‘We send the EU £50 million a day.’ ‘Did someone else write your last paragraph?’ growled a veteran politico a day before the poll.