Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The new PM is right to want boardroom reform, but how can she make it happen?

Also in Any Other Business: the falling knives to catch after Brexit; and a lashing from Elizabeth Hurley

I spent Sunday at the Sage Gateshead watching an epic performance of Götterdämmerung (I declare an interest, as a trustee of Opera North), so my head was full of it as I braced for more political backstabbing and immolation on Monday. That was very much the way it went as Andrea Leadsom fell, Theresa May rode her horse into the ring of flame that is the forthcoming Brexit negotiation, and Jeremy Corbyn, still clutching Labour’s tarnished ring, was dragged underwater by Angela Eagle, unlikeliest of Rhinemaidens.

Enough of the Wagner mash-up: what really caught my ear during the brief moment between Mrs May’s campaign launch and coronation was her attack on the business elite. This might be, as some commentators were quick to suggest, a bid for support from the mass of voters who are enraged by unpunished bankers, gold–plated executives, offshore tycoons, zero-hours contracts and lousy shareholder value — everything that’s happened in the corporate world in the past decade, in fact. Those gold-plated executives were, of course, Remainers almost to a man, so they also make a useful target for a pragmatist trying to ingratiate herself with hardline Leavers.

But let us give Mrs May’s sincerity the benefit of the doubt, and assume she really means it. Another senior Conservative (with a successful business track record) remarked to me recently that ‘something has gone wrong with capitalism’ — and that view is widely held by thinking people who would agree with Mrs May that the widening gap between executive and shopfloor pay is ‘irrational [and] unhealthy’, that companies should pay fair tax where they operate, that predatory takeovers are destructive, and that boards drawn from narrow circles of the like-minded fail to understand why the rest of the world thinks them greedy, heartless and too often incompetent.

So there are real issues to address.

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