HOW MR DULL KEEPS SELLING BRITAIN DOWN THE RIVER ...
WHEN Peugeot decided to buy Vauxhall’s British operations last February, threatening thousands of jobs in the process, our Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark responded in the style of Neville Chamberlain.
First, he travelled to Paris for crunch talks with the French car firm. Then, this would-be statesman returned to Blighty brandishing a metaphorical ‘piece of paper’ – an assurance that his new Gallic chums wanted to ‘expand production’ and that all existing ‘commitments’ to Vauxhall’s UK plants ‘would be honoured’.
As a result, Clark did nothing to prevent the sale of this important and historic UK manufacturing giant. But more than a year down the line, the sad truth is that – in the eyes of critics – Mr Clark has been played for a fool.
In October, Peugeot announced it was cutting 400 jobs at Vauxhall’s plant in Ellesmere Port, which makes the Astra.
Three months later, it announced another 250 British workers at the plant were to lose their livelihoods.
The Government argues such jobs would have gone even if the takeover had been blocked.
Unions say protecting those jobs ought to have been a condition of the deal going through.
Wherever one stands, we should consider, in light of this episode, Mr Clark’s triumphant announcement yesterday that he’d persuaded the would-be buyer of the venerable engineering giant GKN – a rapacious venture capital firm called Melrose – to give ‘assurances’ over the future of jobs, pensions, and research and development.
As history has repeatedly shown during the 20- odd months that Clark, 50, has spent in his current job, the ‘ assurances’ of companies seeking government approval for takeovers are rarely worth the paper they’re written on.
The fact is that modern business secretaries have for years failed to protect UK PLC and stop the family silver, as it were, being sold off. Indeed, it’s been 16 years since a takeover was blocked by the government under the Enterprise Act.
Greg Clark falls firmly into this tradition. During the summer of 2016, he failed to stop the Japanese firm Softbank taking over the brilliant Cambridge technology company ARM, a computer chip manufacturer whose fate is of huge importance to the nation’s economic future (though he did secure an agreement, so far honoured, to keep the firm in the UK).
Straight afterwards, he sat on his
hands when a German raider, Deutsche Boerse, sought to merge with the London Stock Exchange. It was left to the European Commission to block the deal. Last year, Clark allowed the acquisition of Sepura – also a Cambridge firm – which makes products used by law enforcement and emergency services, by a Chinese company called Hytera, having initially intervened to demand a consultation on its national security implications.
Clark is famed for his dull persona – sketch-writers have written about his ‘soporific power’, saying he speaks in the ‘honeyed tones of a graveyard shift local radio presenter accustomed to speaking to three insomniacs at most’.
Little wonder that under his stewardship the Business Department has acquired a reputation in certain quarters for stasis.
It did nothing to prevent new contracts being handed to ailing construction group Carillion before its collapse earlier this year. And Clark last year allowed Britain’s biggest gas storage facility at Rough, off the Yorkshire Coast, to be shut down, leaving the nation perilously close to blackouts last month.
His unveiling of a new ‘Industrial Strategy’ last November was supposed to mark a grand reforming of the nation’s economic landscape. But in the event, it turned out to be a damp squib, dismissed by critics as ‘10,000 words of waffle’.
Downing Street aides blamed Clark for watering down potential changes to takeover rules, which at present give the government only three very narrow grounds (national security, media plurality and financial stability) to block deals.
Shortly afterwards, Mr Clark’s stock with No 10 fell so low he was reportedly due to be moved on, only to earn a reprieve when Jeremy Hunt, who would have taken over the Business brief, refused to leave the Health department.
Though admirers rightly say he’s a fundamentally decent person, opponents complain that Clark dithers, appears ‘utterly incapable of making decisions’, and lacks a sense of political conviction.
Nothing has previously been made of the fact his wife Helen Clark, mother of his three children, earns a crust as a chartered accountant working in offshore trusts and tax planning.
‘I act for a wide variety of individuals, with interests in properties and trusts both in the UK and abroad, with a focus on the UK impact of offshore trusts, and UK non-residence and foreign domicile issues,’ reads her profile on the website of her firm, Dixon Wilson.
Mrs Clark’s work in this exotic realm – where the interests of clients may not always be aligned with that of the UK Treasury – has contributed to the Business Secretary’s domestic set-up in a large detached home in the leafy commuter town of Tunbridge Wells, which was bought for £1.1million in 2011.
It’s a world away from the deprived Middlesbrough estate where Clark grew up, the comprehensive- educated son of a milkman whose mother worked on the checkout of Sainsbury’s.
As the first member of his family to go to university, studying Economics at Cambridge, he joined the SDP in the 1980s, before moving to the Tories in the early 1990s.
Aside from a brief stint at the BBC, he’s been in politics ever since, and was elevated to a shadow job by David Cameron shortly after becoming an MP in 2005.
Since then, he’s become adept at clinging onto Westminster’s greasy pole and sidestepping controversy. But the row over GKN and Melrose puts him at the eye of a storm that might yet blow his career onto the rocks.
‘Trust me, Business Secretary. You have my absolute word – there will be very few changes once we take over’ Mac’s 2017 Seen and Unseen book is available for £11.99 plus £1.99 p&p. Order at mailshop.co.uk using code MP1861846 or phone 0844 571 0640. To order a print of this or any other Mac cartoon, visit Mailpictures.newsprints.co.uk or call 020 7566 0360.