So farewell, Transpennine Express, the northern rail operator whose hapless management were no match for the Aslef union that was determined to see this underperforming franchise renationalised. TPE’s drivers, beneficiaries of the super-luxury conditions I recited last month, have effectively invented a new form of moral hazard: have no fear of crippling your employer with outrageous demands and relentless non-cooperation, because if it goes down, the government will step in and re-employ you on the same terms or better.

Aslef has more strikes planned nationally for 31 May and 3 June, and the other rail union RMT – having done its best to disrupt travel to Eurovision in Liverpool – says it may join in on the second date, which happens to be FA Cup final day. Royal College of Nursing members have voted to hold out for a double-digit pay rise, despite their own leader recommending a lower offer, and junior doctors are still chuntering too.

Teachers and civil servants, even driving examiners, are poised for more action, while airport workers await their best chance in peak holiday season. One way or another, the union movement is more rampant today than it has been for the past 40 years – bottom-up, because workers are distressed about inflation, and top-down wherever hard-left union leaders see opportunities to subvert privatised industries and make Tory ministers squirm.

Oddly, all this seems to be happening with barely a peep from the unions’ coordinating body, the TUC, which is almost as quiescent as the CBI and whose general secretary Paul Nowak, in post since December, is invisible. But the litany of pay demands and forthcoming stoppages has even knocked racism and trans stories off the top of BBC news agendas – and let’s be fair, it’s the legitimate role of workers’ reps to ask for more at a time of steeply rising prices.

The cacophony will last at least until the general election. The disruptions will erode productivity, cause already poor public services to get worse – and generally contribute to a sense of a nation that’s going to the dogs under a government that has passed its sell-by date. As the negative mood deepens, so the pay spiral will gather momentum even as raw materials prices subside, embedding an inflation that’s higher and longer than those of our competitors. The Bank of England is now predicting 0.25 per cent UK growth this year, rather than the 0.5 per cent contraction it previously foresaw: far from a soft landing, however, we’re heading into an extended patch of national turbulence.

Mail failings

Farewell also to Simon Thompson, the chief executive of Royal Mail who is stepping down after little more than two years in post, following a vicious dispute with the Communications Workers Union that was settled last month by a 10 per cent pay award over three years plus £500 bonuses. The deal finally struck with Royal Mail’s board is below what the CWU asked for and includes concessions on working practices – but their consolation prize is the departure of Thompson, a cardboard caricature of corporate insensitivity whose days already looked numbered following a disastrous select committee grilling earlier this year.

Royal Mail (now a brand name within the FTSE 250-listed International Distributions Services plc) limps on demoralised – incapable of maintaining its door-to-door ‘universal service obligation’ to a standard that holds public affection, or of maximising the potential of the international parcels operation that the Thompson regime tried to prioritise, or of boosting its own enfeebled share price.

The concern for whoever is brave enough to succeed Thompson is that the CWU – no doubt inspired by their Aslef brethren – will return to the fray next time determined (as they were accused of being by Royal Mail during the recent dispute) to bankrupt the company. If that happens, the daily letter-post service, renationalised, might be reunited with the state-owned but also troubled Post Office Ltd – to recreate a public-service entity that would burden the taxpayer and slowly wither, while the viable parcels business would inevitably be sold to the highest foreign bidder.

It would be a cruel irony if that turned out to be Germany’s Deutsche Post, an example of success in privatised national mail services that Royal Mail has tragically failed to emulate.

Dancing in the rain

But we’re not saying farewell quite yet to Dame Sharon White, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, who has just lost a vote of confidence – by the employee–owned retailer’s ruling staff council – in her performance for the past year, but won a second vote endorsing her future strategy. Unrest among the 80,000 partners in John Lewis and Waitrose outlets reflects a loss of £234 million for 2022, the cancellation of their bonuses for only the second time since 1953, and concern that White was preparing to sell an equity stake in the group that would have compromised its preciously guarded mutual structure.

But she has now made clear that demutualisation is out of the question – though painful cost-cutting to bring the group back to break-even is not. Given the constraints of partnership on such a scale, Dame Sharon has a uniquely difficult job in the multiple-store retail sector – and as a former Treasury official and regulator, regularly faces the jibe that she’s ‘not a retailer’ herself. We can only wonder what Archie Norman or Stuart Rose or Justin King would have done if parachuted into John Lewis in her place.

Speaking to partners last week, White quoted the poet Vivien Greene about not ‘waiting for the storm to pass [but] learning to dance in the rain’: most business leaders have the opportunity to do that on the way up through their industries rather than, as in her case, in full media glare at the top. Fair-minded shoppers will wish her good fortune in her challenge.