My eye was caught by a passage of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement last week that other pundits, intent on analysing tax impacts, largely skipped past. As part of ‘progressing further capital market reforms to boost the attractiveness of our markets and the UK as one of the most attractive places to start, grow and list a company’, said Jeremy Hunt, ‘I will explore options for a Natwest retail share offer… It’s time to get Sid investing again.’

Leaving aside the non sequitur that battered NatWest, formerly RBS, still 39 per cent owned by the taxpayer 15 years after its bailout, hardly counts as a start-up with growth prospects, how many of Hunt’s wider audience got the reference to Sid, who he was and why he stopped investing? The answer is that he was a brilliant invention of the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, whose slogan ‘Tell Sid’ helped attract 4.5 million retail applicants for the 1986 privatisation sale of shares in British Gas. Sid was the herald of the Thatcherite dream of citizen capitalism, in which savers who were also homeowners would accumulate share portfolios to provide independence in old age and nest-eggs to pass on.

For the record, a minimum £135 stake in British Gas in 1986 would have grown over 25 years to £1,686 worth of shares in the successor companies Centrica, BG and National Grid. But few first shareholders hung on and even fewer sustained a share-buying habit – though their offspring may gamble on hot tips spread by social media. Today’s capital markets are wholly oriented
towards institutional rather than retail investors, who are generally underserved by a plethora of opaque, fee-laden collective investment products.

It’s a sad comment on all that has happened in the financial world since the 1980s that Sid’s grandchildren regard the stock market with suspicion and the institutions behind it as hives of mis-selling and greed. Boosting ‘the attractiveness of our markets’ is not just a worthwhile aim, it’s essential for economic health and growth. An offloading of NatWest shares that have recently fallen back to their price level of 2009 really isn’t going to advance the cause.

Thin end of the deal

Elsewhere on the high street, Metro Bank – the challenger that averted collapse in October after a £925 million refinancing which brought in a Colombian billionaire, Jaime Gilinski Bacal, as controlling shareholder – is reported to be selling a £3 billion residential mortgage portfolio to Barclays. This is the second time Metro has shifted a bundle of property lendings: in an earlier round of ‘balance sheet optimisation’ in December 2020, it sold £3 billion worth to NatWest.

Metro will still hold around £9 billion of lendings on its own account after this latest sell-off, but it has created a curious business model. Here’s a bank that has tried, at high cost, to resist the trend towards reduced customer service by expanding to 76 glossy branches, but also acts as a wholesale mortgage supplier to banks that have slashed their costs by closing, between them, more than 800 branches since 2019. Needs must, but Metro shareholders old and new might feel they’ve had the thin end of that bargain.

Who you gonna call?

Boris Johnson and I have just been to Toronto – for different gigs, I hasten to add, and in different classes of aircraft seat. He was there for a conference of the Ontario Real Estate Association, whose members were invited (I kid you not) to ‘learn from Mr Johnson’s unflinching leadership, and how he reformed UK housing regulations to get more homes built’.

Canada’s crowded cities are suffering a ‘housing affordability crisis’ driven by raised mortgage rates, speculative investment and immigrant-led population growth, up by a million to almost 40 million last year. It’s an issue that is doing major poll damage to the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau and which will sound all too familiar to home-seekers here, especially in London. And as they sang in Ghostbusters: ‘If there’s something strange/ in your neighbourhood/ who you gonna call?’

I failed to blag a ticket for our former prime minister and London mayor’s speech, but I hope he gave the assembled realtors good value: there would certainly have been laughs in an account of his own pre- and post-Downing Street housing affordability crises.

Storms ahead

Johnson would probably have been better occupied joining me across town at the Canada-UK Colloquium, where delegates from these two close allies were debating global issues and risks – ranging from China’s advance in sensitive technologies (56 per cent of known global investment in quantum computing, we were told) to the resurrection of Trump and the even scarier possibility of space storms akin to the 1859 ‘Carrington Event’, which you may wish to Google, that can knock out entire national power grids and global navigation systems. In short, there have been nine such solar eruptions in the past 15,000 years and we really ought to have tested plans to cope with them – or at least have unflinching leaders who pretend they have plans.

Enough Johnson jibes already: put that down to jealousy of his speaking fees. What he will have discovered, as I did, is that Canadians are courteous, modest, serious folk who worry about their place in the world and in relation to their powerful southern neighbour, but who are blessed with abundant natural resources and strong institutions – including relatively sensible banks and giant pension funds that incline to far-sighted investment at home and abroad, perhaps even in the UK infrastructure we’re incapable of funding for ourselves.

They also, I discover, eat heartily. I enjoyed plump Niagara mussels at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, veal piccata at Biagio on King St East, and piles of fried potatoes for breakfast fuel against the wintry chill./>