The TV licence is a dead duck

‘Tell me we’re winning the media battle!’ I imagine Unilever boss Alan Jope barking at his team on Tuesday, following the revelation on Sunday of his rejected £50 billion bid for GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer healthcare arm.

‘Yes, sir,’ replies the flustered PR, ‘Very much so… except for top investor Richard Buxton of Jupiter telling the FT: “The idea of letting the goons at Unilever run [the GSK business] is laughable.” Then there’s an analyst in the Telegraph saying: “We can’t imagine many things that would unnerve us more about Unilever” than this deal going ahead. Oh, and our shares fell 7 per cent yesterday.’

Jope is now huddled with his advisers trying to work out whether he can up his bid to the £60 billion that might be acceptable to GSK shareholders without crippling his own balance sheet. And if he does so, will the market accept that Unilever —widely seen as a top-heavy conglomerate struggling to extract decent returns from its existing soap-to-ice-cream portfolio — is capable of turning a profit from the acquisition of another big bundle of GSK brands?

In the end, price always trumps logic in the takeover arena. But it’s interesting in a broader context to note the damage done to Unilever’s cause, just before the bid story leaked, by a scathing attack from veteran investor Terry Smith on the company’s ‘obsession’ with sustainability and other fashionable causes.

In mocking Jope’s declaration that every Unilever product should be ‘a brand with a purpose’ and ‘stand for something more important than making your hair shiny… or your food tastier’, Smith has shone a spotlight on billowing clouds of hot air around ‘purpose’ — vaguely meaning outcomes which are worthier than profit or shareholder value — that nowadays obscures so much corporate performance.