Are Boris’s hedge-fund pals conspiring to ‘short the UK’? I doubt it

Minding my own business at 67 Pall Mall — the private members’ club favoured by oenophile West End hedge-fund managers that will serve as this week’s restaurant tip — I’m watching two tieless but well-tailored gents at the next table sampling different vintages of Château Pichon Longueville. And I’m thinking: ‘Bastards! These must be the friends-of-Boris who are conspiring to reap billions from a no-deal Brexit!’

It was former chancellor Philip Hammond who wrote recently of Johnson being ‘backed by speculators’, citing the PM’s sister Rachel who had spoken of the influence on him of ‘people who have invested billions in shorting the pound and shorting the country’. The novelist Jeanette Winterson — also quoting Rachel — repeated the allegation on last Friday’s Any Questions? So it must be true, mustn’t it?

Well, no actually, you don’t have to dig far to find how fanciful it is. The hedgie they all seem to have been talking about is Crispin Odey, who certainly looks like a plutocrat — the Sunday Times credits him with a fortune of £775 million — and who gave £10,000 to Boris’s leadership campaign. He says the story is ‘absolute rubbish’, but more to the point, his short positions are available for all to see on public websites such as ShortTracker. He currently has 14 of them, mostly quite small, his biggest negative bets being a longstanding one against the failing store chain Debenhams and a more recent one against the troubled Metro Bank; he also takes a dim view of a Bermuda-based, FTSE250-listed insurer called Lancashire Holdings and a couple of housebuilders. Make a conspiracy out of that, if you will.