This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The other week we had a lobbyist in the boardroom — though I am still not sure why. The company secretary burbled something about the need to “elevate the directors’ capabilities in geopolitical risk”. However, I suspect it had more to do with the chief executive’s clunky campaign to secure his “K” before we give him the boot (of which more later).

This consultant was a familiar Westminster type with shirt buttons straining and a lot of mouth breathing. But I had to hand it to him — he had figured out how to turn tawdry regime change into a shiny product to be monetised. “This is a really good time to engage with Keir and Rachel,” he said. “They are very receptive to policy ideas from business. You shouldn’t miss out on this golden opportunity.”

There was a murmur of assent in the room as the directors were transported to a late-nineties reverie of Cool Britannia and Peter Mandelson being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” and all the lucrative opportunities which followed: PFI, super-casinos and supplying Pugin wallpaper to the Lord Chancellor.

However, the simple, inescapable truth is that little good has ever come from business leaders “engaging” with elected politicians and that’s not going to change now.

During my days in financial services a relationship with a minister was at best a nice-to-have, but more often became a liability. I might momentarily persuade him to review some irritating piece of red tape by appealing to his sense of a “buccaneering global Britain”. 

But he would quickly forget his commitment or get reshuffled — and then I would have to face the fall-out with the regulators in the Bank of England, who took a passive-aggressive delight in punishing me for trying to circumvent their authority. I suspect the same sort of thing happens in every other sector with a regulator or a customer in the public sector.

Fundamentally, the problem is one of mismatched attention spans. The chaps building nuclear power stations think about life in epic 50-year sweeps. Even the most myopic pension funds are plotting how to match assets and liabilities over the next ten years. 

And most other well-run businesses are committed to delivering a strategy stretching at least five years into the future. Meanwhile, in politics, we have gone from a week being regarded as a long time to policy kites being flown in Twitter-storms that crash-land within minutes.

I read that Rishi Sunak is using his Goldman Sachs training to bring greater long-term planning to Whitehall. But anyone who believes this nonsense has clearly never met a real-life investment banker. Most of them spend their lives chasing deals with the same strategic forethought of Labradors pursuing squirrels in the park. 

We live now in a state of such mutual incomprehension that a casual coffee with a politician feels like those moments when an anthropologist makes first contact with the head man of an isolated tribe in the upper Amazon. The only rational approach for us humble wealth-creators is to leave our elected masters to their prelapsarian state and hope our worlds don’t collide.

Unfortunately, some of my peers take a different view. I remember one of my son’s prep school masters confiding that the best way to motivate boys was through elaborate hierarchies of meaningless jobs. (“If you work hard at being changing room monitor, you might become a dining room prefect by next Michaelmas.”) 

Sadly, in business, there are plenty of grown-ups who believe in self-actualisation through the honours system — and they will do whatever political greasing is required to get noticed.

For the rest of us, the news of a CEO getting a gong is a cast-iron opportunity to profit by taking a short position on their business. The once mighty GSK began to flatline soon after its then chief, Andrew Witty, received a knighthood in 2012. Shares in Legal & General intitially fell 30 per cent after its boss, Nigel Wilson, was knighted in the 2022 New Year honours. 

Those with longer memories will recall the “Ks” awarded to James Crosby and Fred Goodwin shortly before their respective companies, HBOS and RBS, almost sank the country when the financial crisis hit. 

I think this problem is about to get a lot more serious. Thanks to the well- reported issue of UK pension funds deserting the London equity markets in favour of lower-risk gilts, investor relations teams are increasingly having to tour America in search of new investors. 

And most free-born American fund managers won’t go near a British company with a titled boardroom. It conjures images of all the things they hate about us: entitlement, brown food, and fussy etiquette designed to embarrass them.

Perhaps desperation for American money will elevate the behaviour of my peers in much the same way that Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham started being nicer to his servants when he married an heiress from Cincinnati. 

However, I fear the weak and the vain in my world will always be tempted by the siren voices of the public affairs consultants and their promises of “meaningful engagement” and hints about future visits to the Palace with the wife.