Any other business: Enough indiscriminate business bashing: time for ministers to start cheerleading

There’s something peculiarly cynical about a political strategy that involves alienating pockets of your own core support in order to attract larger numbers of floating voters. Thus, we’re told, Conservative enthusiasm for High Speed 2 is partly based on the calculation that threats by foxhunting landowners to desert the Tory interest will provoke an uptick in the suburbs, where young mothers will feel more comfortable voting for a party that is no longer the preserve of red-faced rich men — and the recent outburst against the rail project in these pages by David Cameron’s own stepfather-in-law, Lord Astor, was manna from heaven for Downing Street pollsters.

Thus also, indiscriminate attacks on big business, the only locomotive that can haul us back to prosperity, are freely licenced because they play to the vindictive public mood. Last week’s stripping of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood combined with the dissing of his RBS successor Stephen Hester — who the City believes is making a good fist of a hellish assignment — provoked furious responses from business chiefs.