Deliveroo

The market emphatically endorsed my negative opinion of the Deliveroo share offer, which bombed from its offer price of 390p to close at 282p before Easter. The biggest London IPO since the commodity giant Glencore went public in 2011 now also stands as the most embarrassing flop in living City memory. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Cazenove, the deal’s bookrunners, must have known it was in jeopardy when they knocked more than a billion off their first indicative valuation after UK institutional investors lined up to say they wouldn’t touch it. But 70,000 Deliveroo app users, having failed to read that signal, bought into the ‘community offer’ — and have

‘The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism — because of greed, my friends.’ So Boris Johnson told his backbenchers last week, though he immediately muttered ‘Forget I said that’ while aides tried to explain it as a joke on the chief whip, who was munching a cheese and pickle sandwich at the time. Whatever, the PM’s gaffe makes a neat text for a short Easter sermon. The fact is that ‘capitalism’ — the mustering of vast private-sector resources to bring lab-tested potions to mass production in record time — has indeed delivered a triumph, in combination with university science, a smart Whitehall taskforce, military logistics and