Brexit’s sound and fury

THE Brexit talks are going badly. That, at least, seems to be the line in many of the media reports, and it is correct in the narrow sense that there is very little progress.

But in any wider assessment to have little progress at this stage is both inevitable and encouraging. It is inevitable because the initial pitch of the European negotiators is that a bill of the order of £90bn has to be settled before trade talks can begin.

And it is encouraging because it shows that the UK team is being robust in the face of demands that simply could not be accepted by the British people.

Put it this way: If the negotiations were all sweetness and light it would mean that the UK had made a crucial negotiating error.

We have two strong cards. One is the payments into the EU, for we are the secondlargest net payer into the European pot, behind only Germany.

The other is the size of our market, for we have a huge trade deficit with Europe, in contrast to being in rough balance with the rest of the world.

Now, the first card is in play, and we have to extract maximum leverage from it. Once a settlement is agreed in outline – and there will have to be some payment – the second card, the trade balance, comes into play. That will be trickier, because in the short run trade disruption hurts both sides.

The importance of Europe for UK exports has been declining for the past decade as other markets grow faster. But around 43pc of our exports still go there, so spinning out the transition makes practical sense.

At some stage British consumers may have to hold European exporters’ feet to the fire by cutting back on EU goods and services and switching to British ones where practicable (Hint: We could make a start by boycotting Ryanair, following its chief executive’s comments yesterday).

But a gracious, negotiated partnership with Europe would be much better than a punch-up, so we should see the tussle between Michel Barnier and David Davis for what it is: Political slapstick.

Zara’s genius

LET’S celebrate Amancio Ortega, 81-yearold creator of the Spanish fashion chain Zara, who this week briefly became the richest person in the world.

He was estimated to have a personal fortune of £65.8bn, £155m more than Bill Gates of Microsoft, when shares of Inditex, Zara’s parent company, jumped. Since then the market has moved and he is back behind Gates and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

He is worth celebrating because he created an extraordinary business, revolutionising the industry by bringing high fashion to the market at astonishing speed.

The Zara supply chain is the swiftest in the world. And that is fascinating because, in a quite different way, Jeff Bezos’s genius is also in streamlining logistics.

There is surely a moral message here. These three people top the global wealth league because they have created businesses that have brought huge and tangible benefits to humankind. They are not simply competent (or lucky) bureaucrats who climbed the ladder to end up as a chief executive of a big company. So, rather like sports stars, actors or authors, we can directly identify their contribution.

We don’t need to love Microsoft, Zara, or Amazon, but all have earned our respect, and there is a rough justice that the founders should top the global wealth league.

Premier League value

WHILE on the subject of highly-paid sports stars, the most valuable Premier League transfer window ever closed last night, with the total tally well above £1bn. So where’s the value there for the clubs? I was intrigued by a bit of sleuthing by SBO.net, the online betting firm, which has looked at Premier League players’ costeffectiveness calculated by looking at their salaries relative to their performance.

According to SBO.net, the biggest bargain goalkeeper is Tom Heaton of England and Burnley, who made 141 saves last season. He was paid £1.3m, which makes that £9,220 per save.

Bargain scorer was Tottenham’s Dele Alli, on £2.6m, with 18 goals at £144,000 each.

And Burnley’s Matt Lowton, who is on £1.04m, clocks in as best-value defender with 101 tackles at £10,297 a pop.

And who is really bad value? That would be unsporting to reveal, wouldn’t it?