Why hasn’t Britain got a sovereign wealth fund?

Twenty years ago, when I ran the Hong Kong branch of a London investment bank, one of our most important London-based investor clients for Asian stocks was only ever referred to, in whispers, as ‘Orange’. It operated — so I was told — behind unmarked doors somewhere near St Paul’s Tube station; it dealt with us only on condition of absolute secrecy; and it had nothing to do with Orange mobile phones, which had yet to be invented.

I think enough water has flowed under City bridges since those days to permit me to reveal Orange’s identity without embarrassing anyone — the investment bank and its Hong Kong branch having expired long ago. Our mystery client was the Kuwait Investment Office, which can claim, having been founded in 1953, to be the world’s oldest example of what the British media habitually paints as a new and frightening force in the financial world: the sovereign wealth fund.