Martin Vander Weyer

I confess I was lunching at L’Escargot in Greek Street as Rachel Reeves delivered her Budget. My excuse was that I thought I already knew what was in it – but in reality the package was even more anti-business than I feared. My punishment was a risotto too glutinous to finish, but the Chancellor’s 76-minute sermon proved just as indigestible when I tuned in later. Like the wild mushrooms in my dish, the more pungent Budget measures had to be picked out of a blander mass – and I was roused from postprandial torpor by a call from a veteran entrepreneur, regularly quoted here under a variety of disguises, in a fury at one such small-print item.

As the interminable Budget wait goes on, so does the trawl through the Chancellor’s bin bags. I refer to the old tabloid method of digging in celebrities’ dustbins for evidence of depravity or scandal; in Rachel Reeves’s case, that would mean piecing together shredded Treasury analyses on all the various tax wheezes floated since July. One curry-smeared paper no doubt addresses the pros and cons of an inheritance raid on ‘aristocrats and landowners’; beneath the Red Bull cans and pizza crusts, might there be another headed ‘Clawbacks on Enterprise Investment Scheme’? Not that there have been substantive rumours, mind you. But that’s rather the point: having had so many draft Budget items shot to pieces, she must be desperate to shield some last surprises.

Scheduling the Budget almost four months after their election victory would have counted as a monumental misjudgment for the Labour government were it not for all the other cock-ups that turned their first 100 days into a sitcom. Still, the extended period of speculation about which taxes Rachel Reeves is really planning to raise has done no good at all to her carefully groomed reputation as a ‘serious economist’ (to quote Mark Carney) who is somehow uniquely pro-business and pro-worker. On the contrary, there have even been suggestions that she could be about to unleash chaos on the financial markets akin to the Truss-Kwarteng fiasco of two years ago. But in essence it’s pretty obvious.

How excited are you to hear the Prime Minister talking tech with Eric Schmidt, an American billionaire who used to run Google? Me neither. But their on-stage conversation is billed as the highlight of the government’s International Investment Summit in London next week, designed to show the world the UK is ‘open for business’. What with Downing Street looking like Game of Thrones after the Red Wedding massacre, and both Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill and Rachel Reeves’s tax-grab Budget looming, the timing of this summit could hardly be worse.

So farewell, Ratcliffe-on-Soar: the UK’s last coal-fired power station shut down on Monday, having burned five million tonnes of coal per year since it opened in 1968. Back then, 80 per cent of national power came from coal, our primary energy source since the 1880s; at the turn of this century there were still 25 coal plants in operation across the country. Now there are none – and 36 per cent of our power in the past year came from wind, solar and hydro with 7 per cent from biomass, compared with 24 per cent from natural gas and just 1 per cent from Ratcliffe’s coal. That’s a remarkable transition – but far from proof that we’ll have sufficient clean energy to keep the mid-century lights on.

The burden of higher taxation must fall on those with ‘the broadest shoulders’, says the Prime Minister, and City folks assume that means yet more raids on banks. Soft targets because no one loves them, they have also profited from higher interest rates. But they’re already subject to a surcharge on corporation tax and an extra levy on the size of their balance sheets – one effect of which has been to shrink their appetite for the corporate lending which is essential for Labour’s growth ambitions. Loans to small- and medium-sized enterprises fell for five successive quarters to the end of last year and the level was still lower in Q1 2024 than in Q3 2022.

How passively we respond to revelations of Labour’s real direction of travel. As millions of pensioners brace for the confiscation of winter fuel payments and other Budget tax raids, shouldn’t they be pinning on their medals, raising their banners and marching down Whitehall – alongside columns of private school parents, furious at the imposition of VAT on fees? Yet so far barely a whimper of protest, as though those affected are racked with guilt at having kept the Tories in power for so long. In response to the school-fee fait accompli, Eton with its mile-long waiting list will hit parents with a full 20 per cent VAT hike from January, taking the annual cost per pupil to £63,000.

Twice I met the tech tycoon Mike Lynch, once a decade or so ago and again this year, shortly after he returned from his fraud trial acquittal in California. On the first occasion, I followed him as a speaker at a corporate conference in, of all places, the National Football Centre in Burton-on-Trent. He was the star of the show and we exchanged barely a nod. In those days – after he sold his software company Autonomy to Hewlett Packard of the US for $11 billion, but before his career was overtaken by HP’s allegations that Autonomy’s accounts were fraudulent – he had a reputation for arrogance in business which did not help him rally support against the extradition process that eventually took him to a San Francisco courtroom.

If the new government’s ‘pensions review’ takes forward last year’s ‘Mansion House reforms’ – credited to chancellor Jeremy Hunt but largely the work of the then Lord Mayor of London, Nick Lyons, and designed to push the UK’s largest private-sector pension providers to commit funds to unlisted equities and vital infrastructure – all to the good. If it succeeds in ‘unleashing the full investment might’ of the £360 billion Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), as the new Chancellor Rachel Reeves says she intends, even better. We’d have a public investment fund to rival those of the Netherlands and Singapore, though still way behind the likes of Norway and South Korea.

Market reactions to the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania represent, according to taste, rational bets on the significantly increased likelihood of a second Trump presidency or stark confirmation of the madness that has overtaken America and threatens the civilised world. Shares in Trump Media & Technology – the parent of his social media platform Truth Social – rose by 30 per cent on Monday, adding more than $1 billion to Trump’s notional fortune despite the company’s revenues being, as one observer pointed out, ‘comparable to that of two Starbucks stores’. Also up were shares in gunmakers such as Smith & Wesson and in private prison operators – and US Treasury bond yields, reflecting fears that Trump will let government debt rip.

‘We are the masters now,’ I chirrup to my Holborn and St Pancras neighbours – misquoting Labour attorney-general Hartley Shawcross from 1946. I don’t mean I’ve decided to throw in my vote with the predicted Labour landslide: frankly, I’d rather give it to the candidate calling himself Nick the Incredible Flying Brick. What I mean is that as constituents of the incoming prime minister, we’re the heirs to Blair’s Trimdon Labour Club crowd in 1997. The world’s media will be all over us: we’ll be the first archetypes of the age of Starmer. But how will we feel in five years’ time?