Imagine you’re Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, drafting your Autumn Statement for delivery in three weeks’ time. Bookies’ odds for a Tory general election win have moved out to six-to-one (against Labour’s dead-cert one-to-seven) following by-election wipe-outs. The Lib Dems look set to nab your South West Surrey seat if you don’t stand down anyway. And you can’t give your back-benches red-meat tax cuts because public borrowing for this year could run £30 billion higher than forecast.

Releasing the pension ‘triple lock’ to save money would alienate older Tories. Inheritance tax giveaways that might please them would be campaign gold for Labour. A stamp duty cut would do nothing for floating-vote home-buyers facing mortgage costs that will stay high as long as inflation does. In short, there’s nothing splashy you can do to save the government or your own career.

So you might as well do sensible things to help the nation by helping employers face the threat of recession. The Federation of Small Businesses has a shopping list that includes extending business rate relief for retail, hospitality and leisure; making skills training for the self-employed tax deductible; boosting housebuilding with new brownfield development reliefs; and forcing large firms to pay smaller suppliers quicker. No headline-grabbers, but useful tweaks before you go.

Miracles for slimmers?

‘Could obesity drugs take a bite out of the food industry?’ asks a Morgan Stanley research report, highlighting the startling – and, to some observers, scary – impact of appetite-suppressing medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy. These drugs, we’re told, can reduce calorie intake by 20 to 30 per cent per day, with patients cutting back sharply on ‘high-fat, sweet and salty’ snacks as well as fizzy drinks and booze. So why frightening?

Because Morgan Stanley thinks 24 million Americans could be taking the drugs by 2035, Elon Musk and ‘TikTok influencers’ having enthusiastically endorsed them. There’ll be rising clamour for them over here too, Ozempic being currently available through the NHS only for Type 2 diabetics and Wegovy for limited numbers of weight-loss patients.

Potential gastrointestinal side-effects are already well known; more importantly, as National Geographic put it, the drugs’ ‘relatively recent approval means researchers still don’t know what the effects of taking them long term might be’. Another report, from Fortune, found that Novo Nordisk, the Danish maker of the two drugs, had purchased ‘more than 457,000 meals’ last year at a cost of $9 million to educate doctors about its products. The company told Fortune it ‘follows the highest ethical standards as well as all legal and regulatory requirements’ – and with so much at stake, it’s bound to face negative spin from food and drink industry lobbyists and weight-loss competitors.

Observe, for example, how shares in WeightWatchers International have plunged as those of Novo Nordisk have soared fivefold. Maybe these really are miracle medicines and maybe your plump columnist ought to pester his GP for them. But experience surely tells us every ‘blockbuster drug’ story merits highly quizzical scrutiny.

Cross-Channel arrival

I’m intrigued by Evolyn, a rail start-up that aims to launch a rival to Eurostar in 2025 – the first time a competitor has sought to make serious use of the Channel tunnel’s ‘open access’ principle and its capacity for almost double the current Eurostar traffic load.

Behind Evolyn is the rich but secretive Cosmen dynasty of transport operators from Spain, who hold a stake in what used to be the National Express bus and rail business, now called Mobico. Other backers have yet to reveal themselves and there’s some mystery over whether Evolyn has yet ordered a dozen trains from the French manufacturer Alstom.

Nevertheless, if its first offering from London to Paris succeeds, a more ambitious Ryanair-style rail disruptor connecting to other European capitals would be a welcome addition to the travel landscape. Even better, and as consolation for the collapse of HS2, how about an entrepreneurial revival of the ‘Regional Eurostar’ project on which £320 million was fruitlessly invested in the 1990s in the hope of running direct cross-Channel trains from Glasgow, York and Manchester? Or if that’s too ambitious, why not a northern terminus for Evolyn on a fast line to St Pancras, repurposing that middle-of-nowhere monument to bad infrastructure planning which is East Midlands Parkway? The moral, in transport as in so much else, is never stop dreaming of better.

City chaps remembered

News of the deaths of two well-liked City men who triumphed over disability stirs memories of the Square Mile as I first knew it, so different from today. Donald Cameron of Lochiel was my benign boss at Schroders in the late 1970s, when youngsters like me gave more attention to the Times crossword than to the next deal, unaware of the forces of change that would electrify London’s financial arena a few years later. Afflicted by multiple sclerosis, Donald returned to the Highlands cheerfully to fulfil the roles of clan chieftain and lord lieutenant from his mobility scooter: ‘the most loved man in these parts’, a neighbour tells me.

Likewise, a recent packed memorial service at St Luke’s in Chelsea heard how David ‘Chappers’ Chaplin overcame birth defects that left him with short arms and prosthetic legs, to become an ebullient private-client fund manager and the leading light of JO Hambro (now Waverton) Investment Management. His career began in 1971 with a job interview at the grand stockbrokers Rowe & Pitman, whose pipe-smoking senior partner Julian Martin Smith – from the school before the old school, as it were, and a Chaplin family friend – asked only three questions: ‘How are your parents?’, Had any good shooting this year?’ and ‘When can you start?’ Those were the days.