As the Wagner convoy rumbled northwards towards Moscow on Saturday, markets braced for turmoil. What would armed uprising in Russia do to the supply and price of oil, gas, wheat or fertiliser? Would it provoke investor flights to gold or bitcoin? But when the episode fizzled out, Monday’s prices saw little more than upticks, with natural gas traders more preoccupied by outages in Norway and FTSE action refocused on dim domestic economic prospects. Sighs of relief all round, then, and a simple conclusion: world markets will hail the demise of Vladimir Putin – so long as he goes slowly, of natural causes, and not before the end of the great inflation.

Money matters

‘What should I read to understand inflation?’ asks a friend. Top of my own bedside book pile is We Need To Talk About Inflation by HSBC economist Stephen D. King, who draws lessons from history to capture (according to the former Bank of England governor Mervyn King) ‘everything you wanted to know about inflation but were afraid to ask’. But I’ll also commend Inflation: Why Has It Come Back? And What Can Be Done?, a Politeia pamphlet by Tim Congdon (formerly of this parish) reasserting the importance, apparently forgotten by the Bank, of ‘the quantity of money’. Current price spikes undoubtedly have something to do with Brexit, Covid and Putin; but let’s also recall the wisdom of Milton Friedman: ‘Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it … can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.’

House arrest

What news of Dr Mike Lynch? In April the founder of the Cambridge-based software firm Autonomy, once a great hope of UK tech, lost his fight against extradition to the US to face fraud charges over the $11 billion takeover of his company by Hewlett-Packard. Priti Patel as home secretary declined to halt the process and the High Court upheld her decision. MPs led by David Davis – who argued that Lynch’s treatment showed the one-sidedness of the 2003 US-UK extradition treaty and that his case should have been judged in UK courts – could do no more once he departed for California under the eye of US marshals.

Then what? Let me say that I hold no brief for the multimillionaire Lynch, whom I did not warm to on the one occasion we shared a platform and have had no contact with since. But as soon as he set foot on US soil, I gather, bail conditions offered by US officials in London, which would have allowed him to move around San Francisco and travel to see East Coast lawyers, were torn up by a district judge on the grounds that the risk of attempted flight by Lynch was ‘almost a certainty’. Instead he’s confined to a house with armed guards (for whom he pays), allowed to leave only to meet lawyers locally.

And there I suspect he’ll stay for as long as it takes to plea-bargain a jail sentence: as the NatWest Three (accused of fraud against Enron) discovered, innocent verdicts are so rare in US white-collar trials as to be barely worth fighting for. And foreign governments are so spineless in the face of US judicial overreach that any transaction involving US dollar settlement is susceptible to charges of US ‘wire fraud’. Maybe that’s good if it encourages global business rectitude: but buyer and seller beware.

Prince Ashley

And what of another controversial Mike whose side I’ve occasionally taken? I refer of course to the Sports Direct tycoon Mike Ashley, who has surreptitiously acquired a £60 million holding in the blue-chip clothing retailer Next to add to other recent plays in the online white-goods seller AO World, the electrical retailer Currys and the fast-fashion houses Asos and Boohoo.

Ashley’s Frasers group – now run by his son-in-law Michael Murray but with the big man still calling the bold shots – already has interests in fashion brands such as Hugo Boss, Jack Wills and Mulberry as well as House of Fraser department stores. Other commentators regard Ashley simply as an inveterate punter, engaged in the corporate equivalent of betting on every other horse in the Ascot Gold Cup. Some also characterise his Next stake as a ‘raid on royalty’, contrasting his downmarket image with that of Next chief executive Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise. But as usual, I think they’ve got him wrong.

First, I’ve long argued that Ashley himself deserves a peerage (I suggested ‘Lord Shirebrook’, after his Sports Direct warehouse operation) for his quixotic campaign to keep British high-street retailing alive. Second, I’m pretty sure that as a reader of the only column that’s ever nice about him, he must have spotted my recent item – inspired by Prince Harry’s Dior morning suit – calling for ‘a patriotic tycoon… who wants to build a Best of British conglomerate’. Never mind a middle-ranker like Simon Wolfson – soon we could be mentioning Mike Ashley in the same breath as Bernard Arnault, emperor of the great European luxury-goods combo LVMH.

Make mine a magnum

This column comes to you from Rheims, where I’m helping host the Spectator readers’ Champagne tour. Our first tasting – top scores for magnums of Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle No. 23 and Palmer & Co Blanc de Blancs NV – was followed by a fine dinner on the terrace of La Grande Georgette in front of the cathedral. But does this sybaritic diversion disqualify me from commenting on mortgage pain and economic gloom, in the same sense that Rishi Sunak – to quote the New Statesman – is ‘too rich to rule’? Well, to borrow a phrase from the Prime Minister himself, I’m here to tell you that I’m totally 100 per cent on it. But I’ll have to dash, because the bus is about to leave for a tasting at Taittinger.