A giveaway Budget in March preceding a general election in May against an improving economic backdrop: that, we’re told, is Downing Street’s favoured scenario. But still the election is Keir Starmer’s to lose, so here’s my start-the-year advice to him. Don’t bang on about Rishi Sunak being too rich; don’t make immigration the issue, because you have no solutions; don’t pretend to admire Margaret Thatcher; but do channel John Major – to whom you bear much closer comparison – and offer a new Citizen’s Charter.

What? Isn’t that 1991 exercise in footling managerialism, forever associated with the ‘cones hotline’, remembered as a laughable failure? Maybe, but its intention was good: to deliver better performance across every aspect of public administration through accountability, user choice and private-sector best practice. And isn’t our greatest source of misery and low productivity today the dysfunction of everything from commuter trains and NHS dentistry to backlogs in the criminal courts and the chaos of ‘making tax digital’? I am, as it happens, a constituent of Sir Keir in Holborn and St Pancras: if he comes up with a new deal to transform public services, I might even vote for him.

Dames and knights

For once, some interesting boardroom names in the New Year Honours – a list that traditionally reflects British anti-business prejudice by saluting every other walk of life ahead of enterprise and corporate leadership.

It helps to be different, of course – and I raise my hat to ‘UK Women in Finance Champion’ and Aviva chief Amanda Blanc for her damehood, even if her policy of overseeing senior appointments to stop them all being filled with white men is a provocation to anti-wokeists. Likely to divide opinions in a different way is the knighthood for the Wetherspoons founder Tim Martin, deserved for having created 43,000 pub jobs but pushed for (rumour has it) by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch on the grounds that Martin is one of the few high-profile entrepreneurs, and the only one in hospitality, to have consistently spoken in favour of Brexit.

Then there’s Stephen Hester, whose elevation rewards stamina and thick skin rather than espousal of causes. Poached from British Land to replace Fred Goodwin at RBS (now NatWest) after its 2008 bailout, he faced flak over his pay package and was eventually ousted after disagreeing with the Treasury over the pace at which the crippled bank should return to the private sector. Undeterred, Hester went on to run the RSA insurance group, his third FTSE100 company, and chair easyJet. Still only 63, he’ll have more top jobs and flak storms ahead.

And finally Gerald Ronson, the petrol stations tycoon who was convicted for his role in the 1986 Guinness share scandal, now knighted for £300 million of charitable efforts. Ronson was always well respected by bankers (including, long ago in a junior capacity, me) despite the Guinness lapse which – harshly, some thought – brought him six months in Ford open prison. His ascent to public redemption through good deeds deserves a warm salute.

Lessons from 1974

How do this year’s honours compare with those of half a century ago? And why ask? Back then, capitalism was losing ground to state socialism and union militancy, while popular disdain for trade and wealth was even stronger than today – but gongs rather than bonuses were the customary consolation for corporate chiefs.

There were five business knights in the 1974 list, none known for anything other than steady helmsmanship – and one, incidentally, was another NatWest boss, John Prideaux, who a few months later had to issue public denials that his bank was about to collapse. Perhaps there’s a curse: look what happened to Alison Rose of NatWest a few months after her own damehood.

But still, why bother looking back? The answer is that the start of 1974 is worth recalling as one of the lowest moments in British economic history, when stoppages by miners and train drivers forced a failing Tory government to impose a candlelit ‘three-day week’ while food prices soared and the Bank of England ‘lifeboat’ committee fought to avert a domino collapse across the City.

Prospects for my own teenage cohort looked dire. Yet a decade later, as the Thatcherite drive for private enterprise and a more efficient state took hold, all was transformed. Prospects for today’s young are surely much brighter than ours ever were. If only we could persuade them that most of the solutions to the global challenges that make them so anxious – net zero is one, healthcare for ageing populations another – are in the hands not of noisesome activists or gone-tomorrow ministers, but of the entrepreneurs and business-builders whom they should learn to admire and honour.

Meghan’s comeback?

The City looks awfully quiet after a 2023 ‘deal drought’ that saw mergers and acquisitions as well as IPO activity fall to chillingly low levels. But there’s a revolution afoot which only office landlords have so far noticed: an invasion of American lawyers. Big names such as Kirkland & Ellis from Chicago and Latham & Watkins from Los Angeles have been leasing acres of space, while tensions have been rising (and ‘dozens of senior lawyers quitting’, says one report) in the £2.8 billion merger of New York’s Shearman & Sterling with Allen & Overy, pillar of the ‘Magic Circle’ of established City partnerships.

There’s the makings of great television drama here: brash Yankee deal-stealers vs stuffed-shirt Brits who all fagged for each other at school, like a re-run of the 1980s investment banking scene. Stand by for the London opening of the fictional Suits firm of Pearson Hardman, with the Duchess of Sussex herself playing the ruthless arriviste bent on destroying the old guard.