Rishi’s stamp duty gimmick did little but help greedy builders

The Hundred — some sort of pimped-up cricket tournament, I gather — passed me by entirely, but I’ve been admiring the spin bowling of the Clayton, Dubilier & Rice team in another big contest, namely the bid battle for Morrisons. When CD&R made its initial 230p per share offer in June, there was much talk of the ruthless financial wizardry this New York private equity firm might apply to the supermarket group to extract maximum profit within a short timescale. But there was no more than a passing mention of the role as CD&R’s adviser of the former Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy.

Now the offer has been raised to 285p — capping another US bidder, Fortress — while the script has been rewritten to present CD&R’s approach as a personal mission on Leahy’s part to protect the legacy of his hero, the late Sir Ken Morrison, who built the eponymous family business into a nationwide chain. ‘There was genuine respect and affection between the two of them,’ we’re told. In that spirit, CD&R says it has no plans to cut Morrisons’ staff, or their pension rights, or to milk cash from its property portfolio via sale-and-leasebacks.

That all sounds warm and fluffy. But let’s remember that Leahy’s competition-crushing 14-year reign at Tesco was marked by fanatical pursuit of market share and constant squeezing of lower prices from suppliers — and that gruff old Sir Ken would have been the last man to succumb to love bombing in the midst of a bid battle. Morrisons’ board last week dumped Fortress to accept the increased CD&R offer valuing the business at £7 billion. But the shares continued climbing above 290p in anticipation of more to come, whether from Fortress or elsewhere.

Meanwhile Apollo Global Management, tipped last month as a third potential American bidder for Morrisons, is rumoured instead to have hungry eyes on Sainsbury’s, whose shares jumped 14 per cent in response on Monday.