What’s the real reason Jim Ratcliffe is backing Starmer?

On the face of it, there could hardly be a better example of a turkey voting for Christmas than the news that Jim Ratcliffe has come out and backed the Labour party. Yes, a Brexiteer who owns one of Britain’s six oil refineries really is throwing his weight behind Keir Starmer, a man who wanted to frustrate Brexit through a second referendum and whose party is committed to speeding up net zero by refusing to issue new licenses for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea and by decarbonising all power by 2030. Clearly, Ratcliffe is not stupid, so is he suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, or is there some expedience in his political declaration?

I suspect the latter. It is poignant that Ratcliffe didn’t come out as a Labour supporter three years ago, when the Tories were ahead in the polls, nor even a few months ago when it was conceivable that they still had a chance to pull off victory, or at least restrict Labour to being the largest party in a hung parliament.