The Damascene moment in my personal Brexit journey came not when my pen hovered over the referendum ballot on 23 June 2016, but a month earlier. In Amsterdam for a British commercial property jamboree, I was about to speak on a panel with the pro-Remain pundit Steve Richards and the ultra-federalist Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt. \u2018What you need here is a tub-thumping pro-Leave rant,\u2019 I told the organiser. So that\u2019s what I attempted, including some low jibes at the glowering Belgian, who for comic effect I claimed was my cousin. Then I called for an out-or-in show of hands and lost it (this was an audience reliant on European investors) by roughly 500 to five.<\/p>\n
Afterwards I thought: did I really offer a blueprint for freedom and prosperity or was that just undergraduate knockabout? And that\u2019s when I jumped off the Leave bandwagon. But I\u2019ve been listening carefully to serious Brexiteers\u2019 analysis of the outcome. I\u2019m persuaded by Roger Bootle, author of The Trouble with Europe, that the \u2018net negative\u2019 impact of Brexit so far is largely down to the failure to deregulate our own economy (we\u2019ve gone the other way) and to maximise trade with the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
I also learned from the former Vote Leave chief Matthew Elliott that the sole measure enacted by Labour which would have been impossible within the EU is the imposition of VAT on school fees. Ten years on, Brexit still looks like a triumph of mischievous rhetoric: let\u2019s also agree it was a huge opportunity shamefully mishandled.<\/p>\n
Who\u2019s the Boss?<\/p>\n
Then again, don\u2019t you just love a bit of Brexit knockabout? There could hardly be a better anniversary gesture than a bid by the high-street tycoon Mike Ashley for Hugo Boss, the German fashion designer that once made Nazi uniforms. Ashley\u2019s master company Frasers is offering \u00a31.7 billion for the 74 per cent it doesn\u2019t already own of Boss, which it describes as a \u2018key brand partner\u2019 and has stalked since first taking a stake in 2020. The German response to the bid was icy and Frankfurt\u2019s financial establishment, culturally averse to foreign takeovers, can be expected to close ranks in Boss\u2019s support. Meanwhile, the Boss share price jumped above Frasers\u2019 offer, so the game may well go to extra time. Sadly, I doubt it will be all over in Ashley\u2019s favour in time for the 60th anniversary of England\u2019s 1966 World Cup final defeat of West Germany on 30 July.<\/p>\n
AI stampede<\/p>\n
If you weren\u2019t brave enough to join the herd of private investors who applied for $100 billion worth of SpaceX shares, you might enquire whether you (or any charity whose investments you oversee) will end up owning some anyway, through one of those impenetrable fund-of-funds favoured by wealth managers. Whatever you think of the AI stampede, if your fund doesn\u2019t bag a slice of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI this year, it will sag below the indices \u2013 as did those who managed to miss the three-year surge of the chipmaker Nvidia. But let\u2019s pause to salute the bold but oddly named Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, which took a \u00a3150 million stake in SpaceX back in 2018 that has now multiplied in value 25 times over.<\/p>\n
Finger-wagging<\/p>\n
Emma Reynolds has said remarkably little about the future of all-but-bankrupt Thames Water and its year-long negotiation with creditors since she became Environment Secretary last September. There were hopes that a pragmatic rescue deal might be approved in March, ahead of a critical cashflow juncture for Thames. But no: only now, two days ahead of the Makerfield by-election, has the minister grabbed a passing headline with a finger-wagging letter to the regulator Ofwat setting out \u2018my early concerns that the creditor\u2019s proposals don\u2019t do enough to protect consumers and the environment\u2019. The letter does not directly threaten a temporary \u2018special administration regime\u2019 or permanent renationalisation, though the media read it that way and it was clearly designed to play to Andy Burnham\u2019s theme that a return to public ownership of water is \u2018absolutely an option\u2019.<\/p>\n
Except of course that if a Burnham (or any other) cabinet can\u2019t fund an adequate defence investment plan and dare not make significant welfare cuts, it certainly can\u2019t afford the expenditure needed to repair the nation\u2019s pipes and sewerage. So stand by for more months of ministerial inaction after this Thursday. But at least Emma Reynolds has done the equivalent of posting her CV to the likely next prime minister with a view to hanging on to her job.<\/p>\n
Ungonged<\/p>\n
When Britain punched well above its weight in the world, our love of gongs and parades was the dignified icing on the national cake. Now, I fear, these fripperies just make us look more diminished. Foreigners might be forgiven for thinking our entire military strength consists of Red Arrow aircraft, mounted bands and guardsmen in fur hats. They must also be baffled by an archaic honours system that rewards diversity and wokery with membership of the \u2018most excellent order\u2019 of the lost British Empire.<\/p>\n
And they probably share this column\u2019s constant puzzlement at the paucity of recognition for business role models who represent the best of what\u2019s left of our declining economy. It certainly helps to be female: from the King\u2019s Birthday list, I doff my own hat to Citigroup\u2019s Scottish-born chief executive Jane Fraser (Dame), cosmetics entrepreneur Charlotte Tilbury and nuclear power promoter Julia Pyke, both CBE.<\/p>\n
But I commiserate with the male chiefs of Barclays and the London Stock Exchange, respectively C.S. Venkatakrishnan and David Schwimmer, who were named by the Financial Times last month as having received \u2018early-stage approval\u2019 but remain ungonged. In a supposedly deep-secret process, how on earth did that leak out?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Damascene moment in my personal Brexit journey came not when my pen hovered over the referendum ballot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1035056,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,38943,1603,28889,16,15],"class_list":["post-1035055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brexit","tag-brexit","tag-britain","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-great-britain","tag-hugo-boss","tag-spacex","tag-thames-water","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116772412296756103","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1035055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1035056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1035055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1035055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1035055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}