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A takeover battle for BT would bring much-needed excitement to the City — as well as a major political row. The privatised telecoms giant that rarely pleases its customers and regulators has seen its shares fall by four-fifths since late 2015. While many other tech-related stocks have rebounded, BT’s price is still down where it was when the market plunged in February — lockdown having interfered with BT Openreach’s broadband installation programme, slashed new orders from business customers and even knocked out the fixtures that might have been shown on BT Sport’s television channels. On top of all that, there’s a gaping hole in the pension fund. No wonder BT’s board has asked Goldman Sachs and other advisers to dust off the company’s defence strategy in case a hostile bid is incoming.

But from whom? One contender is Deutsche Telekom, which already has a 12 per cent stake (acquired when it sold the EE mobile network to BT in 2015) and a seat on the board. The UK government no longer holds a ‘golden share’ that could prevent foreign takeover, but imagine the reaction in Westminster if this vital piece of national infrastructure falls, on the eve of final Brexit closure, into the hands of its more potent German counterpart.

The alternative, City sources suggest, is an approach from private equity interests who would aim to extract value by splitting off Openreach, which analysts believe could be worth up to £20 billion on its own, compared with the current £11 billion market value of BT as a whole. Some think BT chief executive Philip Jansen, who made his own fortune in private-equity turnaround jobs, might actually favour that approach.

But it would have the effect of turning BT into a vehicle for fancy financial engineering at a time when it needs no distraction from the real engineering task of rolling out superfast broadband to 20 million homes and businesses under the handicap of no longer using state-of-the-art Huawei equipment.