If Big Oil won’t stand up for free markets, who will

At the Spectator party this year I met a girl I hadn’t seen since Oxford. We exchanged pleasantries. She was looking good and she’d done really well for herself, which made me very happy for her. But then she mentioned that before her latest plum posting she’d been working in the ‘private sector’ for Shell. I said: ‘I hardly call Shell the private sector.’ And the conversation went downhill from there.

When I was a child I used to love Shell. We’d never fill our tank anywhere else, if we could help it, because the Shell garages used to give you these brilliant collectable medallions — such as their 1969 Man in Space set — which you stuck into a cardboard display case and raced to complete before your friends.

Later, I may have had one or two shares in Shell which I think did quite well. But I’d never buy shares in Shell, now for the same reason I’d never buy shares in, say, the wind company Vestas (well, not except to short them) or one that sold torture equipment to Third World dictatorships or ultra-high-interest loans to the mentally ill.