Business rebirth is always possible – with the right help

The online fashion retailer Boohoo is buying Debenhams without its stores and staff, confirming the demise of the high street. Airlines face quarantine rules that could kill international travel for many months ahead, while the cross–Channel Eurostar rail service cries out for state rescue. The travel and hospitality sectors, alongside what’s left of bricks-and–mortar retail, watch their survival chances evaporating. Amid unremitting economic mayhem, new milestones are easily taken for gravestones. But here’s an optimistic parable from half a century ago.

The bankruptcy of Rolls-Royce on 4 February 1971, crippled by a contract to supply newly developed RB211 jet engines for the US-built Lockheed TriStar aircraft, was a traumatic episode that bears comparison with today’s headlines. Edward Heath’s Conservative government, facing the collapse of a flagship defence manufacturer, was forced to reverse its previous policy of refusing to rescue ‘lame ducks’. Nationalisation of the aero-engine business gave rise, as his biographer John Campbell recalls, to ‘a good deal of public amusement’ at Heath’s expense and the beginning of the slide into the political chaos of 1974.