Water, water everywhere in the media this week, as the Thames Water utility – crippled by debt and shamed by Niagaras of raw sewage – reached the brink of collapse. Anticipating government intervention if Thames’s owners cannot inject sufficient new equity, pundits decried the 1989 privatisation of English and Welsh water – which passed from conventional shareholders to private equity and foreign sovereign wealth that combined to extract £72 billion of dividends while loading the industry with £60 billion of debt and allegedly denying it new reservoirs and leak-free pipes.

Put like that, the fate of water – a resource so natural that some say it should be immune from all financial alchemy – is indefensible. Yet we know that had it remained in public ownership, capital investment would have been minimal, because no cabinet would prioritise water over hospital and schools. We know also that this is a regulated sector in which smart financiers such as Macquarie of Australia merely gamed tax and debt rules to advantage. And we should admit that the record of current owners isn’t all bad: there are ample statistics to indicate gradual (if still insufficient) improvement.

So flush away any idea of a return to state-owned water, because it ain’t going to happen and we’d be worse served if it did. Let’s have new rules that allow investors fair returns so long as they commit to continuous upgrading of essential infrastructure. We can’t claw back past dividends and water bills will inevitably rise – but that’s the price of constant supply and cleaner rivers, and I’d say this week’s water-wailing has been a touch too loud.

Urban renewal

Canary Wharf – the Docklands mini-City that symbolised London’s resurgence as a global finance centre – faces an exodus of corporate tenants that could return it to the state of desolation in which I first encountered it 30 years ago. HSBC is shifting its HQ westwards to smaller premises, the lawyers Clifford Chance having already decided to go, and the talk is that banks and professional firms no longer need the vast floor space and grand foyers that Canary Wharf provides.

Few, I suspect, will be sad to leave. Consciously North American in design – commissioned by the Canadian Reichmann brothers, who fought back from bankruptcy to complete the project in the late 1990s – its charmless blocks and boulevards always spoke of delusions of grandeur: among other memories, I recall dining lavishly at Lehman Brothers and pressing my nose against Bob Diamond’s glass cubicle (he was in New York that day) on Barclays Capital’s monstrous trading floor.

The development’s legacy has been to provoke the City of London proper to scar its own skyline with a cluster of towers whose future must also be uncertain. Having transitioned from derelict docks to toxic finance hive, Canary Wharf itself may now evolve again, after a vacant interlude, into a village of affordable flats, livelier street life and small business spaces. And that, I think, would be a renewal for the better.

France in three words

I’m surrounded by a surging crowd of French protestors. There’s smoke, firecrackers, blaring hip-hop, a defaced statue and distant sirens. I’m darting for the safe haven of a nearby office block but its doors are locked. Frontline reporting or what?

OK, this was Épernay, not Nanterre or Marseille. The smoke was barbecue not burning cars, and the placard-wearing statue was Dom Pérignon, pioneer of champagne-making, not Charles de Gaulle. The building was the glossy headquarters of Moët & Chandon, where our Spectator tour group was due for a tasting, and the protestors were Moët workers enjoying a half-day strike over some minor change in employment terms.

Nevertheless, this was a glimpse of a nation in which high-end capitalism, heavy-handed statism and the anger of the crowd co-exist in constant tension. ‘Pourquoi la Bourse continue à monter?’ (Why is the stock market still rising?) asked Le Figaro forlornly below a headline report of street violence at Nanterre and elsewhere. As we tucked into the Impérial Brut, one of our party encapsulated modern France in three words: ‘Elegance and anarchy.’

Still plenty of fizz

I expected to find champagne, as an industry, rather fuddy-duddy: resting on its laurels, reliant on a méthode that requires upwards of 100 manual interventions to finish each bottle. On the contrary, what I discovered was a parable of resilient entrepreneurship that vigorously adapts to changing tastes, markets and weather.

Having survived phylloxera, two world wars and financial crisis in the early 1990s, champagne chiefs see global warming, at least for the time being, as a positive opportunity. Taittinger is leading the competitive response to the rise of English sparkling wines by planting 40 hectares of vines in Kent to create Domaine Evremond, named after a French epicure who popularised champagne at the court of Charles II. Meanwhile, the multimillion-bottle grandes marques sustain thousands of individual grape growers, the boundaries of the appellation d’origine contrôlée are expanding to take in adjacent villages, and there’s still room for family winemakers such as the house of Henri Chauvet at Rilly-la-Montagne – where Henri’s grandson Damien produces just 70,000 bottles per year – as well as disruptors such as Brimoncourt at Aÿ, an old name stylishly revived by the lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Alexandre Cornot.

So don’t write off the original fizz because your fridge is full of thin prosecco or overpriced English substitutes. Such is the power of the collective brand that Spectator readers, on the evidence of our convivial tour, still aspire to a champagne lifestyle. And as Sunak sinks and Starmer rises, we may all be champagne socialists next year.