Martin Vander Weyer
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Budgets come and Chancellors go, but if we run out of energy in the next decade we’ll all be in that involuntary post-coital position so pithily phrased by Whitehall chief Sir Richard Mottram in the midst of a transport department crisis long ago. Electrified trains won’t be working either, so perhaps he’ll come back and say it again.
Only one thing can save us from shivering in the dark — the fate to which we’re condemned by ministerial eagerness to obey Brussels by closing carbon power plants. That one thing is not wind power, which is almost as discredited as its leading advocate, Prisoner Huhne. Nor is it shale gas, which no one expects to be the game-changer here that it is in the US. Nor is it our friendship with Vladimir Putin, who holds imperial sway over the price of imported gas. No, the one thing that will avert a return to reading by candlelight is nuclear power. In that sense, the most important announcement this week was the granting of planning permission for a new nuclear station at Hinkley Point in Somerset. That doesn’t clinch the deal, however: the French operator EDF is still haggling over a guaranteed ‘strike price’ for power output to make the sums add up.
Besides its future energy contribution, Hinkley’s construction will be a £14 billion growth-booster. It would be hugely irresponsible of Huhne’s ministerial successor, Ed Davey, not to agree terms with EDF for fear that the strike price looks embarrassing and the green lobby throws tantrums. Meanwhile, remind yourself of the case for nuclear versus ‘renewables’ by searching online for the writings of Andrew Kenny, a South African engineer and occasional Spectator contributor. ‘Do you want to work with nature or against it?’ Andrew asks. ‘The immense advantages of nuclear power come from nature, not from man. The nuclear force is by far the strongest force in nature, so that a very small amount of material can provide a very large amount of energy.’ That’s what we’ll need to keep the lights on.
A Qatari takeover bid for Marks & Spencer, talk of which sent the retailer’s shares soaring on Monday, would demonstrate an enlightened pragmatism on the part of the gentlemen from the Gulf — who would be buying a business built by ardent Zionists of the Sieff and Marks dynasty. In these difficult times we draw reassurance from the continuing willingness of foreign wealth, sovereign and private, to invest broadly in British companies and real estate — but we might prefer the world’s super-rich to ease our fiscal pressures in a simpler way by amassing holdings of gilt-edged stocks. And we might also observe that in the Qataris’ case, investments rarely seem to flourish under their desert sunshade.
Picture Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani, prime minister of Qatar and controller of its sovereign wealth fund, sitting lonesome in his penthouse at One Hyde Park and balefully surveying his assets across the London skyline. There’s Harrods just down the road, for which he probably feels he overpaid when he gave Mohamed al Fayed £1.5 billion in 2010. To the east is the Shard, the pointy skyscraper at London Bridge of which he owns 80 per cent; still ‘in talks’ to secure its first office tenants. Further east is the Barclays tower at Canary Wharf, where investigators are crawling over the terms of the controversial Qatari capital injection in 2008. Due south is the desolate Chelsea Barracks site, bought for almost £1 billion in 2007 but with its ‘Gucci ghetto’ development scheme of super-
luxury homes still ‘under review’.
It would be overegging this story to talk of a curse of Qatar, but that’s not an encouraging record. M&S is a potential takeover target — there will surely be rival bidders from the private-equity world — because its performance has been poor and investors are losing faith: London’s leading retail analyst, Nick Bubb, calls it a ‘declining brand’. It’s hard to see the Sheikh’s fat chequebook as a harbinger of revival.
Because you read about banking
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