‘Let me say it, loud and clear: the Conservative party is, and always will be, the party of business,’ declared Philip Hammond at Birmingham — a few hours after City tycoon and former Tory treasurer Michael Spencer told the BBC that the Prime Minister had ‘let herself down personally by not being a champion of business’. Were Spencer’s doubts assuaged by the Chancellor’s reassurance? I doubt it: the truth is Spencer was right.
Theresa May signalled her non–championship of business in her 2016 leadership bid when, ahead of John McDonnell, she spoke of forcing companies to accept worker representatives on boards and of the ‘irrational, unhealthy’ pay gap between top executives and average workers. Her people scrapped enterprise schemes sponsored by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office, while the Northern Powerhouse, George Osborne’s catalyst for commerce in Manchester and Leeds, went into the deep freeze. The Prime Minister appears to have no friends in the business world and no time for its concerns.
Well, Mrs May is not, in any sense, the heir to Margaret Thatcher — who was sometimes accused of listening too much to friends in the business world — and nor does she have cabinet material, as Thatcher did, of the entrepreneurial calibre of Michael Heseltine, Peter Walker and David Young. All she has in the way of business experience around her are a clutch of second–raters from the City, Spreadsheet Phil who had an obscure career in ‘consultancy’, Gavin Williamson who used to sell fire-places, and Jeremy Hunt, who once launched an educational venture called Hotcourses.
And of course even when politicians do give business people a hearing, the loudest are likely to be those like Spencer who have poured money into party coffers — rather than those such as Ralf Speth of Jaguar Land Rover, Emma Walmsley who runs the pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, and Sir Charlie Mayfield of the John Lewis Partnership, to name but three, who could tell the PM what’s really about to happen.
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