Marks & Spencer was a 20th-century paradigm of better business: a trusted brand and a benign employer that built strong relationships with suppliers and generated handsome returns for shareholders. Then its performance began to fade, as one management team after another failed to keep pace with retail trends in-store and online. By August 2020, when it announced 7,000 job cuts and ‘multi-level consultation [on] further streamlining’, I was moved to predict M&S would end up as no more than ‘a chain of upmarket convenience food stores and a website that’s handy for sending flowers and chocolates’.

But I misjudged the residual loyalty of middle-class shoppers. Lately they have been returning in large numbers to increase M&S’s share of the womenswear and grocery markets – knocking spots off Waitrose in the latter sector. Stores refurbished as part of a major investment programme were reported to have performed particularly well over Christmas. If the trend is sustained, then M&S is back – and in a Britain otherwise falling apart in so many aspects, who could deny that’s uplifting news?

Kudos to chief executive Stuart Machin, who began as a teenage shelf-stacker at Sainsbury’s. But even more so to the master-mind of M&S’s revival, chairman Archie Norman – a veteran operator who previously ran Asda, ITV and the London arm of Lazard as well as commuting to Australia to rescue the Coles retail chain. It’s tempting to ask why people with Norman’s skills aren’t hired in Whitehall to run the country – but he had a crack at that, serving as a Tory MP and shadow minister for eight years before giving it up as a bad job. Companies can be wrestled into shape by bosses with determination; politics is a more slippery business.

Stamina rewarded

Speaking of veterans, the deal of the week was undoubtedly the takeover by BlackRock, the US investment giant, of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIL), a transatlantic business best known in the UK as the owner of Gatwick airport, but whose $106 billion of worldwide assets encompass ports, pipelines and green energy projects, including North Sea wind farms.

‘The global need for infrastructure combined with high deficits constraining government spending create unprecedented opportunities for private capital,’ declares BlackRock boss Larry Fink – and GIL is a flagship of the sector. The pity, from a UK viewpoint, is that GIL doesn’t do nuclear power stations – but its sophisticated private finance model backed by mighty BlackRock will be a powerful delivery engine for the transition to clean energy.

And the price of the deal includes $3 billion in cash plus almost $10 billion of BlackRock shares to be divided by GIL’s six veteran founders, one of whom, the deputy chairman Michael McGhee, was a City colleague of mine long ago. Amiable and competent but overlooked by our bosses, he specialised in the unsexy field of airport financing; I worked with him on a scheme to privatise Warsaw’s freight terminal. Stamina rewarded, now he can afford his own jet, with a luxury hangar to park it in.

Spot on – or not

Across the pond, the crypto crowd is abuzz over the decision of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to approve ‘spot bitcoin exchange traded funds’ – a clutch of which launched on 11 January, attracting $4.6 billion of trading on the first day. ‘Spot’ refers to the minute-to-minute price of bitcoin, which US regulators had argued could not be adequately monitored for fraud, hence previous refusals to allow funds based on the spot price to trade on regulated exchanges. Enthusiasts were left to trade crypto assets through unsupervised entities such as Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud-ridden and now bankrupt FTX.

But a court ruling last year described the SEC’s unwillingness to authorise spot bitcoin ETFs as ‘arbitrary and capricious’ and a violation of federal law. So the SEC gave way ungraciously, with its chairman Gary Gensler continuing to warn about crypto’s ‘speculative, volatile nature’.

The positive outcome, arguably, is that investors can now buy bitcoin stakes in relative safety via funds launched by reputable houses such as Fidelity and BlackRock. Even JP Morgan – whose chairman, Jamie Dimon, remains fiercely anti-bitcoin, this week reminding us that ‘its actual use cases are sex-trafficking, tax avoidance, money laundering and terrorism’ – has attached its name as a participant in the BlackRock fund.

Also positive, as my younger Spectator colleagues like to remind me, is the fact that bitcoin is probably the only thing you can buy with a few clicks on your phone that has doubled in value in the past year – and may climb higher as the ETFs attract new money. Call me a whitebeard granddaddy, but I stand with Gensler and Dimon on this one. The SEC’s concession makes bitcoin look a little more mainstream, but the lawless crypto arena at large is still Satan’s casino – and one day, sooner or later, its devotees will be scorched by his sulphurous breath.

Bargains are back

You’ll be wondering where I’ve been lunching or whether I’m on a lettuce-leaf January diet. Happily not – and I can report a welcome trend in London’s West End: the three-course sub-£30 set menu is back. It’s an indication that footfall and staff costs are steady enough for restaurateurs who doubled their prices in panic in the post-Covid hospitality depression to re-introduce bargain offers, in the confident expectation of relatively full houses. The final price with wine and add-ons may bust £50 but that’s well down on what we were paying a year ago. Two I’ll tip are the extravagantly high-camp Manzi’s seafood eaterie in Bateman’s Buildings, Soho, at £24.50 for three courses; and round the corner in Greek Street – better but harder to get a table – the darkly elegant man-cave of Noble Rot (£26).