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. And there he lost most of us as the journos reverted to Twitter, lashed into the chardonnay or tiptoed for the exit.

It remained for the Lord Mayor, Nick Lyons, to sum up. The ‘Mansion House compact’, signed earlier in the day by nine leading UK pension providers, is largely the result of his determined advocacy. It commits 5 per cent of the pension firms’ ‘defined contribution’ funds towards a collective pot for illiquid investment that should generate higher long-term returns for savers. And as the Chancellor acknowledged, it represents ‘a personal triumph’ for Lyons – who attempted the only joke of the evening by asking whether Kierkegaard, being Danish, had ever said anything about bringing home the bacon. The mayor, I’d say, has done that. But what an archaic form of celebration.

Wilkommen

‘BT put on high alert for German takeover’ – Monday’s Telegraph headline – looked like a spin-doctor’s attempt to sink the invaders before they reach the beach. But how bad would it really be if Deutsche Telekom were to launch a winning bid for the under-performing giant of the UK telecoms market? It’s a prospect that has been in the offing for several years, Deutsche’s boss Tim Höttges having long looked for a way to recoup losses on the 12 per cent BT stake his company acquired when BT bought the mobile operator EE (previously part-owned by Deutsche) in 2016.

One rumour is that BT’s other significant foreign shareholder, the French-Israeli tycoon Patrick Drahi, who holds 24.5 per cent, might fall in behind a Deutsche bid. New owners looking for a timely return on capital would force painful job cuts and efficiency reforms – but should also accelerate BT’s snail’s-pace rollout of fibreoptic broadband. And at least they’d offer an exit for current BT investors who have watched the shares slide downhill since the middle of the last decade. The Germans run better trains and postal services than we do; who’s to say they can’t transform our telecoms? And wouldn’t that look good as a message of foreign investor confidence in the UK?

Tide turned?

The tide of media indignation that was engulfing the UK water industry a couple of weeks ago has subsided with the news that Thames Water has raised £750 million of new equity from private shareholders led by Ontario’s municipal pension fund and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign treasure chest. The much-criticised utility has also acknowledged that another £2.5 billion of equity support will be needed to reduce leakage, clean polluted rivers and ‘improve customer outcomes’ in the next regulatory cycle from 2025 to 2030 – after multimillion-pound fines for sewage-flooding and fish-murdering in the current cycle, not to mention shameless dividend-gouging.

Meanwhile, remarks from the chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Sir Robert Goodwill, echo my own recent comment that companies in highly regulated industries will always game badly framed rules to their own financial advantage. In relation to Thames, says Sir Robert, Ofwat was ‘asleep at the wheel’.

Who shall we ban?

If this column was a bank, whose accounts would we cancel? I’d start with anyone who’s ever bought a peerage by donating to a political party or a politician’s wallpaper, and anyone else who bangs on at the dinner table about the beauty of bitcoin and the fraud of fiat currencies. I wouldn’t ban Nigel Farage, however small his balance, because I’ve always found him highly entertaining – but I might draw the line at Australian wicketkeeper Alex Carey. And I’ll need a committee to help me build this blacklist: in whose face would you slam the great brass doors of AOB Bank? Suggestions please to martin@spectator.co.uk.