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Along, cold weekend brought a haul of business news more bad than good. The worst was from aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce, which announced a £5.4 billion half-year loss — adverse currency movements plus a collapse in new orders and engine-repair work — and warned that in the ‘plausible downside scenario’ of an extended slump in global aviation, the company might cease to be a ‘going concern’.

That’s a horrendous prospect for what’s left of British engineering. And unlike recent losses on a similar scale at BP, there’s no consolation in terms of long-term repositioning of the business: in short, the fewer jets flying, the grimmer Rolls’s future. As cash runs out, survival will require capital injections bigger than the company’s bombed-out £5 billion market value — possibly from HM Treasury, if ministers don’t want this beacon of British excellence to pass into foreign control.

The alternative will be a merger, for which BAE Systems looks the only feasible UK partner. That would certainly create a ‘national champion’, but one which will have to endure very tough times before it starts winning medals again.

Online habits

More signs of the way the world is changing. First, Rolls-Royce finance director Stephen Daintith jumped ship to join the online grocer Ocado, whose prospects have soared this year — while Tesco announced 16,000 new jobs to cope with its own surge in online customers. Second, billionaire industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe was reported to be buying a former Daimler plant in France as the base for his Grenadier 4×4 vehicle project, previously destined for south Wales. When this successor to the classic Land Rover Defender was unveiled in 2017, the spin was that Ratcliffe wanted to help arrest the decline in UK manufacturing; now that looks an increasingly lost cause, it seems he just wants a ready-made factory inside the EU.