The Blackburn brothers who are bringing Asda home

What a triumph of entrepreneurial empire-building — if that’s still an acceptable phrase — is the £6.8 billion acquisition of the Asda supermarket chain by Blackburn-born self-made billionaires Mohsin and Zuber Issa. Sons of Gujarati immigrants, these brothers have advanced from a single petrol station in Bury to a chain of almost 6,000 in ten countries with convenience stores and coffee shops attached. Now their company EG Group has brought Asda back into British ownership after two decades as part of Walmart, the big-box monster of American shopping.

The pair’s success has been built on boosting the profitability of fuel retailing, in an era when big oil companies were pulling out of that market, by adding more consumer choices, including the (to me rather forlorn) concept of the UK’s first drive-through Starbucks outlets. They are also philanthropists who keep a relatively modest personal profile despite negative media attention for building multiple mansions in Blackburn and a neighbour-annoying mega-basement in Knightsbridge.

Even Rishi Sunak has congratulated them on the Asda deal and I’ll be fascinated to see what they do to brighten this dull dog of the UK supermarket scene — which was once itself a fine example of northern entrepreneurship from humble beginnings. It was another pair of brothers, the Pontefract butchers Peter and Fred Asquith, who joined forces with a family dairy business in Leeds in the 1960s to create prototype Asda discount superstores with petrol stations attached. So the Issas’ deal offers a pleasing echo of the past as well as promise for the future — and a moment of cheer in an otherwise dismal corporate season.

Not so dismal

Just how gloomy prospects really are, and how depressed we ought to feel about them, was a topic this week for Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, who always strikes me as a shrewd real-world observer rather than a central banking theoretician — though having once sat through a mind-bending lecture by him on ‘macroprudential regulation’, I know he can do the technical stuff too.