Even Elon Musk thinks Brexit Britain is a risky prospect

Having been awarded the title of business editor of this paper by Boris Johnson in his former incarnation, I know more than most people about the extent of his interest in how businesses succeed or fail, what motivates those who run them and what they want from government. The answer is that his attention span for such subject matter is vanishingly small and that the opportunity to address the CBI conference in the midst of an election campaign would have been no more stimulating for him than a request to pop in and say something funny at the retirement party of a Downing Street doorman whose name he’d never learned.

Little surprise, then, that he managed no more than a couple of hollow compliments for the assembled corporate chiefs on Monday before telling them he was rescinding a long-promised cut in corporation tax from 19 to 17 per cent. These plutocrats were hardly likely to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, after all, or to be persuaded by Jo Swinson that the Liberal Democrats are ‘the party of business’ in any other respect than her urge to please them by reversing Brexit.