Today the Financial Times reports that the Saudis have suspended negotiations over its latest potential purchase of 72 Eurofighter Typhoons.

That is big time bad news for BAE. When associated contracts are taken into account, Britain's biggest export deal is probably worth around £40bn to the company.

It seems that someone in Riyadh is getting a bit touchy about SFO requests to access details of certain Swiss bank accounts, and is threatening to buy French Rafale fighters instead.

The SFO probe centres around the suggestion that bribes have been paid to members of the Saudi ruling family. But what I guess it won't be looking into is the extensive evidence that members of Britain's former ruling family have also taken massive kickbacks.

Fuelling my cynicism here is the record of earlier investigations into al Yamamah. The National Audit Office launched an inquiry into bribery allegations surrounding the contract in 1989. It took three years. So what was the outcome, you ask? We still don't know.

In March 1992 the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee decided not to publish the NAO's findings. The chairman, Labour MP Robert Sheldon, refused even to disclose the NAO report to committee members, assuring them that there was 'no evidence of fraud or corruption'.

Some Labour MPs expressed 'misgivings'. Martin O'Neill - then Labour's defence spokesman - pledged that a future Labour government would re-open the inquiry. But nine years after Labour returned to office, that still hasn't happened.

In October 1994, Labour MP Tam Dalyell produced two documents - a US intelligence report and an internal British Aircraft Corporation memo - which claimed that Mark Thatcher, the son of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, received commission payments worth as much as £12m from al Yamamah. He is pictured above with the woman he calls 'mumsy' and the rest of us call ... no, this is a family blog.

But the PAC declined to investigate the matter, deeming it outside its remit, which is restricted to issues concerning taxpayers' money. The claims have never been refuted. And in the intervening years, we have certainly learned much about the ethical standards of the son of our former prime minister.

Last year, Mark Thatcher was forced to leave South Africa after pleading guilty to involvement in a plot to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea. He was fined $500,000 and given a four-year suspended sentence.

The Campaign Against the Arms Trade website offers an extremely useful dossier on al Yamamah. Read it here.

Meanwhile, I for one will only start taking the claims of Blair to stand for democracy in the Middle East - seemingly accepted as good coin by the pro-war left - when he speaks out against the supply of advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most repugnant dictatorship in the world.

‘On the basis of the argument that monetary policy is too important to leave to politicians, why do not we simply sub-contract the entire economy to Goldman Sachs?’

Well, they say life imitates art. George W Bush has seemingly taken my local MP’s advice, according to an article in the Financial Times this morning [subscription required]"

‘The appointment last week of Goldman Sachs’s William Dudley to head the Federal Reserve Bank of New York market’s group raised to an unprecedented level the number of top positions in public service that former executives from any one company have held during a White House administration.

‘Today, former Goldman Sachs executives control or influence the oversight of key aspects of the US financial system and hold prominent positions throughout the Bush White House.

‘They include: Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary and former Goldman chief executive; Reuben Jeffrey, a former Goldman managing partner who is the chief regulator of commodity futures and options trading; Joshua Bolten, White House chief of staff who served as a Goldman executive director; Robert Steel, the former Goldman vice-chairman who advises Mr Paulson on domestic finance; and Randall Fort, the ex-Goldman director of global security who advises Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state.’

What if the other lot get in? No problem. Goldman Sachs has got the Democrats stitched up, too:

‘Goldman represented the biggest single donor base to the Democratic party ahead of this year’s mid-term elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and at least two Democratic political heavyweights Jon Corzine, the New Jersey governor, and Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, are Goldman alumni.’

As former top level employees of a top Wall Street bank, these men retain close ties to a company that stands to benefit from their public policy decisions.

And I don’t suppose they will ever forget that it was Goldman Sachs that made them rich and influential enough to land their current roles in the first place.

Insider dealing seems to be endemic on the London Stock Exchange. The Financial Times has analysed the standard deviation in selected share price movements over the last year, and this is what it found:

’Shares in Reg Vardy, the car dealership, rose 8.2 per cent relative to its sector four days before rival Pendragon made its $936m (£467m) offer. Such a share price movement was so rare it had a one in 3.5m chance of happening.

‘Likewise, Viridian, an Irish energy utility, had the biggest single-day share movement relative to other peer stocks on the day before Arcapita unveiled its official bid announcement. The price movement was so unusual that the chance of it happening is less than one in 1,000bn.’

Meanwhile, an earlier study – this time from the Financial Services Authority – detected suspicious share price movements preceding about a quarter of all 2005 takeovers.

Bear this in mind when Cameron delivers his ‘revolution in civic responsibility’ speech later today. Insider dealing is just as boorish as gratuitious vandalism, even if most City Boys do have impeccable manners.

Home Office minister Tony McNulty says that the government will take no lessons from Mr Cameron and his "hug a hoodie" Tories. But what are "hug a pinstriper" New Labour going to do to tackle this level of corruption?

Nicholas Ferguson, one of the most prominent figures in Europe’s private equity industry, has broken the sector’s taboo on tax by criticising the fact that top buy-out executives "pay less tax than a cleaning lady."

"Any common sense person would say that a highly-paid private equity executive paying less tax than a cleaning lady or other low-paid workers, that can’t be right," he said. However he warned any policy change should not jeopardise private equity’s role in the economy.

This year 4,200 City workers received bonuses of £1m or more, totalling £8,800m. Yet progressive taxation remains an issue that none of the mainstream parties will even think about, even in one of their periodic bouts of ‘thinking the unthinkable’.

Among the New Labour deputy leadership contenders, Peter Hain has raised the idea that City high-flyers might like to think about giving two-thirds of their "astronomic" bonuses to charity. Harriet Harman and Alan Johnson have made vaguely sympathetic noises off.

However, none of them are proposing any changes to the tax system or any element of compulsion. And despite the comments above from Mr Ferguson, the suspicion has to be that such tugs on the heartstrings will find few takers in the square mile.

Last year the Lib-Dems dropped their earlier manifesto commitment to the modest proposal of a 50% tax band for those on six-figure incomes.

The usual justification is that the City creates wealth for this country, and that if the £1m-plus bonus brigade were made to hand over any meaningful proportion of the cash, they would up sticks for other financial centres.

On that logic, why tax them at all? Shouldn’t we actually give them money, to thank them for gracing Britain with their presence? Then again, it’s probably foolish even to joke about things like that online. It only takes one policy wonk to stumble accidentally on this website and the proposal could become official New Labour policy in a matter of weeks.

The MP for Bethnal Green and Bow has insisted he did not know whether donations given by a Jordanian businessman to his charity - the Mariam Appeal - were paid for by illicit Iraqi oil sales in contravention of the United Nations oil for food programme.

I think Jung called it synchronicity. But there are questions of both scale and intent here.

Chances are that BAe will never stand in the dock for what it has done. Neither will any New Labour politician, even though there is a strong prima facie case that this government condoned the bribery of a foreign official to the tune hundreds of millions of pounds,

Bribery of foreign officials has been an offence since 2001, not to mention unethical in most people’s eyes even before it became against the law.

The more Lord Goldsmith invokes ‘national security’ as a reason not to come clean, the more most of us will reasonably suspect New Labour has something to hide.

At £230,000, Zureikat’s allegedly ‘improper’ donations to the Mariam Appeal were minor in comparison to BAe backhanders. Whatever one thinks of the morality of Galloway accepting money from this and other Middle Eastern ruling class sources, there is no evidence that the cash was used for anything other than the campaigning purposes for which it was raised.

I don’t think anybody describing himself or herself as a socialist should accept funding from the royal family of a wahhabi totalitarian state that revels in organising public executions in the main square of the capital as a routine matter of public entertainment.

But I sure as hell don’t think that a government describing itself as democratic should permit a company that is in many ways a de facto appendage of the British state to make the planet’s wealthiest and most repugnant monarchy even wealthier.

Lord Woolf - former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales – is to head up an ethics committee at BAE, the British-owned arms manufacturer with the closest of ties to the British state. Other members of the great and the good are likely to be announced as participants shortly.

Inevitably, the initial reaction is to suspect spin. BAE has for decades been facing allegations that it pays backhanders to the Saudi royal family as part of the £43bn al Yamamah military equipment supply contract.

Last week, the Guardian and BBC specifically alleged that it has given over £1bn to Prince Bandar. Bribery of foreign officials has been an offence since 2001, although BAE strongly denies that it has acted unlawfully.

The affair takes on a political dimension, after New Labour attorney general Lord Goldsmith ordered that a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into deal be stopped in December 2006, citing the UK's national security.

The first question that needs to be asked about any ethics probe is just which code of ethics it will base itself upon. Inevitably, the ethics of the directors of for-profit arms manufacturer will differ from the ethics of a Quaker pacifist.

And both those sets of moral standards will be at variance with most of us, who can conceive of circumstances in which conflicts have to be fought and therefore accept weapons have to be produced.

But that does not signal approval of them being sold to repressive dictators, with the full connivance of a Labour government once ostensibly committed to an ethical foreign policy.

After all, the arms trade is a dirty business, the argument will run. It is entirely legal to sell weaponry to sovereign states. If Britain doesn’t take the money, some other bugger will. And if palms have to be greased in the process, well, that’s how business is done in the Middle East.

It all sounds like a sophisticated realpolitik defence, doesn’t it? But the trouble with that line of reasoning is that it doesn’t stop at fighter planes. If Tornadoes, why not torture equipment? There’s certainly a market for that in Saudi Arabia.

From a Marxist standpoint, al Yamamah illustrates like few other issues the fusion of state and capital in Britain today. Don’t expect the Tories to go for the jugular in what should be a major political scandal. There is plenty of evidence – much of it willfully surpressed – pointing to the close involvement of Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark in the early years of the contract.

BAE’s interests will remain privileged, whichever party is in power. However long Lord Woolf and his establishment cohorts deliberate, one suspects a searing indictment is not a serious prospect.

If you or I exceed our overdraft limit, we get hit with a shirty letter and a £25 penalty charge. When Northern Rock effectively does the same thing, chief executive Adam Applegarth taps the Bank of England for an emergency lending facility instead.

The ‘mortgage bank’ – as demutualised building societies like to be known – raised three-quarters of its funds from the money markets rather than savers, and lent it out as aggressively as possible. Loan-to-value ratios of up to 125% were freely available.

Now interbank lending is drying up, and NR cannot refinance its maturing positions. Step forward Mervyn King, doorstep loans merchant to the sink estates of the banking community.

So far this isn’t actually costing the taxpayer anything. The BoE is acting as a lender, not a donor, and expects to get the money back. The question is, are NR’s assets good as collateral for the cash? That’s a judgement call, and I’ve no inside information either way.

But there is no doubt that NR management was wilfully reckless in both borrowing and lending practices. So there are few good reasons why the state should ensure the company’s survival; indeed, there’s one over-riding reason why it shouldn’t.

Of course savers should be compensated. But that’s a job for the Financial Services Authority and its Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

And yes, some 6,000 jobs are at stake. Many of the workforce are members of the company’s share scheme, and will have lost out badly as a result of NR’s plummeting equity price. But workers with financial services skills shouldn’t have too hard a time finding alternative employers.

But ultimately, there is no way of getting round the question of moral hazard. If bankers believe that they will always be saved from the consequences of their own folly, they will continue to act with doltish ineptitude, unable to see further than the trough in which their snouts are so firmly buried.

Applegarth’s wedge last year was something like £1.3m. So much for the mantra that telephone number salaries are justified by the need for British companies to ‘recruit and retain world class management talent’.

If, as expected, NR now gets sold on, the new owners will doubtless see him alright with a suitable golden goodbye. A year later, a brief item in the newspaper appointment columns will inform the world that he has found a new corporate gig on similar remuneration.

While Applegarth’s macroeconomy-of-one will continue to prosper whatever happens, the overall outlook is visibly deteriorating. In an interview with the Financial Times today, former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan predicts a potential double digit fall in US house prices.

That makes recession in the US more likely than not. The real questions are, how bad will it be, and how far will it spread?

Britain became the world's largest arms exporter last year, according to government figures released yesterday, overtaking the US which normally occupies the top slot.

Lord Jones, trade and investment minister, said: "As demonstrated by this outstanding export performance, the UK has a first class defence industry with some of the world's most technologically sophisticated companies."

So it is worth asking exactly how this ‘outstanding export performance’ has been achieved, over a period which saw the assembly lines of Britain’s last remaining large domestically owned car plant were taken apart and sent to China, while the largest vacuum cleaner factory relocated from Malmesbury to Malaysia.

The answer is, to a large extent, state support. As of 2005 – the last year for which I have the stats to hand - arms manufacturers picked up state subsidies of about £990m, enough to build ten hospitals.

In addition, no other UK industry has such a sizeable number of public sector employees devoting their time 100% to promoting its wares on a government-to-government basis worldwide, effectively working as an extended adjunct to the sales and marketing team of BAE.

As of last year, some 450 civil servants were employed by the Defence Export Services Association, at a cost to the taxpayer of some £13m.

In July 2007, Gordon Brown - perhaps in response to pressure from the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and around 30 NGOs – announced that DESO was to be closed down.

And so it has been, only to be rebadged last April as the D&SO, the group that published the export figures yesterday. What precisely constitutes the point of the changing one letter in the acronym remains unclear.

Can there be any justification for extensive state involvement in times when all other industries are left to prosper or flounder according to the market? Why the throwback to 1970s-style dirigisme?

The argument is often advanced that the making weapons provides employment. This is patently spurious; military exports sustain just 60,000 jobs, around 0.2% of the UK workforce.

In employment terms, that puts it roughly on a par with kebab shops. Moreover, the skills of these workers are directly transferable to socially useful applications, and could be better used elsewhere.

Another important moral issue is exactly to whom Britain is selling its deadly kit. In 2004, UK arms export licenses were granted to 13 of the 20 'major countries of concern' identified by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in its 2005 Human Rights Annual Report.

The truth is that, without being propped up by the state, British arms manufacturing would not be viable, and its collapse would be a good thing at every level. Yet this isn’t going to happen, because no political party would countenance any move against its strategic interest.

As Blair’s personal intervention to get BAE off the hook when the Serious Fraud Office was ready to file corruption charges against it illustrates, the arms industry doesn’t even have to observe the same laws as everyone else.

Time was when forward-thinking sections of the labour movement and the left put forward plans for converting arms plants to peaceful purposes. This is an idea that could usefully be revisited.

LINK: Campaign Against the Arms Trade

Then again, I doubt very much whether all those cassettes that my friends and I swapped in the playground put that many dodgy 1970s heavy rock outfits out of business. Most of them still appear to be going concerns.

And if home taping was anywhere near the mortal threat it was often claimed to be, how come the standard C-90 was exactly the right length to fit a vinyl album on either side?

At bottom, ‘illegal filesharing’ amounts to no more than an updated version of what teenagers have been doing for decades. Lost sales are surely minimal. When you are that age, you either buy the tracks if you have got the money, or don’t if you haven’t.

As I understand music biz economics, the recorded product is something of a loss leader these days. Major artistes – such as the one formerly known as Prince – are happy to give away new albums to the Mail on Sodding Sunday. The revenue actually comes from touring and merchandise.

Yet according to today’s papers, ‘music piracy’ is regarded as a major problem. The music biz has roped in the leading internet service providers to write warning letters to thousands of prolific downloaders. Gosh, that’ll frighten the average 17 year old.

The fact is, the exchange value of recorded music in commodity form has fallen to zilch, because the amount of socially necessary labour time it embodies is next to nothing.

But given that my generation has in recent years more than made up for adolescent miscreance by paying royalties twice over on all the CDs it has purchased to replace beat up vinyl, record company execs should simply stop whingeing. Their charlie habits seem safe enough for the foreseeable future.

Being as it's summertime, regular commentators are invited to embarrass themselves by revealing the first 45 they ever bought. I'll start the ball rolling by admitting to Snoopy versus the Red Baron by the Royal Guardsmen, back in 1967.

The practice is absolutely rife in both London and New York. So, come to that, is the inverse racket, known as ‘pump and dump’. This entails starting positive rumours to inflate the value of a stock, and then selling at an artificially-induced high.

What impact all of this has on real economy firms that employ millions of private sector workers, or on the pension funds which many of us will look to in old age, is basically irrelevant. Either way the market moves, the City Boys win.

Remember this reality the next time you come across some spurious justification of financial markets as the most efficient way to allocate economic resources.

Trash and cash has an above board cousin, in the shape of so-called short selling. The mechanism is basically the same, minus the deliberate market manipulation.

Prime exponents include hedge fund manager Crispin Odey (pictured), who has made £28m from shorting banks during the credit crunch of the last year or so. Yes, that’s £28m, directly into his own pocket.

While I have no evidence whatsoever that Mr Odey has engaged in any practices he would not wish to discuss in full and frank fashion with the Financial Services Authority, it is certainly fair to say that he has been astute enough to ride the Square Mile rumour mill to his pecuniary advantage.

This is completely legal. But is it completely moral? Alex Brummer provides a useful and cogent analysis of hedge fund activities in Daily Mail – a newspaper not widely known for its anticapitalist stance - this morning. Much of it wouldn’t be out of place in a serious reformist publication. He concludes:

Voluntary measures are not enough to bring the cowboys who have flocked to the UK back under control. It is time for tighter regulation and if that drives some of the wilder elements offshore then so be it.

That’s not enough; in today’s world, trash and cash merchants can just as well be based in Monaco or Bermuda as in Mayfair. But at least Brummer is willing to identify the problem and discuss methods of tackling it.

There you have it; the City editor of Britain’s most rightwing national newspaper is willing to be more radical than any politician on the Labour frontbench. That’s politics today for you.

US investment bank Merrill Lynch lost $29bn on its global collateralised debt obligations last year. Not to worry, though; all losses worldwide have been booked through a London subsidiary, so three generations of British public will be forced to pick up the entire tab instead. So that’s OK, then:

Merrill Lynch is unlikely to pay corporation tax in the UK for several decades after $29bn (£16bn) of losses suffered by the US investment bank were charged to its London-based subsidiary.

If Merrill’s UK subsidiary were to continue to generate profits at 2006 levels, a record year for the investment banking business, it would pay no UK corporation tax for 60 years.

Oh, and the FT adds: Merrill Lynch declined to comment. Wonder why? This story should generate widespread outrage. This kind of rampant freeloading may be legal, but it is beyond unacceptable. A government that prides itself on should tell them that in no uncertain terms.

Still, look on the bright side; at least we're not being charged any interest.

FRED the Shred had to work damn hard to secure that nickname. In the heady years of mergers and acquisitions seen in the early part of this decade, it took a lot of effort to stand out from the chief executive crowd when it came to giving people the chop.

But Fred Goodwin – the working-class grammar school boy from Paisley who rose to head Royal Bank of Scotland – managed exactly that. After RBS took over NatWest in March 2000, an astonishing total of 18,000 staff found themselves out of a job.

Yet, we are told, Goodwin revelled in the moniker he acquired as a result, doing everything he could to live up to his reputation as outspoken and abrasive. Those that knew him hint that he was in doubt as to his own genius, or the stupidity of rival bank bosses, come to that. One colleague even described him as a ‘deal junkie’.

The methods even seemed to meet with success; the rise and rise of RBS saw the Scottish bank transformed from an also-ran to the global top five. Accolade followed upon accolade. In 2002, the influential business magazine Forbes named him as businessman of the year, praising him as an original thinker with a fast-forward frame of mind.

Inevitably, Fred found favour with New Labour. He was reportedly a regular visitor at Number 11 during Brown’s stint as chancellor, and sat on government task forces on credit unions and the New Deal. In 2004, he got his knighthood; that was for ‘services to British banking’, you understand.

Still the deals kept on coming, including the successful hostile break-up bid for Dutch bank ABN Amro at the height of the bull market in 2007. Even at the time, the £63bn price tag was open to question, and footing the bill left the bank’s capital position clearly stretched. Goodwin rejected the carping of the fainthearts, and paid himself £4.2m that year for a job well done.

Then came the credit crunch. The government was forced to step with £20bn of taxpayer cash to keep RBS afloat, prompting the resignation of the man at the top. And there was worse to come.

On Monday it emerged that over the last year, RBS has run up losses of £28bn, the largest deficit ever clocked up by a British company. Its share price fell by over two-thirds as the news broke.

Gordon Brown responded by announcing a further blank cheque lifeline for the banking sector and told a press conference that he was ‘angry at RBS and what happened’. He even went on to accuse its management of taking ‘irresponsible risks’. Yet somehow – maybe for old times’ sake? – he did not mention the one person who truly deserved to be named and shamed.

The state now owns 70% of RBS. Nationalised in all but name, it seems likely to remain in the public sector for decades to come. And Fred the Shred? Well, if he has been clever enough to salt away some of the money he legally looted in recent years, he probably won’t have to sell either of his Ferraris.

The question for the New Labour are what political lessons are to be learned from this morality tale. Nobody tried to make this particular deal junkie go to rehab, in the name of the free market, he was even allowed to fund the smack with borrowed money.

The result was dole queue misery for many thousands and the vast enrichment of an arrogant and privileged few. This should never be allowed to happen again.

TERRY Leahy became chief executive of Tesco in 1997, exactly the same year in which Tony Blair became prime minister. The synchronicity was patently fortuitous; in the intervening years, Leahy’s supermarket chain has prospered under New Labour more than perhaps any other company.

The boss man’s performance has clearly impressed Daily Mail economics columnist Alex Brummer, who this morning makes the case that Leahy should be put in charge of Britain. The article is a somewhat odd piece of fanzine journalism, in tone characterised as much by seriousness as satire.

What is peculiar is that Brummer is usually a savvy economic commentator, penning articles that bring broadsheet depth to the middle market tabloid. Despite repeated nods to populism, it’s pretty obvious on reading them that he is not personally a rightwinger; that presumably explains why he knocks out a column for New Statesman as a conscience-salving sideline.

Yet today he toys openly with one of the classic fantasies of the free market right, namely the idea that Britain should be handed over to a top businessman so that it can be run in line with business school theory.

Brummer starts by pointing out that Gordon Brown wanted Leahy to run the NHS, and argues that Labour has ‘made a botch’ of health provision since it took office.

But how different things might have been if Britain was run by the geniuses behind Tesco’s unstoppable business model rather than the second-rate politicians who have formed so many recent governments.

Worryingly, there is not even passing consideration of what such a move would imply from a democratic point of view. This is, by its nature, an authoritarian vision. Our politicians may indeed be ‘second rate’, as Brummer asserts. But at least they are elected second-raters. They are where they are because they do have some sort of mandate. Such cannot be said of managements of major private companies.

Yet in Brummer’s mind, no praise is too extravagant for the ‘genius’ Leahy:

Leahy does not do average … Second-best is simply not in the Leahy lexicon … The overriding principle of everything that he does - whether it be his company’s international expansion or its current flirtation with financial services - is to produce superior results.

There is good reason to believe that, given the chance, Leahy could have made a significant impression on Britain’s titanic problems within the public finances, education, health and foreign affairs.

At this point, it’s worth pausing a while to unpack some of these claims. After all, many aspects of Tesco’s business practices have been widely criticised. For instance, one way that Leahy has produced these ‘superior results’ is the use of cheap labour in other countries.

An investigation by Channel 4 News in 2006 found that Tesco was selling clothes produced by child labour in Bangladesh, with 12 year old kids working 80-hour weeks for 5p an hour. The Leahy administration Brummer is so keen to inflict on Britain would presumably generalise that kind of aggressive outsourcing across the UK economy, with predictable results for the unemployment figures.

Meanwhile, the prices of anything a Tescofied government reluctantly still had to procure in Britain would be driven down below the levels that make small businesses such as dairy farms viable.

What if Leahy was running the welfare state? Tesco has experimented with abolishing sick pay for the first three days of any absence, so presumably the Invalidity Benefit bill would be sharply cut. Anybody know if the policy is still in place?

How about putting him in charge of public finances? One thing’s for sure, he is not particularly keen on contributing to them. I note in this connection that Tesco last year reportedly sued the Guardian for libel and malicious falsehood, after certain claims concerning offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, where corporation tax is zero. Obviously one can only wish Leahy well in bringing the muckraking hacks to book.

It is inconceivable for instance that Tesco, which has created one of Britain’s biggest and most efficient online shopping businesses in a few short years, would have ever allowed wasteful spending, such as that on ID cards, the NHS computer database project and the £1.7bn spent on computers as part of the so-called National Grid for Learning.

Tesco runs a massive computerised database that could tell you down to the nearest how much each individual shopper spent on canned ravioli last year. It’s a bit much to present it as a bulwark against the surveillance state.

Also, any City bonuses would be shared equally among staff, from counter clerk to shelf stacker and manager.

Well, it is true that all Tesco’s 207,000 staff were eligible for a part of the £98m pot allocated for bonuses this year. But Leahy rakes in over £5m a year; last time I checked, that’s not what the Jobcentre was offering Tesco’s new starters. If bonuses are shared, they are not shared equally.

Finally, I’m quite sure that the first legislation passed by any incoming Leahy regime would be the Abolition of Sainsbury Act and a statutory instrument allowing it to buy up any branch of Morrison it happened to fancy.

But look on the bright side; once Leahy governs our all our destinies, customers can probably expect quadruple Clubcard points at all Tesco Express outlets. What a pity there will be nowhere else to shop.