‘We are the masters now,’ I chirrup to my Holborn and St Pancras neighbours – misquoting Labour attorney-general Hartley Shawcross from 1946. I don’t mean I’ve decided to throw in my vote with the predicted Labour landslide: frankly, I’d rather give it to the candidate calling himself Nick the Incredible Flying Brick. What I mean is that as constituents of the incoming prime minister, we’re the heirs to Blair’s Trimdon Labour Club crowd in 1997. The world’s media will be all over us: we’ll be the first archetypes of the age of Starmer.
But how will we feel in five years’ time? Will our shopkeepers, small traders and restaurateurs have prospered for themselves while creating decent jobs for others – or will they have given up the struggle against punitive business rates and rising employment costs? How about Bow-Wow the poodle parlour and Metal Morphosis the piercing salon, both beneath my flat? In our ultra-urban ward of Starmer-land, will there be more social housing, more planning decisions favouring residents over developers, more dentists and GP appointments – and fewer drug dealers lurking in dark enclaves off Shaftesbury Avenue?
We’ll never know what the Tory counter-factual might have been. But what’s missing is any feeling that daily life, locally or nationally, can only get better under Labour the way it arguably did, for a while, under Blair. Sir Keir’s constituents have a duty to keep him humble by shaving his majority: neighbours, don’t dismiss Nick the Brick.
Going private
There’s a certain irony in the news that Hargreaves Lansdown (HL), the online stockbroker and fund supermarket that rose to be a FTSE 100 company as it helped popularise retail investment in the UK, is passing into the hands of private equity. If an agreed £5.4 billion bid by a consortium led by CVC Capital and including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority goes ahead, HL will be the latest leading stock to de-list – in a worrying trend in which collective lack of public investor enthusiasm and sluggishness in regulatory reform have left company valuations in London perpetually lower than those in US markets, and an open field for private equity to pick off the best bargains.
That includes HL, whose billionaire retired founders Peter Hargreaves and Stephen Lansdown have watched their firm lose ground to competitors such as AJ Bell, Interactive Investor and the US giant Vanguard. Customers report service quality declining since the days when Hargreaves himself ran it all with an iron hand – and HL’s reputation has been tainted by association with the collapsed Woodford group, whose Equity Income Fund was one of its longtime recommendations.
But with 1.9 million clients and £150 billion of assets under management, observers say there’s plenty of scope for improvement and growth under vigorous new management. If the HL deal is also indicative of a wider ‘malaise in UK capital markets’, as one report puts it, that’s another story.
The hottest proxy
Retail investment is alive and well but with eyes across the Atlantic. Or so I surmise from a clergyman friend who tells me how pleased he is with his stake in Nvidia, the AI-related US chipmaker that last week briefly became the world’s most valuable company, surpassing Apple and Microsoft to hit $3.34 trillion before falling back to $2.9 trillion.
The spikiness of Nvidia’s price graph is an indication of the nervousness of investors in the still new field of artificial intelligence. Here’s a 31-year-old Californian company that made its name in videogaming software long before ‘gametech’ was recognised as a major pathway to AI development.
Right now Nvidia is the market’s hottest AI proxy, its shares having risen tenfold in little more than a year. But no one knows whether it will stay ahead for the long-term, as Apple and Microsoft have done, or be overtaken by something hotter. I’ve heard it said that this election campaign should have been all about how AI might transform the productivity of the UK economy and the delivery of public services, including the NHS; depressingly, it’s been about nothing but Tory meltdown. By way of consolation, my inbox is overflowing with AI-related entries for our Economic Innovator Awards, which close this week. Among them could well be the next Nvidia: let’s hope UK capital markets revive to make it happen here rather than over there – and I can give the punting vicar a timely tip.
Lost England
As for election betting – the week’s other hot topic – I’d wager a tenner I’ll survive three more parliamentary terms, but probably not four. So there’s a fair chance I’ll live out my span under Labour. With that prospect, there’s nothing left in these last Tory days but to seek distraction in pleasure – including exotic dining (latest find: Jumak 39, a Korean dive in Panton Street), The Spectator champagne tour (more on that anon) and Tosca at the Grange Festival in Hampshire.
At Basingstoke station en route, tattooed girls and shirtless lads were shouting at each other over a hip-hop boombox. ‘It’s rough here these days,’ said the minibus driver, ‘but not as rough as Farnborough.’ The Grange, by contrast, was an arcadian vista of lost England – and its older, more elegant crowd were no doubt whispering over their picnics about what Labour will do to their assets.
The production was as reassuringly retro as the audience. If wicked Scarpia had a touch of Nigel Farage about him, his polling certainly narrowed once Floria Tosca got her hands on his paperknife. When the diva herself finally back-flipped off the battlements in despair, I thought of Penny Mordaunt. And if the big Uruguayan tenor singing doomed Cavaradossi didn’t look a bit like Rishi Sunak, I think you can see where this metaphor is going. At least there’s comfort in knowing how the tragedy ends.
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