I worry that my Burlington Bertie life in London’s West End offers a misleading picture of the real economy. Yes, boutiques and brasseries are busy, but what’s it like in outer boroughs and distant provinces?

To take a single morning’s headlines, on the plus side there’s upbeat trading news from ABF, the grocery and Primark discount clothing retailer, which reaches consumers everywhere; and a prediction that energy prices will fall 16 per cent by April. On the negative, warnings that ‘more than 47,000 companies are on the brink of collapse’ (from insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor); and that world trade faces a second wave of Red Sea disruption even if Houthi attacks stop (from the shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd).

So here’s a balanced view: with inflation falling, interest rates at peak, wages generally up and taxes likely to come down, the consumer economy is improving, but not by much; the mildest shock could set it back. In search of confirmation I asked my cleaning lady, who lives in east London, whether she sees things getting better or worse.

‘Pluto has moved into Aquarius,’ she answered solemnly, ‘and that hasn’t happened since the French Revolution.’ I rush to Google: ‘Pluto… the planet of death and rebirth… is often associated with deep, transformative change.’ Deeper than the rise of Keir Starmer and the return of Donald Trump? Crikey. I see no signs in Piccadilly and the Strand, but we’d all be wise to brace for turbulence ahead.

Steel’s bitter end

Transformative trouble has hit Port Talbot, where 2,800 job losses could follow Tata Steel’s decision to close its last two coal-fired blast furnaces and replace them with electric arc furnaces that will reprocess scrap steel. The change will reduce the UK’s carbon footprint but leave us more dependent than ever on imports, with no capacity to make primary steel from iron ore.

‘Net-zero madness’, critics cry, but even an alternative plan from the plant’s unions would only keep one furnace operating for less than a decade, at huge expense to Tata (which says it’s already losing £1 million a day) or taxpayers.

The British steel industry has been slowly dying for 50 years, crushed by tectonic global shifts. Port Talbot is literally the bitter end. New technologies and new investors are the transformative answer, though they’ll never create equivalent numbers of industrial jobs.

A Starmer portfolio

With Starmer in mind, I asked Robin Andrews – the ‘veteran investor’ whose share suggestions served readers well over the past decade – how he might build a buy list for the new political era which, let’s face it (and to quote Philip Larkin), is coming like Christmas.

He picked three sectors bound to be affected by a change of government, starting with housebuilding: if incoming ministers address housing shortages by easing planning rules, then big names such as Persimmon and Barratt will reward the patient investor, as will Forterra in building materials.

Next, defence, and the perpetual search for more bang for Whitehall’s buck. Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems were strong performers last year but they may have further to rise; QinetiQ (the privatised defence research establishment) and Cohort (a smaller collection of defence tech ventures) could also do well.

Finally, pharma, in which any advance that might improve NHS performance or relieve its pressure points must be worth a look. A safety-first approach would involve quoted specialist investment trusts such as Polar Capital Global, Biotech Growth Trust and International Biotechnology Trust – or even safer, a holding in AstraZeneca as a pillar of the sector. But for a little more excitement our man picks three smaller companies in the process of seeking US Federal Drug Administration approval for their products and with reasonable cash runways: Scancell in immunology; Destiny Pharma in infection prevention; and Angle in liquid biopsy technology. Shield Therapeutics, with an iron deficiency drug already FDA-approved, could be a fourth. A spread across those four, plus Cohort, is a bet the veteran investor has already made for himself; but as ever, he urges you to do your own research. And we invite you to send your own Starmer portfolio picks to martin@spectator.co.uk.

City fox

To the Mansion House for tea with the City’s 695th Lord Mayor. He is Professor Michael Mainelli, and rather surprisingly he’s an Italian-American from Seattle who started out as an aerospace and computer scientist. He’s probably best known for founding a market-research firm called Z/Yen, publisher of a ‘global financial centres index’ in which London currently ranks second, below New York but above Singapore.

The theme of his mayoralty, ‘Connect to Prosper’, is less about financial clout and more about the City as an intellectual power-house and hub of ideas. That broad canvas is in contrast to the approach of his predecessor, Nick Lyons. Indeed, as I tried to keep pace with Mainelli’s polymathic tour d’horizon, I recalled the distinction first made by the ancient Greek poet Archilocus between the hedgehog who knows one big thing and the fox who knows many things.

Lyons was the former. He set himself one major objective: to persuade pension providers to contribute to collective funds for long-term, high-return, illiquid investment in UK infrastructure projects and unlisted equities. The ‘Mansion House compact’ to that effect, signed by nine UK pension firms last summer, attacked a big gap in the London capital market – and was an unusually solid achievement for a one-year term of office.

Mainelli – the fox – assures me that con-tinuity from one mayor to the next is ‘stronger than people think’. But amid all the conversations he’s keen to start in ‘the world’s coffee house’, I hope the Lyons project doesn’t get lost in a cacophony.