Would a German takeover of BT be so bad?

To the Mansion House, on an unbearably humid evening, for the Lord Mayor’s annual ‘Financial and Professional Services’ dinner. It’s a big night for the City, with the formal unveiling of reforms designed to channel pension money into unlisted equities, creating by 2030 a £50 billion pool of capital for high-growth UK companies that might otherwise list in New York or sell themselves elsewhere. Simplified London listing rules, favourable to founder-entrepreneurs, will be another part of a wider reform package, much of which has been foreshadowed in this column over recent months.

But what a way to put out a major policy announcement. ‘No wonder the tech kids don’t want to list here,’ remarked a fellow hack at the naughty end of the table, gesturing to the packed hall of (predominantly) perspiring middle-aged white men being served by young black catering staff. As for the quality of speeches, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt made such dull work of a text already widely spun that I longed for Kwasi Kwarteng to burst through the double doors disguised as a Just Stop Oil protestor.

Other media folk tuned out and focused on their Twitter feeds. I pretended to do likewise for a while, then stared at a rather butch statue of Alfred the Great in a nearby niche and wondered what he thought of it all. ‘Burn my cakes!’ he seemed to be saying. ‘Could this be any more boring?’

But the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, it’s fair to say, was an improvement. More natural as a platform speaker than he is on television, certainly more engaging than his predecessor Mark Carney when I last heard him at the same event, he caught our attention by quoting the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard – ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’ – to explain central banks’ (his more than most) struggle to get on top of inflation.

If he had nothing new to say on that subject other than to blame its stickiness on ‘unexpected resilience’ driving higher wage demands, he surprised again by diverting into a lecture on the pros and cons of digital currencies.