I’ve been reading – so you don’t have to – speeches recently addressed to a hot-ticket gathering of business leaders at the Oval cricket ground by Sir Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. The nub is a promise to hold corporation tax at the current rate of 25 per cent for the duration of the next parliament, combined with a warning that ‘levelling up of workers’ rights’ will cause companies’ labour costs to rise. Then there’s all the usual guff you’d expect from a government-in-waiting about infrastructure and skills; plus an unusually warm tone towards the financial services sector, including a pledge not to reinstate the EU-inspired cap on bankers’ bonuses that was abolished by Kwasi Kwarteng.

In essence, Britain’s boardrooms now believe Labour can’t lose the forthcoming election and the City’s chieftains – the likes of Sir Douglas Flint of abrdn, Nigel Higgins of Barclays and Sir John Kingman of Legal & General – have been lining up to join its advisers. So there’ll be lots more supping of Labour’s ‘proudly pro-business, pro-worker’ porridge in the months to come.

But at least there’s one scrap worth watching. Back in 2021, Reeves pledged to close a loophole that allows partners in private equity firms – whom she accused of ‘asset-stripping some of our most valued businesses’ – to pay 28 per cent capital gains tax on ‘carried interest’ profits rather than 45 per cent top-rate income tax. Some 2,550 individuals are reckoned to benefit to the tune of £400 million a year, so it looks like an easy symbolic win for Reeves. And she’s not wrong in the sense that private equity is too often seen as a ruthless profit-extractor rather than a patient investor helping promising companies to grow.

But private equity’s fat cats are fighting back, threatening to invest less in the UK and move themselves abroad if their tax bonanza is taken away. In the current mood of cosying-up, I suspect Reeves will back off and compromise – a manoeuvre still known in Labour-speak, I believe, as seeking the third way.

Brothers apart

I’m sorry to see the billionaire Issa brothers falling out with one another. Sons of Gujarati immigrants who settled in Blackburn, Mohsin and Zuber Issa started with a single set of petrol pumps, built Euro Garages (EG) into one of Europe’s biggest chains of filling stations and convenience stores, and in 2020 – in partnership with the TDR private equity group – acquired the Asda supermarket chain from Walmart for £6.8 billion. Criticised though they have been for the scale and complexity of their debts, they are living proof that bold entrepreneurs from modest origins can make it big in British business.

The reported rift has to do with Mohsin divorcing his wife of 30 years to pursue a new relationship. Sources say the younger Zuber now wants to sell his personal stake in Asda in order to focus on EG – and whatever the unravelling, the brothers apart will be less potent than together.

Meanwhile, a curious detail catches my eye: Mohsin ‘is said [by the Daily Mail] to have moved out of the family compound near Blackburn and into a nearby mansion, which he bought for £18.2 million’. I can’t see a stately home or landed estate currently for sale anywhere in the north-west for more than half of that price. Has he bought a whole postal district?

Tunnel power

Le Shuttle through the Channel Tunnel is never a beguiling experience. But at least the lavatories have improved, I noticed on my recent trip. And after 30 years of debt restructurings and corporate upheavals, so have the finances, with record 2023 revenues in the operating company Getlink (formerly Groupe Eurotunnel) of €1.8 billion and a 58 per cent share of the cross-Channel passenger car market, as holidaymakers despair of delays and fare rises on competing ferry services.

What’s most interesting is €558 million of those revenues come not from traffic but from sales of electricity transmission capacity via the tunnel’s ElecLink interconnector, rolled out without fanfare in 2022. Incapable as we seem to be in addressing the UK’s long-term energy gap, you might think that means power constantly being piped from France to Kent. But in fact it’s often the other way, what with French nuclear stations out of action for repair and the giant ArcelorMittal steelworks at Dunkirk about to switch to electric arc furnaces (ahead of Tata at Port Talbot) in the cause of decarbonisation. Either way, the interconnector is a belated smart use of a great engineering feat that few of us have ever learned to love.

Green Alps

Maybe what Mohsin Issa has really bought – in a moment of folly – is an up-yours-brother chalet in the French Alps. I say folly because, at €15 million or so for a family-sized new-build in an exclusive location and with a full suite of ‘wellness facilities’, such extravagances can only shrink in value as the climate warms and the pistes retreat.

Even in the supposedly prime skiing days of late January, my lodgings in the Haute-Savoie resort of Megève looked out on snowless green pastures to the south while thin slush, boosted by artificial snow cannons, barely covered the lower slopes to the north. Some reports claim that the European ski season has shortened on average by as much as 38 days since 1970 and that lower-altitude stations such as Megève – among perhaps one in three of all Alpine resorts – could become completely unviable within a few years.

What’s more, you’ll pay a 1.5 per cent annual French wealth tax on the value of your chalet and you’re highly unlikely to meet an unsanctioned Russian oligarch (or underinvested Gulf sheikh) who’s eager to buy you out. In short, however rich you are, I wouldn’t blow it on Alpine assets if I were you. But I’ll happily join you for champagne and charcuterie on the terrace of the Ideal 1850 restaurant, with its panoramic and still unmelted vista of Mont Blanc.