When Tony Blair made Stephen Byers Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, it is now clear that he was entrusting that office to the most incompetent, the most cynical and the most financially illiterate Cabinet minister of the last 20 years. This spring the last British-owned volume car manufacturer has been brought to its knees in humiliating circumstances. Five thousand employees of MG Rover are shortly to come on the job market. They will probably be joined by a further 20,000 workers also in the Midlands automotive trades, whose firms are owed hundreds of millions by the expiring company. If they fail soon to find new employment, let us hope that they join forces, on a no-win no-fee basis, with the 55,000 defrauded Railtrack shareholders still pursuing Mr Byers in the High Court for misfeasance of public office, and the destruction of £1.5 billion of value in the company in which they had invested.
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