There’s nothing new about bringing maverick businesspeople into government to give the bureaucratic blob what an unnamed ‘Trump adviser’ was recently quoted as calling ‘a swift kick in the ass’. After all, it was David Cameron who in 2010 hired the now all but unmentionable retail buccaneer Sir Philip Green to find ways to cut Whitehall waste.
But Donald Trump’s conferment of the role of solo global peacemaker on his real-estate buddy Steve Witkoff – who has no known foreign policy or government expertise – takes that idea to a scary new extreme. Take a look on X at a clip of him arriving alone to meet Vladimir Putin and a line-up of Kremlin heavies. When a woman, face unseen, takes the seat next to Witkoff, he turns to her and says: ‘Are you my translator? Are you from the embassy?’ Unbelievable.
To emphasise the point, try imagining a British version of Team Trump. Suppose Alan Sugar – who like Trump achieved fame as a host of The Apprentice – had transitioned, after his brief tenure as Gordon Brown’s ‘enterprise tsar’, into a blob-bashing prime minister. Might we have had Piers Morgan as defence secretary, Mike Ashley on trade talks, Crispin Odey at the Treasury and Bernie Ecclestone eyeballing Putin?
None of them would be wackier choices than the Fox News host Pete Hegseth commanding the Pentagon or anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of America’s public health. As for Witkoff, he’s been a devoted admirer of the President ever since they met by chance in a New York deli in 1986; Trump had no cash on him, so ‘I ordered him a ham and Swiss’. As Putin sneers across the non-negotiating table, that sandwich has a lot to answer for.
Fink’s fine words
Millionaires and billionaires, from the steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal to the Goldman Sachs chief Richard Gnodde, have been departing these shores at the rate of 200 per week. Kyle Bass, a US hedge-fund player whom Trump considered appointing as treasury secretary, has just dismissed the whole of Europe as a ‘retirement community’. So it’s heartening – if perhaps a touch surprising – to hear Larry Fink, chairman of New York-based BlackRock, the world’s largest institutional investor, waxing positive about UK investment prospects.
In an interview with the Times, Fink declared ‘more confidence in the UK economy today… than a year ago’ when Rishi Sunak was still in Downing Street. Sir Keir Starmer, by contrast, is ‘trying to tackle some of the hard issues’, including over-regulation of capital markets. For sure, disenchantment with Trump’s inflation-stoking tariff turmoil must be forcing the seasoned operator Fink to think of shifting assets to more stable destinations abroad. Clearly he sees a cornucopia of bargains in a London stock market long held back by ‘too much negativity’.
But if he’s also serious about investing in UK infrastructure – if, that is, planning processes can be reformed to generate decisions in ‘one year… vs five years or ten’ – then BlackRock’s firepower and its influence on other investors could be transformative. Of course, it’s also possible the Times interview was more about offering Starmer and Rachel Reeves a helpful headline to win better political access. So show us the money, Larry; or as we say in these parts, fine words butter no parsnips.
Channel-hopping
The Pope’s funeral may well have been the first live television event I’ve watched (not being much of a sports fan these days) since the King’s coronation. Post-Covid, I shunned terrestrial channels almost entirely, tuning instead to Netflix and the occasional dip into BBC iPlayer or (for Slow Horses only) AppleTV+. And I hop swiftly away from anything interrupted by ads.
So I’m not surprised that state-owned but commercially funded Channel 4 is in crisis, losing both its chief executive and chairman as advertising revenues decline. Or that ITV, a FTSE 250-listed company, is in play as a takeover target, with approaches from two programme makers: Banijay, the French outfit that made Peaky Blinders, and All3Media, which is owned by Abu Dhabi-backed RedBird IMI.
ITV’s strengths are in hit formats such as Love Island and I’m a Celebrity…, live sport and Coronation Street. Its future is in ITVX streaming, not afternoon repeats spliced with stairlift ads. And with the global reach of Netflix as a model, it would probably be better off as part of an international group. But let’s hope that’s not the baleful RedBird IMI, who were blocked from owning the Telegraph but have stubbornly failed to sell it. We’ve seen quite enough of them.
Power crazy
Was the Iberian power outage a Carrington Event, or at least a rehearsal for one? That question has been rattling around chat sites such as Hacker News this week in reference to the great geomagnetic storm associated with unusual solar flares on 1 September 1859, which caused telegraph systems to fail, spark and in some cases burst into flames all over Europe and North America. Catastrophists like to cite it as an example of a natural phenomenon for which no government is ever fully prepared – the chances of another solar storm on that scale within the next century being estimated at 12 per cent or less, but by no means negligible.
As it happens, power had been restored to most of Spain and Portugal by Tuesday morning without reported mass casualties or breakdown of social order. But still you wouldn’t want to be Richard Carrington (1826-75), the heir to a Brentford brewery who devoted his life to stargazing and reported to the Royal Astronomical Society on the terrifying electrical surge of 1859, thereby attaching his name to it forever. And we might wonder what kind of mercurial and destructive malfunction of power history will one day label a Trump Event.
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