Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 1028 i MoneyWeek

“Even analysts at Goldman Sachs now say that the future of the UK is ‘not all negative’” We’ve been telling you that the UK stockmarket looks ridiculously cheap for some time now. We’re finally getting some traction. The FTSE 100 rose more than 12% in November (see page 5) as attention turned to the fact that we are nearer the end of the nightmare of rolling lockdowns (the first Covid-19 vaccines will roll out in the UK next week) – and possibly to the end of the relentless negativity around the type of trade deal we end up making with the EU. Even the analysts at Goldman Sachs are coming around to our way of thinking. The future of the UK is “not all negative”, they say (which is nice).…

Universities have already fined students more than £170,000 for breaches of coronavirus safety rules, even although the academic year has barely begun, notes David Batty in The Guardian. Students at the University of Nottingham accounted for a third of the total, with 91 students fined a total of £58,865 up to mid-November. In all, 1,898 students were fined across 105 universities for breaking rules on household mixing, masks and social distancing. The Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has been banned from more than 100 pubs in north Wales after he announced strict new rules for the sector, including a ban on alcohol sales and a 6pm closing time, says Katie Feehan on MailOnline. Furious landlords from the West Conwy Pubwatch group have barred Drakeford for at least 18 months due…

The FTSE 100 has enjoyed its best month in 31 years. Britain’s blue-chip index gained 12.4% in November, adding more than £180bn to its market value. You would have to go back to January 1989 to find a more profitable month for UK investors. Despite the gains, the FTSE 100 remains down 16% so far this year. The UK market “has been a dog” ever since the 2016 Brexit vote, says Russ Mould for AJ Bell. But as any investor knows, the aim of the game is to “buy low” and sell high. Bargain-hunters sense opportunity. There have been 14 takeover deals in the past month alone. To quote the writer Joseph Campbell, “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”. Private-equity firms have accumulated a global…

America’s Dow Jones index, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to give it its proper name, was established in 1896. It has been one of the most widely watched US indices since then – even though it is a narrow and misleading gauge of US equities. Instead of being weighted by market capitalisation (the number of shares in issue multiplied by the share price), it contains just 30 stocks weighted by share price. So a stock costing $100 has more impact on the index than one trading at $10. The index has been back in the spotlight because it eclipsed the 30,000 mark last week. This has revived memories of one of the dotcom bubble’s most bullish predictions: that the Dow, then at 10,300, would reach 36,000 by the mid-2000s.…

Californian video-gaming platform Roblox is planning an initial public offering (IPO) following strong recent performance as “millions of tweens and teenagers” have been “glued to their mobile devices” during the pandemic, says Wallace Witkowski on MarketWatch. The group offers several 3D digital worlds built by users and developers, providing “virtual communities” where users can play with their friends. Over half of its 31.1 million daily users are under 13. Over the past 12 months the number of players has increased by 92%. The firm makes money through its virtual currency, Robux, which players and developers buy to upgrade their avatars and make purchases.…

Debenhams is set to wind down the business and close all 124 stores after JD Sports ended discussions over a rescue deal, says Sarah Butler in The Guardian. While Debenhams’ administrators have been seeking a buyer since the summer, they now admit that the sale process has “not resulted in a deliverable proposal”, blaming the “extremely challenging” economic landscape and the pandemic-related “uncertainty” facing the UK retail industry. No wonder JD Sports pulled out, says Jonathan Eley in the Financial Times. The market reacted “badly” to the news that the successful retailer was planning a bid for Debenhams, with the stock sliding by 10%. The collapse of Arcadia, a leading concession in Debenhams’ stores, is“unlikely to have helped sentiment”. JD’s departure means that Mike Ashley, the founder of JD’s rival…

“The bosses of five lockdown winners received £45m in dividends after their firms’ profits were fuelled by big tax breaks”, says Tom Witherow in the Daily Mail. Simon Arora, the billionaire CEO of retailer B&M, raked in by far the most, £44m, despite his company having received £38m in business-rates relief this year while its trade in gardening and homeware products boomed owing to lockdowns. Arora and the bosses of Tesco, Pets at Home and Wm Morrison received a joint £44.6m in dividends, despite being granted £1bn in rates relief, according to the paper’s analysis. The fifth lockdown winner, supermarket Sainsbury’s, paid out £231m to investors and received £460m in rates relief. In total, retailers and hospitality businesses have been handed £10bn of business rates relief this year. “Critics say…

aei.org How much would an iPhone have been worth in 1991? asks Bret Swanson. Smartphones are today so ubiquitous that it is easy to forget what a technological marvel they are. You would have had to pay an astounding $30m in 1991 to get the equivalent of the recently released iPhone 12’s 5G communication capabilities, assuming a bandwith price of $100/kbps. Its 256GB of data storage would be worth another $11.52m and you would have needed $10.1m to buy comparable computing power, making for $51m overall. That’s not even counting the cameras. Kodak’s 1991 DCS 100 DSLR (digital) camera cost about $15,000 per megapixel. At those prices, the iPhone 12’s three 12-megapixel cameras equate to $540,000-worth of 1991 “photographic power in every smartphone”. Of course, in the 1990s it would…

■ Aberdeen Standard Investment, one of Europe’s biggest asset managers, is planning to launch a fund investing solely in hedge funds run by women, says Laurence Fletcher in the Financial Times: “greater diversity leads to better returns”. Aberdeen’s new fund will track the performance of an index of women-run hedge funds collated by data provider HFR. It has been a strong year from women-led hedge funds compared with the rest of the industry. HFR’s Women Access index is up 6.9% this year to the end of October, compared with a 1.1% rise in the broader HFRI 500 index. Catherine Nicholas’s Nicholas US Equity Opportunities fund and Lan Wang Simond’s (pictured) Mandarin Offshore fund gained 40% and 24% this year respectively. ■ Despite the Covid-19 crisis, investment in European care homes…

National Savings & Investments, or NS&I, has lurched from one disaster to another this year. As a result, it is losing its reputation as the nation’s favourite savings institution. “I’ve long been a champion of NS&I... and I know many readers feel the same way,” says James Coney, Money editor of The Sunday Times. “Or at least, they did.” So what’s gone wrong? It started in spring when Treasury-backed NS&I was given extra funding so it could offer better rates. “Customers flocked to it, but like many financial institutions it faced the challenge of keeping service levels up when lockdown came,” says Coney. “Phone waiting times rose from ten seconds to 12 minutes.” After that there were changes to Premium Bonds that meant winners couldn’t be paid by cheque anymore.…

Treatt (LSE: TET) is a natural extracts and ingredients supplier to the flavour, fragrance and consumer-product industries, especially the beverage sector. The company has profited from the increased demand for drinks consumed at home and for citrus-based ingredients used in industrial and household-cleaning products, says James Crux in Shares. The booming alcoholic-seltzer business, which has increased exponentially in the US over the past year and is now catching on in Europe, has also proved a boon. The shares have climbed by 58% in a year. Be glad you didn’t buy… Rank Group (LSE: RNK) operates gambling services in the UK, Spain and Belgium. It announced in early November that it planned to raise cash from investors to help prop up its balance sheet, which had suffered because the first lockdown…

A Promised Land Barack Obama Viking, (£35) President Donald Trump may be reduced to whining on Twitter about his election defeat, but his immediate predecessor has been celebrating record sales of the first volume of his memoirs. A Promised Land, by former president Barack Obama, covers Obama’s journey from “genuinely humble beginnings” to his arrival on the national and global stage as a “unique political figure”, says Gerard Baker in The Times. However, the vast majority of the 701-page book deals with key moments of Obama’s first couple of years in office, “driving the passage of big domestic legislation and handling the challenges of foreign and national security policy”. A Promised Land delivers “amply” on the basic expectations of political autobiographies, providing a “granular view from the driving seat of…

Even by the “brutal standards of big business and the political arena”, Lord Magan of Castletown has suffered a “spectacular fall from grace”, says David Brown in The Times. The 75-year-old, a former Bank of Ireland deputy governor who briefly served as Conservative party treasurer in 2003, once had a net worth estimated at £200m. Now Lord Magan has been declared bankrupt, with an estimated £14m of outstanding debt. In 2018, he was sued by the trustees of a foundation set up for his children, into which he had placed the Irish estate in which he lived. The trust claimed that he owed £500,000 in unpaid rent, as well as other outstanding loans. Eventually he was evicted, and the estate sold for £18m. Last year he received a suspended one-week…

Prepare for the “revenge of the old economy”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. Goldman Sachs says we are heading back to the Noughties: a commodities supercycle is beginning. If so, then the current rally in beaten-down stocks may prove to have been the “amuse bouche” for what is to come. Rising demand hits constrained supply Copper prices recently hit a seven-year high thanks to soaring Chinese import demand. The red metal has gained 22% in 2020. Brent crude rose by 27% in November and was trading around $48 a barrel earlier this week. Goldman Sachs thinks there is much more to come, says Myra Saefong on Marketwatch. Commodity prices have been caught between hope of a strong recovery next year and lockdown misery in the present. Yet three…

“What is it like to win against the machines? By New Year’s Eve the least smart buy-and-hold investor in an index fund might be able to boast of such a victory. For 2020 has been rotten for ‘quant’ funds, which use powerful computers to sift market data for patterns that might predict future prices. ‘Long-short’ momentum – buying recent winners and selling recent losers – had been one of quant’s better strategies this year. Yet on 9 November, when news broke of an effective vaccine for Covid-19, it had its worst-ever day. Quants rely on history. If something [unprecedented] happens... such as a vaccine in a pandemic, they have a problem. No doubt afew quant hedge funds are nursing heavy losses... The terrain on which human traders can beat the…

Three to buy CVS Group The Times This veterinary chain saw its practices closed during the first lockdown, but business has rebounded. Total sales were up by 6.3% during the four months to the end of October compared with a year before and the second lockdown has been less disruptive. That has allowed it to reduce debt and grow its portfolio of 480 practices through “bolt-on acquisitions”. Add in rising pet ownership and the outlook is encouraging. 1,435p Rolls-Royce Shares Shares in this aviation engineer have soared on hopes that a vaccine will soon have us all flying again. Rolls-Royce is part of an “effective global duopoly” with General Electric for civil aviation engines, an area that accounts for more than half of sales. The medium-term outlook for aviation is…

• Things haven’t gone well for US electric-lorry company Nikola lately, says Lex in the Financial Times. It became the “source of endless jokes” in September when it was revealed that the start-up’s first truck, the Nikola One, “had trouble moving unaided”. Since then, the stock price has “more than halved”, founder Trevor Milton has stepped down and the US Department of Justice is investigating. Now General Motors (GM) has taken a “sledgehammer to its prospects” by scrapping plans to take an 11% stake in Nikola and help it build its electric Badger pick-up lorry. Instead, a “watered down partnership” means that GM will no longer take a stake in the business while Nikola will abandon plans for the Badger and refund customer deposits. This will allow Nikola to “refocus…

Talks between the European Union and UK over a trade deal are coming down to the wire, with Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, warning that “the two sides had not yet overcome their divisions”, say Sam Fleming and Jim Brunsden in the Financial Times. A deal to replace the transitional arrangements that expire at the end of 2020 faces two big “sticking points”: EU fishing rights in UK waters; and “level playing field” regulations, determining the extent to which the UK must follow EU standards on labour, social and environmental protections. Expect the prime minister to back down, says Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. Leaving without adeal would “kill off the car industry, manufacturing, farming, finance and fishing”. Boris Johnson has no option but to agree to “align with…

In his spending review last week, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was once again spraying money around. He launched a raft of new initiatives to get people back into work and added extra funding to a few things that were already in place. You can see why. With an expected 10% drop in GDP this year the Covid-19 crisis has created one of the worst recessions ever recorded. We have not yet seen that translate into a huge surge in joblessness, but it is only a matter of time. So far the furlough scheme and cheap loans to companies have softened the blow. Over the next year that will start to change. We are starting to see that this week, with Arcadia group going into administration. We will see many more…

Australia must choose China or US Mohamed El-Erian Bloomberg I suspect that the rising trade tension between Australia and China is more than a “nasty bilateral disagreement”, says Mohamed El-Erian. It could be part of a “bigger phenomenon” stemming from difficult China-US relations. China’s most recent move – slapping tariffs of up to 212% on Australian wine imports – is essentially a “weaponisation of tariffs” triggered by what Beijing views as provocative Australian statements, encouraged by the US, on various issues, including Covid-19. Australia is one of a handful of countries that has “run a ‘dual-option’ model”: relying on the US for national security and on China for turbocharging its economy. China’s pursuit of special bilateral and regional partnerships in recent years and its progress in tech and AI have…

nationalreview.com/capital-matters Argentina’s economy has been in recession since 2018, says Antonella Marty. Annual inflation has reached 36.6%. It takes “about five months” to start a business. The country has suffered repeated currency crises, most recently in 2018. The economy has long chafed under heavy-handed interventionism. Between 2003 and 2016, public expenditure exploded from 22.7% of GDP to 41.5% of GDP. Much of that was financed by deficits and money-printing, culminating in the inevitable currency crisis. In May, Buenos Aires defaulted on its debts for the second time this century. President Alberto Fernández re-negotiated $300bn of the debt with bondholders over the summer. He called it a “triumph”, but the “steep discount” on the country’s debt on global bond markets tells another story. The public finances are unlikely to recover as…

Earlier this year the global insurance industry was under pressure. Claims for losses from the Australian and Californian wildfires were coming in, Covid-19 was expected to lead to an avalanche of claims for lost business and the hurricane season lay ahead. But the hurricane season passed without serious incident, the wildfire losses are quantified and those from the pandemic are proving manageable. Steep rises in premiums As a result, “this is a fantastic time” to consider the sector, says Nick Martin, manager of Polar Capital’s £1.4bn Global Insurance Fund. “Covid-19 has accelerated the insurance-pricing cycle, creating the best underwriting market in at least a decade.” Marsh & McLennan’s global pricing index, which tracks premiums, rose at an annual rate of 20% in the third quarter after 19%, 14% , 11%…

When you’re stuck at home all the time the opportunities to spend money are vastly reduced. As a result, many of us have been saving more this year. Prior to lockdown the average household saved just under 10% of their income, but this rocketed to 29.1% in the first lockdown, according to the Office for National Statistics. While many of us have more money in our savings accounts, the banks are not rewarding us. The record-low Bank of England base rate means that the average easy-access savings account pays just 0.23%, according to Moneyfacts. The best possible rate is a paltry 1.65% from AgriBank and you’d have to lock your money up for five years. So, what else could you do with your money? One idea could be to reduce…

When it comes to pensions, changes to the small print can have big ramifications. So it is with the announcement last week from the chancellor that the government is to stop using the retail price index (RPI) measure of annual inflation from 2030. Instead, Rishi Sunak said, the default inflation yardstick will be the consumer prices index plus housing costs (CPIH). There are good reasons to make this change. Statisticians have long complained that the RPI does a poor job of measuring the way prices are really changing, frequently overstating inflation. But the move will have a profound effect on pensions – particularly on defined-benefit (DB) schemes. Since these schemes have liabilities that grow broadly in line with inflation, they tend to make large investments in index-linked gilts, government bonds…

£39.50, The Great Wine Co., 01225 322810, greatwine.co.uk South African wine pioneer Ken Forrester, or “Mr Chenin” as many know him, is a mischievous raconteur and a tireless ambassador for not only his own exemplary wines but also for the greater Cape business as a whole. There has always been a question mark about what “FMC” stands for. In 2002, I listed the inaugural vintage of this now legendary wine, the 2001 vintage, in my annual wine guide book The Wine List. I remember Ken showing me a sample prior to its release, and I declared that it was “f*cking magic chenin”. Ken didn’t disagree, so Ifelt I should tell the world. It turned out that FMC actually stood for “Forrester Meinert chenin” (Martin Meinert was Ken’s winemaking partner)! I…

Regular readers will know we have left our ranch in Argentina to return to the US. But as many people ask us, why do we have a ranch at all? Why get involved in a difficult property, in a distant part of a dysfunctional country, operating in a language we don’t really speak, and working with people whose customs and beliefs are beyond our understanding? That question has no ready answer. I can only say that the natural beauty of the place is breathtaking. Because of the way it has been worked – with stone walls, hidden valleys, indigenous cultures’ ruins and so forth – it is unlike anything available in the US. It was also much cheaper. “What most investors regard as a handicap turned out to be a…

The success of Netflix’s latest hit, The Queen’s Gambit, has made chess cool again. The drama, which follows orphaned chess prodigy Beth Harmon (played by Anya Taylor-Joy, pictured), has become the streaming group’s most watched scripted series to date. In the three weeks after its premier, chess set sales rose 87% in the US, while chess book sales surged by 603%, says Todd Spangler on Variety. The Crown , another Netflix hit, has benefited from government tax breaks worth up to £16m for its contribution to Britain’s “culture and heritage”, says The Mail on Sunday. Left Bank Pictures, which produces the drama that is currently chronicling the lives of the royals from the 1940s onwards, pocketed the windfall for its first two series. The scheme allows a scripted production to…

The global electric-car sector is really starting to motor, says Der Aktionär. The proportion of electric cars among new vehicle registrations in Germany was a mere 1.7% in October 2019; now it is 8.4%. Throw in hybrids and the figure rises to 17.5%. In China 6% of cars are electric and by 2025 25% will be. The strong increase in demand is beginning to boost producers of lithium, as lithium-ion batteries are a key feature of electric vehicles. The supply overhang that has bedevilled the sector looks likely to dwindle. That bodes well for Canada’s Millennial Lithium, ahitherto largely overlooked junior miner now set to exploit ahighly promising deposit of the metal in the Andes.…

Lloyds Banking Group has “poached” HSBC’s Charlie Nunn to be its next CEO, replacing outgoing boss António Horta-Osório, “one of Britain’s best known executives”, say Harry Wilson and Stefania Spezzati on Bloomberg. This reinforces Horta-Osório’s strategy of making a “bigger push into managing money for individuals” in order to diversify the bank’s revenue: Nunn is HSBC’s head of wealth and personal banking. Lloyds shouldn’t assume that boosting sales by expanding wealth management services is a surefire route to success, says Lex in the Financial Times. Even if it does become one of the top three providers in the UK, it will be “tough” to make a lot more money from it given that fees in the industry are in long-term decline and top-quality wealth managers “remain costly”. Meanwhile the bank…

Britain has become the first Western nation to approve a Covid-19 vaccine, say Sarah Neville and Anna Gross in the Financial Times. Care homes and the over-80s will be “in the vanguard” of the vaccination programme with the Pfizer-BioNTech treatment. This vaccine is 95% effective and the UK has secured 40 million doses, enough for 20 million people, with the first 800,000 expected within days. But the need for it to be stored at –70ºC highlights the massive logistical challenge. It would be “nearly impossible” for care home residents to be given it as they would have to leave the care home to receive it, said Martin Green, CEO of Care England, a trade body for the care sector. However, the government has also secured another 100 million vaccine doses…

Even though Donald Trump’s various post-election lawsuits have generally been laughed out of court, Betfair is evidently waiting until the Electoral College formally votes on 14 December, to settle the market on the next US president. Meanwhile the amount of money matched on the market has swelled to £1.27bn. While the 1.03 (97.1%) available on Joe Biden to win is absurdly generous given that his victory is as close to a certainty as possible, my rule of avoid making tips that are shorter than 1.10 means that I can’t recommend it. The next major political contest is the double run-off election for Georgia’s Senate seats. This will be taking place on 5 January, as no candidate in either race managed to get a majority of the vote. At the moment,…

• HSBC banker Charlie Nunn is set to replace António Horta-Osório as the head of Lloyds Banking Group (see page 7), says The Guardian. His maximum pay package of £5.6m will include an annual salary of just over £1.1m and almost the same again as a fixed share bonus. He will also be paid benefits and pension contributions of 4% and 15% of his salary respectively, as well as short- and long-term bonuses worth up to 140% and 150% of basic pay. In addition, Nunn will receive deferred cash and share awards to replace unvested HSBC ones, along with a “lost opportunity” bonus to make up for bonuses lost at HSBC. • Former chancellor Sajid Javid (pictured)“will earn more than £300,000 for just three weeks’ work after landing his second…

“Everybody does rich differently. There’s the guy who is quiet about it, doesn’t tell anybody about their wealth, wears a simple T-shirt and jeans and goes off and does his thing. Then there’s the other guy, who buys five, six mansions and a golden yacht. Then there’s the guy that spreads the money out for generations of his family to inherit, and then there’s the other guy who builds another corporation. Money magnifies the best and the worst of human beings; money magnifies character.” Actor John Boyega (pictured), quoted in The Times “Dolly likes being rich. I wrote a song called Sacrifice and one of my favourite lines says, ‘I was going to be rich no matter how much it cost. And I was going to win, no matter how…

thehill.com America is unhappy with the social-media giants, says Alfredo Ortiz. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the likes of Facebook and Twitter enjoy special legal protections; unlike a traditional publisher, they are “mostly excused” from liability for what users post on their platforms. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have advocated revoking those protections, which would lead to more lawsuits against the tech giants. But such a move would backfire. Regulating social media only serves to “entrench their oligopoly”. Complying with red tape is expensive – you need to hire “more coders and lawyers” – which makes it harder for new players to enter the market. It is telling that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has backed more internet regulation. He is also a fan of Europe’s General Data…

Activist investor Gianluca Ferrari is setting up a fund targeting companies lagging on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, says Simon Jessop on Reuters. Ferrari has previously led campaigns against mid-cap firms such as Spanish renewable-energy group EDP Renováveis and Retelit, an Italian broadband provider, as part of Frankfurt-based Shareholder Value Management. He said his firm Clearway Capital is aiming to launch its first fund in 2021. The move follows growing interest from investors in issues “from carbon emissions… to boardroom diversity”. By going into companies and pushing them to “clean up their act”, Ferrari hopes to be rewarded through higher valuations.…

■ “People living in poorly insulated houses could pay more for their mortgages and lose value from their homes under government plans to prioritise loans on properties with high energy-efficiency ratings,” says David Byers in The Times. The Department for Business is aiming to make mortgage lenders gather the energy ratings of their borrowers’ homes and put them into an average league table. “Lenders will get time-limited targets to improve their scores by lending to greener homes.” However, the consultation document on the idea has admitted that the plan could raise mortgage costs on draughtier homes. ■ More cyclists are “taking to the roads than in any period since the early 1980s”, says Stefan Wagstyl in the Financial Times, so it is time to raise awareness of bike insurance. “Nobody…

The crisis that engulfed markets in March when the reality of Covid-19 and the potential for nationwide lockdowns struck rattled equities around the world. However, for those who looked through the volatility hitting companies’s shares and instead focused on their underlying value, there were significant opportunities to be found. It was a situation that suited value investors seeking inherently stable businesses. However, focusing on value does not only mean rooting out the cheapest stocks. Instead, it is important to find strong businesses and wait for their share price to become discounted. “Skyworks is well-placed to become a leading semiconductor maker” Many companies in markets are currently overvalued and we took advantage of the market volatility this year to buy into three companies we believed presented alarge opportunity, but were hit…

Michael Meehan was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1892, but grew up in New York. After leaving school to become a messenger boy he graduated to selling theatre tickets. Owing to the connections he made while selling tickets, he managed to secure a seat on the New York Stock Exchange by 1925. Before the Wall Street Crash his brokerage firm, M.J. Meehan & Company, employed 400 people with nine offices, including one on a liner, and even after 1929 he was wealthy enough to buy his son a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $130,000 (the equivalent of $1.99m today). How did the scam work? Meehan was regarded asan expert market manipulator. He would assemble a group of investors who would agree to buy and sell the stock…

Money for Nothing: The South Sea Bubble and the Invention of Modern Capitalism Thomas Levenson Head of Zeus (£20) The South Sea Bubble of 1720, which saw shares in the South Sea Company rise nearly tenfold before collapsing, is frequently cited as an example of how markets can behave irrationally. However, Professor Thomas Levenson of Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes that the bubble was more than a simple cautionary tale of investors led astray by greed and euphoria. It was also a watershed moment in the development of modern financial markets. In Money For Nothing, he not only tells the story of the bubble, but also places in it the context of wider changes taking place in the first half of the eighteenth century. Levenson’s emphasis on the broader backdrop…

• The bullying allegations surrounding Priti Patel (pictured) have highlighted the “profound sensitivities to be found in the upper echelons of the Civil Service”, says Frederick Forsyth in the Daily Express. It’s fortunate that none of these “Whitehall snowflakes” ever did National Service; they might have suffered a drill sergeant roaring four inches from their face. Priti Patel’s  voice raising led to “weeks of trauma therapy” for the senior civil servants whose “auditory delicacy… cannot be lightly affronted”, lest extended counselling ensue. To add to that, the Essex MP is “not even a British public school boy who lunches at the Athenaeum”, but a daughter of Asian parents who fled Uganda. Boris Johnson has instructed his cabinet to “‘form a square’ around The Prittster”. The prime minister “has at last…

£107 How much the average household energy bill is expected to rise by this winter owing to people working from home, according to comparison site Energy Helpline. That represents an extra 18% for the average bill, equivalent to a combined £1.9bn. £1.5bn The value of British export sales of television programmes for the financial year 2019-2020 – a record amount and a 6% rise on the previous year, according to industry body Pact. Scripted drama, such as Chernobyl, His Dark Materials and Doctor Who, comprised 48% of sales. 1 The percentage of farms that operate 70% of the world’s crop fields, ranches and orchards, areport led by the International Land Coalition organisation has found. Control has become more concentrated since the 1980s. £5bn How much of taxpayers’ money has been…